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Comment by dinodino | Hacker News Reader

Good luck trying to meddle in the elections in the Netherlands! They vote with pencil and paper http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English.

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The meddling in the elections in the US the Russians are being accused of has nothing to do with the actual election systems. It's related to impacting the public perception of a candidate by releasing dirt on one at opportune times.

It is funny that the ones accusing Russia are the same who were in Maidan Square, haranguing the crowds to revolt against Yanukovich ( the democratically elected president ). So meddling is good in one direction and wrong in the other?

Are you claiming members of US Congress and CIA and FBI and so on were literally on Maidan Square haranguing the crowds? If they were, they certainly managed to avoid being detected and recognized by anybody but you.

Or, more likely, to counter one propaganda you are just parroting another piece of propaganda.

Or, more likely, both things are true (you know what he meant when he said "the ones") because intelligence agencies of superpowers are constantly trying to influence geopolitics in their government's favor.

"because" here is completely wrong. From the fact that intelligence agencies of superpowers, in general, try to influence geopolitics, in general, does not follow in no manner that specific people performed specific actions at specific place.

True, one does not imply the other, so "because" is wrong. I meant to say that "Russia (presumably) retaliated because the US does it too."

Geopolitical inevitabilities aside, though, there is plenty of evidence for both the US and Russian governments' manipulations of other countries' elections.

And goal is to break trust between US government and US people.

This should be a zero trust relationship by design. Instead we are forced to trust the untrustworthy.

Blaming convenient phantoms is sidestepping the problem.

It can't be zero trust relationship - if you pay taxes and elect representatives, you trust they will not just do whatever they like with it and ignore you but do at least something useful to you. Of course, I would agree that people in general place way too much trust in government right now and that's why it was allowed to grow to current metastatic sizes and become so dangerous. But it does not mean it can function with zero trust - some trust is necessary, just not too much of it.

Well, there shouldn't be trust by default, but the government should be able to earn our trust on a department-by-department basis.

For example, I have quite a bit of trust in the CDC. I have less trust in the EPA. Trust is hard to earn but easy to lose.

Doesn't matter if they can influence voters with enough "fake news" and document dumps from selectively hacked politicians. Social engineering is always the weakest link.

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