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Comment by baakss | Hacker News Reader

>although they obviously kept much of their supporting evidence classified.

Was anything not classified? I have trust issues stemming from an unnecessary war based on false premises when I was a child.

Most of my hesitation stems from a lack of information about it. "Russians hacked Podesta's emails and released them to Wikileaks."

"Russians hacked voting machines."

Those are very targeted statements, and I'd feel better about the whole thing if more questions were answered.

Have the hackers successfully been linked to the Russian Government? How?

How long has this been going on? Since before this election cycle? If so, why is it only now an issue worthy of public attention?

Have other Government entities, China, North Korea, etc, done the same?

Have we seen similar attacks from inside the US?

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Motivations matter.

When we had the march to war in Iraq, suspect intel was being selectively and deceitfully pulled out of context specifically to build a case for war in Iraq. By politicians, not by intel professionals. A bunch of former intel people went on record calling BS on it.

Right now, nobody's making a case for war with Russia. Retaliatory sanctions at best. They mostly just want to harden our election process and systems to prevent it from happening again, or worse.

Yet we see constantly moving goalposts from people who don't want that hardening to happen. What's their motivation?

See this for non-classified evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14620389

I don't believe there are any claims Russia successfully hacked voting machines (I may have missed developments in the last week though). I believe there are claims they did successfully attack voter registration databases, but there are no real claims (except by left-wing conspiracy theory people) that they changed those databases - just stole data. I believe there is no non-classified evidence of this though (although I didn't read the document that Reality Winner sent to the Intercept, so that may document some evidence).

China has a well known hacking group (ATP-1) - see [1] for further information. There is no evidence or real claims they are involved in political interference within the US. OTOH they are quite good at industrial espionage and tracking Chinese dissidents.

I'm not very familiar with North Korea's group, but it is widely believed to be responsible for the Sony hack. I found that bizarre, but NK actions often are.

[1] https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/services/pdf...

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