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Comment by ssijak | Hacker News Reader

And then people make a fuss about Russia "hacking" the election with some dumb Facebook ads which cost less than maxed out Ford Mustang.

When on the other hand we have the state-sponsored military grade/purpose viruses used to attack other nations/regions (Flume attacked a large number of targets and countries) and nobody blinks an eye.

View on HN

Engineering an election to install a malleable leader in a rival country is the holy grail if you ask me. Developing the cyber equivalent of WMDs to get what you want is a relatively blunt tool, just like how North Korea is doing but they use nukes

It can backfire spectacularly, though, as the US (but sadly not the CIA) learned with their adventures with the Shah in Iran.

Those are indicative of the public’s enduring lack of technology literacy, and the media’s desire to have facts and eyeballs meet halfway. Media reports Russian election interference via digital ad spend, astroturfing, and infiltration attempts on state voting systems accurately, but the views to that reporting probably pale in comparison to the oversimplified, tweet-size “Russia hacked the 2016 US election” reporting that gets around more quickly and sticks in the public conversation.

Stuxnet is considerably more sophisticated and technologically more brazen, but won’t get the same reporting. But it’s also worth it to consider whether the lack of awareness/awe over Stuxnet vis a vis Russian election tampering is simply due to technology illiteracy, or whether media is not considering the notability of the means, just the effect of the ends.

To me the astro-turfing--which is still going on btw--is the most impressive/scariest part of the whole thing. It basically means there is a constant undercurrent of motivated Russian trolls tipping the scales of perception on every single news story, online poll, comments section, social platform, clickbait site, etc. It basically means that the internet is even more a reality distortion field than we imagined, and there is no real bottom. Imagine hooking up decent conversational AIs to do this, and scaling this all the way up to drown out the real conversation.

> But it’s also worth it to consider whether the lack of awareness/awe over Stuxnet vis a vis Russian election tampering is simply due to technology illiteracy, or whether media is not considering the notability of the means, just the effect of the ends.

No, it's because the media is ultimately subservient to power regardless of what they might think of themselves. US attacks on countries designated by power as enemies -- Iran, Venezuela, Russia, etc., are only to be discussed in clinical terms, marveling at their technological sophistication, for example, never in moral terms. Bringing up any introspection of what American reaction would be if Iran did the same thing to us is virtually career suicide for a mainstream media professional. Trying to draw parallels between Russia meddling and Stuxnet, noting that Stuxnet was an attack many times worse, is cutting it dangerously close.

That may be the larger factor, but I also believe that if you control for the media perspective on the perpetrator and targets of separate incidents, something like Stuxnet and its sophistication will be given less emphasis, because its sophistication is beyond the public's technology literacy, and would be considered too "inside baseball".

Also, let's not forget Libya. Compare Libya before Benghazi to now.

Never understood this logic, "We do it so why should we care when other people do it to us." Total insanity.

Nobody is saying not to care. Parent comment is just pointing difference in reaction to a situation ( outside actors trying to screw a country), which is hypocritical.

That kind of complacent pride is very dangerous. Do you think the facebook ads are the only route taken? And do you think that nobody else is going to refine and develop these methods? The whole world saw an opportunity last November.

What we just saw was a public alpha. There will be a beta and a final version of this system. The rewards are too great for every state-level actor to ignore and fail to develop election manipulation tools using any new technology they can get their hands on. Big data may have doomed democratic process in an irreversible way. The next couple of decades will be telling.

> What we just saw was a public alpha. There will be a beta and a final version of this system. The rewards are too great for every state-level actor to ignore and fail to develop election manipulation tools using any new technology they can get their hands on. Big data may have doomed democratic process in an irreversible way. The next couple of decades will be telling.

What we saw was the first export version for the West. Authoritarian regimes have been honing many of the same propaganda techniques on their own populations for some time.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency (they were involved in the 2016 election interference, but they've long been doing similar in Russia and Eastern Europe).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party (Chinese equivalent)

I think it's important for Westerns to study the details of these propaganda programs, so we can recognize and respond to the export versions.