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Comment by jbegley | Hacker News Reader

32 pointsjbegley21 comments

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! By bot, by bot!

Good god, this mass delusion needs to stop. Or perhaps people need to read up a bit more on history and realize that influencing each others' internal affairs to nudge popular opinion about is what great powers do to each other and everybody else, going back to Sumer and Akkad.

I do find myself asking cui bono? with this this whole situation. There are such extensive efforts to pump up the story.

Speaking of delusions, the dollar amounts and timing of the spending indicate this was more likely a click-bait farm and/or social experiment and not an operation focused on influencing the outcome of the 2016 election. You could argue they were practicing up and getting data to do operations for future elections.

The hacking of the DNC and of Podesta, and release of their emails, suggests they did try to influence the election. The social media campaigns may not have started off as a way to help Trump/hurt Clinton, but they probably turned more in that direction as the election approached.

History is full of foreign influence, true, but that doesn't mean it was a good thing. The US has laws protecting against it because we fear the subversion of our independence. In fact, many countries fight civil wars between a national group and a foreign backed group.

In history, foreign interference is rarely healthy. That's why people care about this.

It's different with the Russians though - remember how they had an arms race for the better part of last century and how they were very close to basically annihilating the whole world?

When do we get to blame the DNC for having horrible netsec practices in place? Podesta was 'hacked' with a phishing email? Are they absolved from all responsibility for basic tech competency?

Just because the DNC are incompetent doesn't mean this isn't a really big deal.

Also, most high-profile organization breaches start with phishing emails, exactly like the one sent to Podesta.

It get your point, but that’s similar to blaming someone that has their house broken into because they only had a standard knob with lock instead of a deadbolt. Sure they could’ve done better, but locks only slow down a determined intruder.

Would you hold Equifax to that same standard?

Ah but I have absolutely no choice in Equifax getting their grubby fingers on my data (and then charging me for it). So Equifax should at the very least build itself like fort Knox!

Who is stopping "us"? As far as I can tell, we do get to place that blame, and many of us frequently do. I hear extremely few voices claiming the DNC was totally secure or had no responsibility to secure itself. The topic doesn't HAVE to be a combative battlefield where you are either allowed to blame one thing entirely or the other, depending on your political leanings.

If I leave my front door open, sure, that's stupid, but it's still robbery if you come in and take my television.

You would blame the criminal for you leaving your front door open?

No, I would blame the criminal for stealing my stuff despite the front door being left open.

Podesta had a security and support team fronting his access. He got phished anyway.[1]

Podesta was using Gmail, which has (or should have) its own world-class account security features. Numerous people, myself included, give Google no end of grief for their failures here. To their credit, Google have vastly enhanced their barn door locks now that the horses are freed. This includes identifying PEPs (politically exposed persons), and physical-token based security (Yubikey), but not additional-factor end-to-end encryption.[2]

Phishing has been a known threat since the 1980s.[3] Google failed to defend against it desspite numerous previous attacks.[4]

The GOP saw multiple accounts and entire emailsystems (SmarTech) compromised, leading to deep questions of compromise and exposure,though relatively little media coverage.[5]

Additional successful attacks were made against politicians, political parties, voter registration data, election officials, and quite possibly voting machines and systems themselves.[6]

The fact is that the US election and political system has been subject to massive, pervasive advanced persistent threat attacks consistent with state-level actor for years, with multiple independent systems on all sides failing.

Your question and framing are exceedingly disingenuous.

Sources:

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-e...

2. https://gizmodo.com/google-employees-secret-to-never-getting...

3. Felix, Jerry & Hauck, Chris (September 1987). "System Security: A Hacker's Perspective". 1987 Interex Proceedings. 8:6.

4. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/01/google-ha...

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/russia-hack-h...

6. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/russians-hacked-two-u-s... https://abcnews.go.com/US/russian-hackers-targeted-half-stat...

You can absolutely say they should have had better security, but that doesn't remove responsibility from the hackers.

I guess they're trying to get ahead of the coming broad declassification of the Carter Page FISA application and Strzok, Page, McCabe, Comey, Ohr, and Steele text messages.

> And there is a plausible case that Mr. Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr. Trump, though it cannot be proved or disproved.

I'm impressed the writer had the restraint to use the word "plausible" as opposed to "probable". It's equally impressive that the editorial board at the NYT didn't make that switch back either.

> In an election with an extraordinarily close margin, the repeated disruption of the Clinton campaign by emails published on WikiLeaks and the anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia could have made the difference, a possibility Mr. Trump flatly rejects.

Or more likely it had no measurably effect and Clinton was simply that bad of a candidate.

Oh she was that bad of a candidate, and I voted for her!

My hunch is that Trump simply thought of this type of foreign assistance (and the hush money payments) as business deals. You help me with the election, I'll help you with sanctions and we'll build a better relationship: win/win.

If that really happened and it can be proven, he'll probably spend the rest of his life in prison. But I'm skeptical that that's what happened.

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