A hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
What we now see is an evolution into social media.
Al Jazeera had prepared a story on the tentacles AIPAC had into US politics, but at the time Mohammed bin Salman was making serious noises about invading Qatar,one of the reasons being Al Jazeera's reportage.
The story was dropped and MbS was persuaded to back off.
https://www.justsecurity.org/69094/timeline-on-jared-kushner...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/mideast/open-secret-saudi-arabi...
Surprising, unless the guys are actually just good at lying to potential customers, to fleece them of as much $$ as possible. I'm not saying they don't use sock puppet social media accounts, etc. but really, how would any of their customers know if it was at all effective? They wouldn't. After the fact, if they won, they wouldn't know if this helped, and if they lost, it's not like they could sue in court, or even just complain loudly to trash this group's reputation.
It seems quite ripe for inflated claims and ineffective results. Of course, they might also be trying, or who knows maybe even succeeding, but it would be a lot simpler just to put up a show for your customer and collect the money.
I don't see how the realities of such an industry wouldn't be a race to the bottom
A more interesting question is why haven't governments - or even the platforms themselves - worked hard to shut down these known vulnerabilities? Doesn't it undermine the trust of the users to know that there are professional organizations actively creating thousands of fake accounts that deliberately spread (at best) partisan propaganda and (at worst) outright disinformation? Doesn't it work against the lofty ideals of social media being a community space where real people can engage with one another? The fact the companies are so unresponsive to removing abusers shows their incentives are not aligned with those of their users.
The sad thing is we’re probably trivially close to the tech needed for direct democracy, but the powers that be use tech to confuse and supplant democratic institutions and propose their authoritarian rule.
The truth is half of the population is dumber than the average, but the other half is smarter than average. Groups of people are susceptible to bias just like individuals. At least when people vote we know they are considering their own interests.
And moreover, we can't trust each other fully. We can try to aspire to it, but none of us can honestly say we just want what's best for everyone.
Just because someone is smarter than you by some measure, doesn't mean you're better off letting them rule you.
> We can try to aspire to it, but none of us can honestly say we just want what's best for everyone.
This is exactly why having anything approaching a ruling class is a large hazard to avoid. Intermediate steps between citizens voting and power being executed are an attack area for people with selfish interests to inject themselves.
Yes it’s “elitist”, but it’s the equivalent of expecting someone qualified to perform a heart surgery rather than a rando off the street.
(You do need the random lottery version of DD, sortition, rather than the everyone gets to vote on everything type).
If you evaluate it on a longer timeline, people achieve a greater political intelligence because of increased voter participation and a quicker policy feedback loop.
Yeah, collectively, humans are still idiots. That being said, we do have a decent amount of technological promise and maybe just enough idealism in our blood to sustain the species. It's probably worth a try.
Similar idealism was expected before everyone use Internet. Internet would make everyone smart. Now we can see current awful situation.
They apparently do have their own problems and pressures that need to be balanced, but that’s why we don’t just say everyone can decide anything, but with some rules and regulations I really think it can work … I mean it seems to *be* working - just analyze Switzerland.
There is still a need for an Environmental Protection Agency, an Anti Corruption agency, a Police etc, but it seems much closer to the ideal of what a democratic society should look like than what I can see in my own country.
I’ve always thought why not try that out, sure there would be some blunders, but it would be made by us, ourselves, so we can always revisit, fix and learn.
The premise of Humanism is that people should decide for their own future.
It also means we won’t hide the bible in Latin and we’ll translate it in current languages; In other words we’ll educate people. If you don’t trust people, that means school is failing, but remember that we’ve invented democracy in the 1700 across the world, when schools weren’t briliant either. And it was a much better system than anything else. And it outran any other system ever.
Maybe you are not in favour of democracy. Many people support despotism because they think [place any way to choose leaders] will be better.
Tech isn't the issue, making everyone find time to stay sufficiently informed is.
I already have one full-time job, I don't need 2-3 more (city and county which might be part-time, state, maybe federal).
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/07/switzerland-direct-de...
At some point you need technology, otherwise it would just get too expensive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiatives_and_referendums_...
EU and election authorities have demanded change to make it private but the previously ruling party didn't want to. Now we got a new government a few months ago and this was one of their first tasks, so it might be changed in time for the election in 2026.
> Your family, friends and the whole neighborhood will know whomever voted for the wrong party and will treat you thereafter.
"Repercussions" from family or neighbours, sure, but not from whoever has the monopoly on violence. I haven't heard of the Swedish government going after people that "voted wrong".
Do you work with programming or something?
I've seen no evidence that the democracy model employed across large parts of the western world and elsewhere, is anything other than criminal. Its like watching a punch and judy show where the public get to chose their puppets, but the shadowy puppeteers are lurking in the background, mainly wearing or have worn fancy dress.
:)
You know what is terrifying? That upon learning about Russia having a major hand in Western election, nothing concrete was done. In Britain we learned the whole Brexit movement was paid for, and manipulated by Russian money (and it was arguably a crucial milestone mentioned in the infamous Foundations of Geopolitics book), yet there was a little noise on printed media that went nowhere. No one investigated, no top politician jailed, just business as usual.
I'm not even sure that what they're selling us in our free Western countries is democracy at all.
If this was indeed a sarcastic comment, I would consider dialing back the subtlety so you don’t inadvertently appear to lend credence to misinformation currently being spread among less scrupulous portions of the population.
I'm fine with distaste for Trump and the realities of disinformation campaigns, but the focus of the Twitter files in this regard is clearly specific to the false Russia Trump connection propagated by Dem polticians and leftists.
None of these things are "false connections propagated by Dem politicians and leftists". They have made these connections evident through their own admissions, and denials.
There is certainly a narrative that drives beyond what we have evidence for, but it's absurd to pretend these things were only propagated from political rivals trying to attack their rivals.
>There's enough there to remain suspicious.
Honestly, after years of the Democrats throwing everything they can at Trump, still nothing. Yet you persist.
Switch your focus to Biden perhaps, the current corrupt president that mishandled classified documents, has made a fortune off his political position.... see the similarities here? No? Of course not.
> but the focus of the Twitter files in this regard is clearly specific to the false Russia Trump connection propagated by Dem polticians and leftists.
Did the Russians interfere in the US election? This is unquestionably true. The DNC did not leak their strategy docs by themselves.
Was Russian interference in the 2016 election decisive? Highly unlikely. Imo, it would be generous to say the effect was marginal at best.
In hindsight the whole thing was pretty stupid; and lines with the Russian government’s increasingly erratic and incompetent behavior. They could have achieved the same end with none of the blowback by just doing nothing.
Ever heard of Edward Snowden? I mean that's just for starters https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/05/nsas-v...
The NSA (a US intelligence organization) has verifiably been conducting widespread surveillance of US citizens on US soil for decades.
This is an extremely naive statement with no basis in history. At least you recognize that Russian election interference had little, if any impact on the 2016 election.
Just incredible. Thanks for giving me a hearty laugh. Make sure to refill your pitcher of kool-aid, I see you're running low!
An unbelievably naive statement.
These groups, some commercial and some governmental inside the US, Israel, Italy, and elsewhere, can hack the phones and mobile devices of Presidents/Prime Ministers, member of Congress/Parliament, Supreme Court justices, and the military. This presents the risk of blackmail/extortion being used to control critical decisions and actions made by these people every day. They are not shy about advertising these capabilities and the rules they put in place to limit damage mostly concern damage to the hacking groups, not to countries or people.
I'm not saying that votes are fixed (though I wouldn't be surprised), but lots of money goes into essentially buying seats of power.
The meddling in our elections was the social media companies suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the election, which the media also claimed was "Russian ops" while Hunter since admitted it was his laptop (full of emails detailing the corruption in his family).
The amount of propaganda and lies that is fed to the American public through these corporate media outlets is absolutely astounding.
- https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download
- https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
- https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
- https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
- https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download
Spending some time flipping through these (ignore the last two if you please, one heavily redacted and the other focusing on Trump) after reading your comment makes me wonder if we live in two parallel universes that are in the process of converging.
The dossier that was used as a basis for launching all of this in the first place: "Main Steele dossier source Igor Danchenko was FBI operative: court document" https://nypost.com/2022/09/14/main-steele-dossier-source-igo...
Actually it was discovered that the Clinton campaign paying for "opposition research" was in turn the source of that fake dossier.
The whole thing was made up, that's not even controversial at this point. The fact that you're on here citing those documents as if it wasn't just proves the pervasiveness of the corruption of our system of democracy and media.
Here's coverage on all of this from the journalist that broke the Snowden story and is maligned by our state/corporate/fascist media outlets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-lg5RU8xAI
...but you seem to have ignored that.
I do not understand your hand-wavey dismissal of the documents I linked to, as I do not understand how you could have checked their contents and came away believing they all discussed Trump-Russia collusion. For example, the indictment I linked to is very clear, direct proof of election interference activities performed by an offensive cyber unit within the Russian military and never makes any implications of involvement by Trump.
Regarding Trump-Russia collusion - since you brought the topic up - the things you are asserting still seem potentially dubious.
A decision to not indict and prosecute is not based on whether it is more likely that the crime was committed than not, but whether or not it can be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, especially in a scenario like this. It is not 50% sure, not 80%, closer to 99% sure. If you read the Mueller report is is most definitely not a conclusive exoneration of Trump. You cannot honestly argue that collusion did not occur because Mueller did not indict.
Opposition research is research funded by opposition. That does not imply that the output of the research must therefore be asserting the opposite of the reality of its subject matter. I don’t understand this point.
Somebody who was a source for Steele, who is ex-Western intelligence, also being a source for other components of Western intelligence like the FBI seems wildly unsuspicious. Of course, the Post tries to spin it anyway, which is unsurprising for media outlets in general today, but particularly unsurprising for this particular outlet.
Basically, I am not saying that collusion did or did not occur, because I do not know. And if we do truly live in the same universe, you do not know either, you just think you do.
The source of the dossier was charged for lying to the FBI. The funds for it were tied back directly to the Clinton campaign. I don’t see any ambiguity here, at all.
I can’t conclude collusion didn’t occur simply because there’s no evidence for it? Do you hear yourself?
Let’s be real dude. You’re an anti-Trump neoliberal whose been gobbling up this media propaganda, you’ve made it part of your identity, and you will twist and say anything to defend it. Your ears and mind is closed. You’re repeating the same line as before this mountain of evidence came out that this whole story line was a hoax. If someone really doesn’t want to be convinced of something they won’t be, that’s what’s going on here. You’re not looking for the truth, you’re trying to defend your tribe.
It’s exactly this type of tribalism that the uniparty in DC uses as a diversion to rob our country blind and it needs to stop.
The only official actions that should have been taken in response were sanctions or other international relations consequences for Russia. Trump's biggest failing on this issue was to not realize he could do this without compromising the legitimacy of his election.
There were concerted efforts to push messaging via left-wing sub-reddits. I saw how the narrative pushed had little logical basis towards achieving the ends they pretended to push. I watched as the trolls waxed and waned with the war effort. I watched the same spaces push anti-Ukraine messaging when it had nothing whatsoever to do with their claimed political goals. Then I watched most of them disappear after enough people pointed out what they were doing.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ActiveMeasures/comments/titwwg/fyi_...
I don't think that's entirely fair. There's been no political route open to prosecuting anyone for the above, but there's been plenty of concrete actions. Western opposition to Russia has increased substantially in recent years.
Would we have been as vigorous in our support for Ukraine and eager to supply weapons and all the other things if Russia hadn't been pulling off all these shenanigans? It probably had an effect and Russia is certainly facing consequences.
Western intelligence has also been a lot more proactive in combatting Russian misinformation.
“WASHINGTON (TND) — The latest Twitter files release shows the company knew there was no evidence of Russians spreading disinformation on the platform as Democrats pushed those accusations in the media.”
https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/russian-disinformatio...
Only one ?
Who is gonna protect you if the next village town or city decides your individual property is somehow theirs and they have the means and will to enforce it?
As much as you can prep to defend yourself against attacks bh other individuals, nobody around you is bannaed from forming a band/group/nation. And if they are banned, who is going to enforce it?
In the end it all comes down to the ability to direct violence, the society with the bigger stick wins in the end, and nations and systems of governance that can produce smaller sticks are just eventually snuffed from existence, no matter how bright egalitarian and fair they are to their participants … just look at Armenia, Georgia, Cechnia and Ukraine.