Hacker News Reader

Comment by sigmarule | Hacker News Reader

I'm always cautious about saying something like this for fear of sounding hyperbolic. But good lord, watching this video right after reading about the administration's change in stance on Russian cyber threats [1] really chips away at any remaining room for ambiguity.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/trump-russia...

View on HN

You should continue to be cautious, as the Guardian article is pretty weak. It's first point is that Russia wasn't mentioned in a talk about cyber threats, which means very little by itself. It's second and final point comes from an "anonymous source". I'll believe it when the source becomes de-anonymized. Too many deep state "anonymous tips" have turned out to be lies. It should be noted that CISA has a history of strong leftwing activism:

https://www.dailywire.com/news/u-s-cybersecurity-defense-age...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-administration-colluded...

Trump is not far right and never has been. He's actually moderate on most issues. The current far right position is the Tucker Carlson "isolation at all costs" and "Putin maybe isn't a bad guy" garbage. Trump holds neither of those views.

If it turns out that CISA analysts were truly told verbally to no longer focus or report on Russian threats, and if you assume this was done under Trump's direction or to align with his intent, would would your thoughts be?

I'm not (yet) asserting that either of those two conditions are or aren't true, I'm just curious what your thoughts would be IF they were.

It's a good question, and, in the worst case, I would disagree with the Trump administration and lose some trust in them. There is also the possibility that missing context would provide reasonable justification for the order. For instance, I think "Russian election interference" investigations have mostly been a partisan operation with little evidence that such interference has had any meaningful impact on U.S. elections. These investigations are mostly used to make the political right side look bad by tying them to Putin. It would be reasonable for the Trump admin to defund these investigations as we have much greater problems to be worried about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com