How the Military Will Hack the Election
kenklippenstein.com
kenklippenstein.com
American Big Tech is a menace for all democracies around the world.
Inside the US, you have a remarkable lack of serious reporting and common-meaning-generating discussion. Filter bubble echo-chambers are extreme to the point of constituting entirely incompatible realities.
Those distortions aren't random either, they clearly serve a specific goal. Having people scoff at "conspiracies" even when they're facing them dead-on is a surprisingly effective trick.
Wait, aren't that is exactly the definition of the democracy? When the people use all information there is (even if American Big Tech, or China, or Russia, or Soros, or world‑controlling pedo cabal have not very uniformly media coverage of the election process) to make their own decision?
There are real ways to secure our elections but the end result is that it's insecure by design. The states who run the elections seem perfectly happy to run them with the current level of (in)security.
The people obviously don’t care very much if they are still using these products.
I think we are past the point of complaining. People should just log off permanently and countries who care legislate. But stop complaining. Do something or don’t.
Countries can even make it illegal to hold elections, but that too will be incompatible with the democracy.
In 5th gen warfare, the battlefield can be kinetic or information, and might be all around us and omnipresent.
What we're guessing at without this decade's version of a Snowden leak is what the equities of the US military are in this. Are we playing defense, offense, and where? Is the answer just, "yes"?
What about our adversaries, or more importantly, _who_ are our adversaries?
Consider just the usual 3 who are in the news: Russia, China, and Israel:
Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation#Against...
China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_interference_in_the_20...
Israel: https://quincyinst.org/research/the-eighth-front-inside-isra...
Mailers going out in Iowa, reportedly: https://x.com/DMRegister/status/2110328563211567310
There's so little that's public about these wars and so little traction in the mindshare of the electorate, you'd wonder if it was real if you just talked to random people.
It is to me shocking how few have listened to Yuri:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErKTVdETpw
Of course he did not 1:1 predict Trump, but things such as "flood the zone with shit" is exactly what Yuri spoke about, just using different words e. g. informational overload or the corresponding russian words. And what he also didn't expand on enough, IMO, is corruption. Putin bets a LOT on corruption. Imagine if Trump were not corrupt - Yuri's prediction would not come to fruition. You need a rotting egg for leverage, and who knows what kompromat exists on the orange, clueless man.
And the left? They’ve been driving over cliff after cliff. Left and right cable news are on the take, they have to be. Individuals obviously, not the networks.
Where was this guy when cybercom destroyed the Internet Agency's computers and sent them personalized text messages in a highly publicized attack?
1. Republicans win in midterms. Trump: "I defended democracy!"
2. Republicans lose in midterms. Trump: "The election was rigged by the evil Democrats!"
Recall that the whole basis of the Jan 6 insurrection was that he made the same "rigged" claim. He's already laying the foundation to claim "rigged" this time too, unless it conveniently benefits his party.
At the very least I expect riots and some attempt at a January 6th repeat. People will die, police or rioters or both.
This is what people voted for (including all the ones who didn't vote for various dumb reasons), so I'm just getting popcorn.
It's good that we now have a recorded timeline for history...
In any case, I just find arguments that are along the lines of "it's not really free speech restriction, your free speech isn't restricted by not being able to see foreign propaganda" to be beneath contempt.
Personally I want to be able to see even foreign propaganda that is false. But attempts to curtail foreign propaganda lead to situations where even foreign propaganda that is true would be curtailed. And that is even worse. If some foreign government hacks the US government and dumps a bunch of compromising information about US politicians online, you'd best believe that I would like to see it.
It seems naive to think that there aren't massive information warfare campaigns targeting all political wings in the United States, and that no looking should be done to uncover it.
The military and CIA can muck with explicitly foreign actors, but they shouldn't be doing any kind of domestic law enforcement. Really bad precedent.
... that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic... ... once I and my family get paid appropriate compensation...What we need to understand is that cyberspace has opened up another theater of Operation and one that the nations enemies actively use against it, because of our free and open culture of speech.
I'll also point out that throughout the article it points how the operation was authorized by Obama, appealed for bt democratic senators trying to stop "disinformation" and prevent election "interference" as well as Republican presidents.
The fact of the matter is almost everything you see or read on the Internet is not organic but is parroting a prepared position for someone trying to influence you. Benignly to buy things, less benignly can be foreign actors attempting to distablize or so discontent amongst a potential geo-political rival. And this isn't new either, all the way back in in WW1 Germany was supporting and supplying Irish rebels. This is how the great game is played unfortunately.
The solution will be found by building bridges, getting to know people in the real world and reducing the influence of cyberspace on your life.
You can't be so naive that you think we can "build bridges" with North Korea (one of THE most prominent threat actors in the entire world).
This is a culmination of everything post-9/11. The lesson for administrations is to not create institutions that will be weaponized by future administrations — against your party too, if you won't think about the citizens. Decentralization has been our saving grace.
So that the physical agents can sway us?
even classified stuff gets out because people brag
I'm not saying this isn't a possible scheme, I'm saying the press will find out very quickly
Plus every state is different system, mostly
What we should be talking about is the clear and documented fact the current administration has outright ignored 250 court orders, including deporting one person three times despite being ordered not to and then ordered to return them
Because after the election, that's when they go scorched-earth and ignoring court orders like cutting down nearly 500 trees in a single day rush before they are caught, well that's nightmare fuel
Large segments of people will never see the open secrets
I am unaware of who Klippenstein is and whether he's left or right leaning. This article via HN is my first exposure to him, but without any context at all, just by reading the article, I can figure out he's very left leaning.
Why does that matter?
It matters because journalism in 2026 has turned from reporting facts into appealing to a certain spectrum of an audience. It's no longer about providing facts of the matter but about leading an audience to a conclusion that they already had in their minds and re-enforcing it. This is the same echo chamber loop journalists accuse social media of but they are guilty of the very same.
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First, Klippenstein (seems to) imply that it was the Trump administration that began claims of Russian intelligence interference.
Not so. In October 7, 2016 - the Obama administration, via both Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, publicly attributed compromises of political organizations’ emails to the Russian government, connecting the subsequent disclosures to Russian-directed efforts. This was a government intelligence attribution and not merely a statement from the Democratic Party or Clinton campaign
Next, Klippenstein (seems to) imply that CYBERCOM is running the show here. That's not how INT works - CYBERCOM complements, and doesn't replaces FBI/DHS, while CIA is itself foreign focused. CYBERCOM’s role also includes disrupting foreign cyber operations, not just merely investigating them.
Now a very noble interpretation of Klippenstein is he's describing a bipartisan willingness to restrict speech in the name of election security - that his central objection is to the government’s intervention in political expression, not exclusively to which party controls it.
This is a fair argument but if there's foreign intelligence interference, that brainwashes the American public, making them draw conclusions that are factually invalid, whose responsibility is to atleast point that out?
The DoW has, at its disposal, incredibly advanced intelligence dissemination tools (as a requirement for INT operations) that are a great fit for this usecase. Should not the American public, who pay for all of it, not make use of it?
By that definition, all medical science is "biased". And until the current administration, it wasnt. Requiring people making claims to demonstrate it with repeatable methods is not "bias".
If you report all crime by black people and no crime by white people, you are factually accurate in what you report but you are also biased.
>whose responsibility is to at least point that out?
Not the military. I agree that work needs done but when you dance close to taking down sites or possibly removing actual human Americans' posts surreptitiously, it should be done with civilian mechanisms and with oversight.
If it were really a good idea; if it were really supported by Congress and people really needed it, the ruling party with Present + Congress wouldn't condition it on them winning more elections.
Any comparison to policies like "elect me and get free education and free healthcare" are statements based on policy positions, and usually coming from people who don't have the power to make that happen alone. Trump and GOP have the power right now to try to do what he said, but they won't.
Calling it out as election interference now shows a clear bias.
We are in agreement that the #1 concern for the midterms is that Americans will vote honestly. Trump was removed from office by honest voters, after his failed attempts to malign them.
There was much more than this as well and it was well documented in a Rolling Stone article after the election.
Now that someone you don't like might use these same tactics, you want to stop the 'cheating'.
Get in line with the Republicans and others that lost their jobs and livelihood over having this opinion.
I will echo the statement of the security community during that time that our elections are the most safe and secure in the history of the United States.
Want evidence? ................... (this is what we got after Biden won, along with massive bannings and shutdown of online speech). I stopped taking many in the security community seriously after this when they can be swayed so easily by public opinion.
They are nothing more than political hacks with no integrity.
Yes. I do. Very much.
Do you have any?
Trump also got a weird and very high vote total in the 2020 election. People just chalk this up to mail in voting. Perhaps, but the 2024 vote totals fell back into line with previous expectations on both sides for vote totals. Make of that what you will.
I did 2 years ago, and you are right, you got nothing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43512337
The published numbers are totally in line with recent voter activity in the States.
Still worse than most other democracies.