Why all the excitement about blaming the Russians?
Even if the leaked emails were stolen by Russia–why does it matter?
If the emails had been stolen by someone else, would everything be okay?
The issue to me isn’t that the big bad Russkies hacked our computers…governments do that to each other every day.
The issue is : what was contained in those emails that scares the Democrats so much?
If you’re participating in an election in a democracy, why do you have to keep so many secrets?
Ideally, everything that all the parties do should be open to the public.
Businesses have trade secrets, that must be legitimately kept hidden.
But political parties are not private businesses.
If they have secrets, the public deserves to know about them before the elections.
Could be our historically low opinion of them, bellicose military history, sanctions against them, position in the Syrian war, or the fact they are the sole country to prefer Trump. Something tells me they might be trying to do us harm.
I mean, before that, I would have used “climategate” as an example of how trivially easy it is to pick through private communication to find something that seems like foul play (but isn’t). But the fact is, we have perfectly good examples from this case. Even politicians have a right to some basic privacy. Even if there was nothing there, hacks like Sean Hannity or Alex Jones would have found something. There were some things there, but there’s no reason to believe that’s out of the ordinary, or that the republicans’ communications were likely to be any less problematic.
I wonder how the election would have gone if we had gotten all of Trump’s personal emails from the last 8 years?
There’s some dispute about if any hacked RNC emails even exist. The NYT claims to have an anonymous source that says they do, but I haven’t seen anyone able to confirm this.
Sure, but it’s a right they’re unlikely to realize when they hire crappy IT guys that have to ask reddit for help managing their email server.
While I would agree that everyone voted of their own free will, and subsequently we ended up with Trump, (and I also agree that Johnson was the right vote ) I would have to say that your statement seems deliberately obtuse.
You may as well say, “What crime is Bernie Madoff supposed to have done exactly? People gave him money of their own free will! I know people who did it! He didn’t stick a gun in their face. It’s what everyone chose to do!”
If your standard for wrong-doing is sticking a gun in someone’s face or vote tampering, then yeah, no wrong has been done. But if that was the legal standard, we wouldn’t have crimes like fraud, impersonation of an officer, crying “fire” in a crowded building, etc.
Trump’s win is based on a fairly small percentage of the population. A few hundred thousand votes, in the right places, could have changed the entire election. If the population, on average, had been 0.1% more favorable towards Hilary, she may have been the President. (I didn’t do the math, but you get the gist.) And so if you ask, could targeted advertising, targeted misinformation, and targeted revelations with negative or misleading implications have swung that small percentile of the vote? Then yes. I think that could reasonably be done. I think it’s reasonable to believe that, minus Russian tampering (if there was any), that the electorate may well have chosen differently.
Rumor has it that the FBI largely took out the Black Panthers, back in the 60s and 70s, by helping to sow discord within the organization, through a few well-placed moles and forged letters. Information, and the ability to control how it is portrayed, is not a nothing power. Whole countries live on propaganda and lies, and would fall apart without them. The CIA and KGB destabilized a good number of countries, through the Cold War era, using misinformation (and other) tactics. The whole “there will never be peace in the Middle East” meme is based on the rise of Fundamentalist Islam, a movement whose rise was supported by the CIA, to keep Russia out of the region. Minus that and most of the region might have been more like Turkey. Fundamentalist Christianity has been on the rise, as a political power in the US, over the last few decades and just made its largest victory yet, with the promotion of Pence to the Whitehouse.
The free will to do something doesn’t mean that you weren’t conned. If someone tells me that this bar-shaped brown thing in a wrapper is chocolate, when it’s actually some poisonous concoction made to look like a candy bar, I will end up killing myself of my own free will, through no fault nor intention of my own. If you would argue that no crime was committed against me nor needs to be investigated, I would seriously question your reasoning.
When someone breaks into my home and steals my shit, I have not “failed to realize” my right to property, my right to property has been violated. Even if I forgot to lock my door.
Yup, and if you leave big piles of $100 bills in your driveway overnight, your right to property is also likely to be violated. Buy better locks or reap the almost-inevitable reward. Whether that’s “right” or “fair” is irrelevant. It happened.
So, look at it the right way, its really their fault they were hacked! Why, its almost like entrapment, they made it so easy those poor Russian guys just couldn’t resist! Sashaying around dressed like that, just asking for it!
I’m sure not.
For others if you have stuff you want to keep secret, you should keep it from discovery with intelligent care.
Months ago, it was pointed out that any country’s intelligence service with a budget of more that $130 could have hacked a Gmail account, and that old Hil’s email server was less secure than Gmail
Blum: You don’t need to be a cat-burglar to hack into an email account and you don’t need a cloth to wipe a server clean. One would think that a former United States Senator, one would think that a former Secretary of State, would know this as well, would you agree?
Comey: You would think…although as I said before one of the things I’ve learned in this case is that the Secretary may not have been as sophisticated as people assume. She didn’t even have a computer in her office at the State Department for example.
Wow. Clinton doesn’t even have a computer in her office? How is that even possible in our day and age?*
Hillary’s Email Was Less Secure Than… Gmail
However, there Hil was just Secretary of State, and those emails weren’t so important; but for the DNC, they had plenty of private stuff too arcane for the common man. You’d imagine they could have dropped, say, $500k from the Clinton Foundation for computer security in order to win the election they spent $1.2 billion to secure.
Are you sure that’s not just something you’ve told yourself because you really want to believe it’s true?
I keep hearing this and yet I see no evidence for it. Certainly we’re less likely to get into a conflict with Russia in the short-term under Trump because we’re much less likely to oppose their expansionist ambitions in Ukraine and elsewhere in eastern Europe, and will be less supportive of NATO. But how well did appeasement work out for Neville Chamberlain? Jimmy Carter aided the Soviets and it prolonged their regime; Reagan took a harder stance and the Soviets collapsed under their own flaws. The soft approach is not always the best.
Conversely, Trump advocated a much harder line against Iran and has indicated an intent to tear up an agreement that has pushed back Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons for a decade. How do you think that’s going to play out? Is that approach less likely to get us into a major conflict?
Basically this whole argument is “Electing Clinton means that the Russians are more likely to hack our systems and steal our secrets…so let’s elect someone who will just tell the Russians all our secrets. Then our systems will be safe!”
And now we’ve got a president-elect with a Twitter addiction and an unwillingness to take State Department advice. Given Trump’s behaviour in the past month, how much more casual provocation do you think we’ll see?
Actually most people around the world were terrified of a Trump victory - except for Russians, who strangely preferred Trump. And the reason most of them preferred Clinton, for all her flaws, is that they rightly recognized that putting an ignorant narcissist with no self-control in charge of the nuclear arsenal is incredibly dangerous.
Careful there, man - you’ve dropped a whole bunch of straw. Wouldn’t want you to trip on it.
By the by, there is a certain entertainment value in watching the party of Reagan all lining up to defend Russian shenanigans against the US’s security services. How times change.
More likely “Because Trump isn’t going to do squat if Russia decides to ‘re-acquire’ the rest of Ukraine. That’s not something we can say with certainty about Clinton.”
Has anyone said that no investigation is necessary? AFAICT, the Republican response has been largely along the lines of the OP. Needs to be investigated, but we shouldn’t accept any particular hypothesis at this time.
And in full contrition for my earlier behavior: this is true. However, we are dealing in a mix of two worlds where so little is truly secure, and it is even more rare to know “who shot who in the what, now?” I can almost always tell my customers where the attack is coming from, and what they’re trying to do within a few minutes. Sussing out a who and a why is sometimes very difficult, sometimes very easy. However, the parties reporting on this, and now investigating it are several levels up the food chain from I.
In this case the secrecy is exacerbated by the spy aspect, and by the fact that either side releasing anything but the bare minimum necessary to achieve their goal is going to expose methods and capabilities to the other side.
And this is the part that gives me heartburn. Really, if a nation is willing to throw all of its weight against you, there’s no practical way to be absolutely sure you can stop a determined attacker with a legacy protocol open to them. At least not in a way that everyone else is going to want to use. Podesta used Gmail, which is relatively secure. It got hacked. Even if he had two-factor authentication turned on, it’s possible to compromise that with a concerted attack.
So basically, if you deal in secrets that a nation would want: don’t use email, or use it in such an inconvenient manner (e.g. encrypting the content at rest with an out-of-band system) that the end user would be looking for alternatives.
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