I have no idea if this has been posted somewhere already, nor even any idea what existing thread it would best fit in. So, new Breaking News thread here:
Looks like the same story at CBSNEWS here, ad-blocked:
It says the guy, whose step-dad had worked at Deutsch Bank, had given hundreds of docs to journalists and investigators. But he also had a history of drug abuse, credit card theft, and connections with North Korean hackers. Not obvious if there was foul play here. (But the commenters at the end of the Raw Story article sure seem to think it’s obvious. )
With the Trump cabal trying so hard to emulate Putin’s propaganda and cyber control tactics, here’s another story that might give us pause.
From the article:
As the digital age evolves, information dominance is increasingly wielded for social control, as China has shown in its repression of the Uyghur minority. It was no surprise to Ukrainian officials that a prewar priority for Russia would be compiling information on the citizenry.
“The idea was to kill or imprison these people at the early stages of occupation,” Victor Zhora, a senior Ukrainian cyber defense official, alleged.
Aggressive data collection accelerated just ahead of the invasion, with hackers serving Russia’s military increasingly targeting individual Ukrainians, according to Zhora’s agency, the State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection.
This happened before.
The German government spent several years in the 1920s & early 1930s building data files on all citizens (on IBM punched cards). Thus they were able to quickly identify Jews, gays, liberal politicians, etc. so quickly (they opened the first concentration camp 30 days after Hitler took power).
This is covered rather extensively in the book IBM and the Holocaust.
I wondered why it seemed the Russians weren’t very successful in shutting down Ukraine’s mobile communications. I noticed in videos of Ukraine that people were constantly on their phones.
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