And anything that was done by Obama regarding the meddling was 100% witch huntery!
Has anyone seen this video or can they comment? It was a congressional testimony about changing priorities during the hacking.
Any idea why priorities were changed?
I do not agree with republicans trying to blame democrats for the fact that republicans committed treason. That is like if I beat up someone in the street and blamed other people because they didn’t call the cops. The fact that Obama may not have fought hard enough to stop Trump’s treason doesn’t make Obama the criminal. It also doesn’t absolve the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump after so many of us told you he was treasonous.
But can anyone explain the video?
Key is the words “cyber response”, implying a sort of digital counter-attack. The respondent was willing to confirm the response at the meeting, but further details withheld for a secure environment. Keep in mind, McConnell had already threatened to accuse Obama of interfering. He was briefed, he knew what he was doing, he did it anyway,
It also appears from the testimony that Obama was focusing attention on any possible interference with the election *mechanics *rather than the propaganda blitz. Obama was of the opinion that the multi-state environment made such interference extremely difficult, so Obama had good reason to tread carefully. Even to this day, we don’t really know how effective Russian agitprop efforts were, we can only be sure they happened and the motives were malicious.
If Obama had gone retaliatory, and Trump had lost…as seemed likely…can anyone doubt that the Republicans would have gone full tearing-hair-and-screaming mode? Obama made a wise but difficult and risky choice.
People like to treat blame like a zero sum game, where if you assign it to one person, then others can’t have it. That’s not how reality works though. The total amount of blame doesn’t have to add up to 100%. It doesn’t even need to exceed 0.
- The Russians are 100% at fault for hacking into the DNC machines and into Clinton’s email server. They are likewise 100% to fault for releasing those materials in a way so as to optimize misleading the American people, and causing them to vote as the Russians wanted.
- The DNC is 20% to blame for having insecure hosts and people who were not trained to spot phishing attempts.
- Clinton is likewise 20% to blame for the same.
- Trump is 100% to blame for encouraging Russia to attack his own nation.
For #1, it’s a crime and act of war. There’s no ambiguity on that. It was a direct decision to defeat American sovereignty, taken consciously, and enacted as a military measure.
For #2 and #3, I don’t know of any non-tech company that has anything like decent security - and a good part of that is simply down to techies understanding how things work and the rest of everyone else not. You can tell people to check the URLs on their links all day and if they don’t understand how the Internet works, it will be all for naught. This is likely an intractable problem. Most organizations are spared by the fact that attackers are generally going for mass. They publish a virus or an email, a few users are caught in it, the security scanner companies get a report, add the signature for the virus to their database, and the remaining 99% of everyone is protected. But that does no good when you’re dealing with a targeted attack on a specific person.
To the extent that the politicians are to blame for hacking, it’s that they aren’t hiring a CTO for the nation to lead an effort to revise the TCP/IP protocol and email protocols to be more secure and have things like certificates of authenticity which companies can include in their emails. But really, that’s a matter for the Executive branch and Trump ain’t done bupkis on that front.
For #4, it’s simply ludicrous for a person running to be the head of the Commander in Chief to be calling out at his rallies for enemy states to attack the country. You may as well have a person running for chief of the fire department issuing prizes to arsonists for every building they burn down. There’s simply no defense for this sort of behavior.
Wait. Is this the new talking point based on the new goalpost? Have we now accepted collusion but are arguing that it’s the Democrats fault? I wondered when we’d get there.
Can you clarify what you mean by 3? Are you saying that Clinton was responsible for the DNC’s security? For all of her talents, I don’t think she’s a cyber security expert. Otherwise, I can’t figure out what you mean.
Why [del]would[/del] would[del]n’t[/del] they?
… As Trump has said many times before. Many many times.
Oh, yes, it’s Russia. But they’re working to get Democrats elected because he’s so hard on them.
So, apparently, it proves that any investigation into Trump is politically motivated and must be stopped immediately.
I meant for the Secretary of State email server being hacked.
Can I have a cite for this? Or, you can put the cite in this GQ thread:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=859187
Thanks.
So, her e-mails, then? Duly noted.
Sorry, you are correct. I was conflating “insecure storage” with “successfully penetrated”. Replace with “Hillary was 70% to blame for the SoS email being insecurely stored”.
I’ll put a higher blame metric since she was told to not do it. Her only justification for doing otherwise is that Colin Powell did it, but surely she’d know that technology will have progressed.
The main mitigating factor is that both she and her underlings appear to have treated the server as insecure, and don’t seem to have ever hosted any Top Secret materials on it, except a handful of items that (it seems) didn’t really need the designation. The FBI investigation seems to have proved that Clinton and her people were surprisingly good at keeping secrets off of the machine, which is better than one would expect for any group of people over a large period of time.
Though it does seem likely that the server was successfully penetrated, it just wasn’t interesting.
You’re still playing into the confusion that Republicans are trying to sow, apparently with great success. To whit, this thread is about “The Russian hack,” which refers to the hacked DNC server (and possibly John Podesta’s phished email account), and has absolutely nothing to do with Clinton’s private email server during her tenure as SoS, which is not known to ever have been hacked. And yet, the OP included mention of the private server in his OP, and here you are continuing to talk about it.
What level of culpability rests on the shoulders of SDMB for providing a platform for this propaganda?
Fair point.
How much of a rape is the fault of the victim’s clothing? There’s your answer.
Does the OP have any further comment?
Russia, or at least the Soviet Union meddling in U.S. Elections is not a new phenomenon. It goes back at least as far as the 1960 general election by way of attempted bribes and backing certain candidates.
Obviously newer technology like the internet and social media create a whole new avenue for meddling and propaganda on a huge scale, previously not possible. I’m certain the U.S. has done their fair share of meddling in Russia and other countries elections as well, Argentina was an old example I’m sure there are many more recent ones that we don’t know about. I’m not really arguing one side or the other, I was just reading about them trying to influence elections during the Cold War and a lot of the stuff I never knew about until now.
That’s ‘colusion.’
I have not been able to confirm this, but it is my understanding that the Russians got into the DNC’s mail server by guessing the password was password. Eh-h-h-h, that’s like saying a guy who strolled in your unlocked front door committed a break-in. Sure, he shouldn’t be rooting around in your stuff, but I would call it taking advantage of an opportunity.