Yup, North Korea’s GDP sucks, but their capacity and willingness to harm the US are relatively high.
No fair moving the goal posts. We were talking about your level of trust in the information provided by the US intelligence community. Whether it’s WaPo or NYT or Fox News reporting that Russians are planning a cyber attack on some part of the US infrastructure, is irrelevant. Are you going to believe US intelligence community reporting a cyber attack the same way you claimed you’d believe them if they were reporting a terrorist attack?
<confused>… I thought this was a hypothetical with respect to me being accused of being a terrorist by US intelligence and you wanting evidence before agreeing with their decision to bring me to justice. </confused>
There’s a difference between forewarning of danger and trying to ascertain the motives (or identities, in case of cyber attacks) of bad actors after the fact. If they’re forewarning of danger, and there’s a minimal effort I can make to avoid it, I will. In your example of “Russia was planning a cyber attack to shut down the North East power grid”, if I lived in the northeast, I might go buy a generator and fuel. I don’t require an overly-high bar of evidence to take simple precautions. Worst case scenario, I have a never-been-used generator at the end of it.
On the other hand, if they want to convince me that Putin was twirling his mustache like a super-villain while reading Podesta’s emails, I’d like a bit of evidence for how they know that besides just taking their word for it.
My hypothetical assumed you were an American citizen. It wasn’t necessary for you to prove it for the hypothetical. That was my point. Apologies for the confusion.
A lot of misinformation here trying to minimize this and blame it on Podesta being dumb. First, Podesta’s email was separate from the DNC hack. They only got into Podesta’s email, but they also got into the DNC network twice. So please drop the “none of this would have happened if it weren’t for Podesta” nonsense.
If you want to say a phishing attack doesn’t qualify as a hack, whatever, but the hackers got onto the DNC network and installed tools from a sophisticated suite of custom built malware (that is not available or used by anyone but Russia, in case you’re wondering) on the DNC network and exfiltrated files over an extended period of time. Is that good enough to be called a hack?
Yes others were targeted as well, and there were more than the two listed above that were successful. Colin Powell is one. But no information was leaked on anyone but Democrats. Was it because Podesta’s emails were so juicy that they had to see the light of day? No, they were boring as shit. But coupled with propaganda, fake news and botnets, it had an impact.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was also hacked, and guess what, the hackers fed information stolen from the Democrats running for congress directly to their republican opponents and selected media contacts.
Russia just undertook a widespread effort to derail the campaign of every single democrat up for election, but please continue telling us how the Democrats weren’t targeted and all these hacks are Podesta’s fault.
Obama’s father is Kenyan and Obama spent years overseas in an Indonesian school, he has a foreign sounding name, and there’s a picture of him dressed in a turban. It’s stupid, but you can understand the germ of the idea. What’s more bewildering is they think a billionaire who stiffs his vendors and ran a fraudulent university is a hero of the working class. Class consciousness isn’t in America’s vocabulary.
You’d like it, but you must realize why expecting them to provide you with such probative evidence is unreasonable, right?
The good news is that a reasonably intelligent person that can parse a bit of technical jargon can form a solid conclusion based on the freely available circumstantial evidence. If you’re reasonably sure of OJ’s guilt, you can be reasonably sure of Putin’s. If you don’t want to read through or believe the declassified official report, it’s not really necessary.
If you want all the details and full-on jargon with an assist from some illustrative infographics, check this out.
If you want the Twitter/summary version of the above, just read all the posts of user pwnallthethings here, where he explains why a 14 year old on his bed was most certainly not capable of this.
What’s the worst ISIS could do to the US? Even the damage of 9/11 is overblown. Bush did an order of magnitude more damage to the US with his shitty policies than the most effective terrorist attack of all time.
It’s not about GDP or size, but both those things help give capacity to cause damage. ISIS cannot cause that much damage to the US. The only significant damage they can cause is by goading us into a shitty response, not on their own.
Trump: Only ‘stupid’ people, fools oppose better Russia ties.
Imagine that. Trump referring to stupid people and fools.
So the extent of your trust in the intelligence community is not whether or not they are capable of detecting, assessing, countermanding and informing the American public of cyber threats to various institutions (public and private), is dictated by whether or not you can take relatively simple steps to minimize such impact as to least inconvenience you… Is that about right?
Still have no idea where you were going with this. Doesn’t matter.
It’s almost like we’re taking turns firing geo-political potshots. :smack:
The “hackers” gained access to Podesta’s 60k emails on his private gmail server. Those were the emails that were leaked and that was the door into the DNC servers.
Not a particularly good one. Again, read the cites. Had the breach been handled competently when it was found, there likely would have been minimal damage. It was bungling by the DNC, FBI and administration that allowed the breach to continue for 7 months.
Please cite that other emails were obtained but not released. All of the cites that I have seen indicted only Podesta and the DNC were breached to the extent that emails were downloaded.
Interesting, yet unsubstantiated theory. I see nothing online that references DNCC emails going to republican candidates other than the manner that Wikileaks published to everyone.
Nope. The motivation for Russia is to destabilize the US political process in general. One of the motivations of Julian Assange was to hurt Clinton. Had there been an RNC breach, those emails would have gone up for sale as well. Wikileaks may not have bought them and likely wouldn’t have published them if they did, but it’s unlikely Assange would have spent money to buy something only to hide it. His end game is three fold: 1) make money; 2) be famous; and 3) stir up discord for those he doesn’t like. Get the players right or you’ll never understand the game.
Assange* paid *for the hacked info? News to me. Cite?
Well, why not? If, as you say, it was all about the ching-ching? Because the Pubbies are too smart for that to happen, too tech-savvy? The alternative explanation would be that they didn’t want to. But you have reliable information that this is not the case? In your haste, you neglected to provide it. But now is a good time!
Those were some of the emails. Emails from the DNC network were also released, and documents and emails from the DCCC hack were also released.
I’m a bit curious how the hackers stealing Podesta’s gmail password got them onto the DNC network. Care to elaborate?
Wait, you said Podesta’s gmail was used to get into the DNC. Podesta’s gmail was hacked for two days. They got his password on March 19th 2016 and lost access two days later on March 21st (that’s Saturday to Monday). How is Podesta’s gmail hack in March 2016 responsible for the DNC hack in 2015, or the DCCC and the other DNC hack later in 2016?
Have you not even heard of the DCCC hack?
Anyway, “Russia collected on some Republican affiliated targets but did not conduct a comparable disclosure campaign.” - the unclassified intelligence report.
Or,* Russian hackers breached GOP individuals and organizations prior to the election, including Republican House members, thought leaders and non-profits to the GOP, a former senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the hack investigation told CNN.*
Of course, Republicans deny this but in that same article admit that their staffers were hacked.
Republican National Committee officials have repeatedly denied that their systems were breached, insisting instead that only individual staffers’ accounts were hacked.
I haven’t see any releases from them and I seriously doubt only a few low ranking nobodies got hacked.
Yeah I take that back. Guccifer offered them to opponents and select media and I was sure I read somewhere of details of opponents getting documents from Guccifer but I can’t find it now. He did feed docs to right wing blogs.
You can’t say that with any confidence and it goes against what the intelligence community concludes and they put a lot more work into it than you did.
Assange wasn’t behind the hacks.
Cite that the other documents were sold?
You definitely don’t know Assange.
The New York Review of Books has a good article about the latest intelligence report:
“…On Friday, when the report appeared, the major newspapers came out with virtually identical headlines highlighting the agencies’ finding that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an ‘influence campaign’ to help Donald Trump win the presidency—a finding the agencies say they hold ‘with high confidence.’ A close reading of the report shows that it barely supports such a conclusion. Indeed, it barely supports any conclusion…”
The article then proceeds to dissect the report in devastating detail.
It’s been clear for several years that the US intelligence agencies have been trying to stir up a new cold (or hot) war against Russia. Their propaganda has largely been accepted by the media and public.
Trump has very few good points, but one of them is that he won’t be a patsy of the intelligence agencies.
So, they were all in on it? What was it, seventeen different intelligence entities? Was this a directed conspiracy, with a kingpin convincing all the others to fall into line? Or was it a spontaneous thing, and just miraculously simultaneous?
The author of this story tells rather a different version in today’s LA Times
She’s a bit confusing, but it seems to boil down to two Russian intelligence operations working entirely ignorant of each other, with neither actually reporting to Putin. And while they definitely hoped to sow dissension and distrust, they did not actually work towards helping Trump, even as much as they preferred him. So, the “K” in “KGB” stands for Keystone Kops? They blundered in, stumbled around, and scored a coup.
OK.
Don’t be silly. Almost entirely the CIA.
What I want to know is why the lying media isn’t reporting on all those Russians dancing in the streets of New Jersey at Trump’s victory. Sad!
I’m curious who these Western leaders were who failed to realize that Putin was still very much in control, because it was widely and publicly discussed in the media and political think tank reports at the time that Medvedev was Putin’s puppet, put in place to allow him to circumvent term limit issues. Putin wasn’t exactly subtle about it.
Just like Reagan wanted to go to war with the Soviet Union when he demanded they tear down the Berlin Wall. And we all know how much Republicans opposed that approach.
Since we’ve already established that there were GOP breaches, you might want to consider a fourth motive: 4) to hold embarrassing (or worse) material on the Republicans you’ve just helped put in power and then use that material to “influence” them into doing what you want.
Please read the cites I provided. If you wish to dispute those cites, please provide other, reliable sources. I’m presenting what I have read as facts, if there is verified contradicting info I’ll be glad to read it.
When was this established? I think a lot of Democrats have this false view in their mind that Russia hacked into both campaigns and found themselves with two comparable troves of emails: one from the DNC and Podesta, and another one from Republicans. And then the sneaky commie bastards only released the Dem emails and held the Republican ones back. I don’t think there’s evidence to support this conclusion. I believe it’s wishful partisan dreaming. I haven’t seen evidence that Republicans systems were compromised to the same extent that Democrats’ systems were. I don’t believe there’s evidence that anyone of a comparable rank to Podesta on the Republican side had their emails stolen.