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from the all-your-email-are-belong-to-us dept.
From NPR:
President Obama has ordered the intelligence community to conduct a "full review" of "malicious cyber activity" timed to U.S. elections, the White House said Friday.
The review will go all the way back to the 2008 campaign when China was found to have hacked both the Obama and McCain campaigns, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said at a Friday press briefing.
In the 2016 election, U.S. intelligence officials charged that Russia had interfered. In early October, they released a strongly worded statement saying they were "confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations." The statement went on to say "these thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process."
Shortly after that, WikiLeaks began posting emails hacked from Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta's Gmail account. The slow drip of those emails, including transcripts of Clinton's remarks to Goldman Sachs, hung over the campaign in its closing weeks and proved embarrassing at times. Podesta said he spoke to the FBI about the hacking, and intelligence experts blamed Russia for that as well.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by zocalo on Sunday December 11 2016, @10:49AM
I agree with your second point though, that the contents of the emails wasn't really disputed is the more interesting story here. The question is, do we ascribe that to the idea that it was 100% unequivocably true, or just that the media wasn't prepared to question their information in case is ruined the narrative they were trying to spin (too much like actual journalism, and we don't do that anymore!) and the public's willingness to lap it up without question because it fitted with their personal worldview? The reality is almost certainly somewhere in the middle, of course, but the media has collectively made it impossible to determine just where in the middle the truth lies - there are almost no verifiable sources, quotes are almost always out of context, rebuttals are barely reported on at all. It's a brave new world of news reporting, and it's almost all totally useless if you are interested in any kind of truth but what someone with an agenda wants you to believe.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11 2016, @01:16PM
> there are almost no verifiable sources, quotes are almost always out of context, rebuttals are barely reported on at all
That's not true. Sure it happens sometimes. But not most of the time. The problem is that people get their news from the headlines. The body of the reports are skimmed or just completely skipped far too often. So those rebuttals, the context of the quotes and the identities of their sources are there, just ignored.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jelizondo on Sunday December 11 2016, @01:36PM
There is not a shred of evidence that Russia or any other State actor hacked the election. Bear in mind that the very same people that are making such claims without proof also claimed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which to this day have not been found.
If HRC had used a secure (?) government server, the FBI would not have had anything to investigate; if the DNC had not rigged the election in favor of HRC, there would not have been leaked emails; if Bill & Hillary weren’t taking money from foreign governments, there would not have been anything to hold against them.
It is quite easy to blame the Russians but if, a big if, the Russians indeed tried to influence the election the root cause is the corrupt ways of HRC and the DNC. If you give your enemies weapons, don’t blame them for using them against you.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11 2016, @02:00PM
There is not a shred of evidence that Russia or any other State actor hacked the election.
Uh, no. They have the phishing email that compromised podesta. It used the same exploit, and more importantly the same back-end server infrastructure that the fancybear hacking group used in other attacks that were indepdendently traced to russia.
Bear in mind that the very same people that are making such claims without proof also claimed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
Don't blindly repeat Trump talking points without checking them. Its not the "very same people" - because the intelligence agencies were highly skeptical of the idea that iraq had wmds. Its was the Bush administration that took low-confidence intelligence based on 5-year old data and sexed it up to sell the invasion:
Congress eventually concluded that the Bush administration had "overstated" its dire warnings about the Iraqi threat, and that the administration's claims about Iraq's WMD program were "not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting."
The CIA Just Declassified the Document That Supposedly Justified the Iraq Invasion [vice.com]
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday December 11 2016, @07:55PM
That's evidence of a phishing email, not that Government of Russia hacked the emails.
Also, thank our lucky stars someone so careless with technology isn't part of the government.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @02:09AM
> That's evidence of a phishing email, not that Government of Russia hacked the emails.
Those fingerprints on the gun used to kill the victim aren't evidence that the suspect killed the victim, its evidence that he touched the gun.
Seems like you don't understand how evidence works.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday December 12 2016, @05:02AM
You got a source? And by that I don't mean the lying bastards at the CIA/FBI?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @05:41AM
Do you have proof their evidence is faked?
No, I didn't think so.
So stop playing the role of dumbfuck. We've got more than enough intellectually dishonest masturbation here on soylent.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday December 15 2016, @06:18PM
CIA: Santa is real.
Me: That's bullshit.
You: Do you have proof?
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by hemocyanin on Sunday December 11 2016, @07:58PM
Let us not forget that HRC was JUST AS BAD as GWB about cheerleading for the Iraq war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtK9AzcU42g [youtube.com]
synopsis:
-- 1:40 HRC enters room
-- Code pink intro: war in Iraq will harm American and Iraqi families and cost a lot.
-- 6:30 HRC parrots the WMD arguments, blames the danger to Iraqis on Hussein, ignores harm to Americans, financial costs, and the fact that Iraq was not a threat to the US nor involved in 9/11.
-- 8:52 HRC lies about careful review of WMD info [remember that HRC never even read the National Intelligence Estimate which while suggesting WMDs existed, also contained significant disagreements with that conclusion that a reader not interested in a particular outcome would have agreed called the whole thing into question].
-- 10:00 Audience member: not up to the US to disarm Hussein, up to the world community, Iraq has no connection to terrorism, not only are Iraqi people in danger, so are US people, and will harm the economy. It's reckless.
-- 11:14 HRC: The world community would not take on difficult problems without US forcing the issue. Goes on and on about Bosnia. Segues into how GWB tax cuts are a bad idea.
-- 13:29 [regarding the tax cuts] "Here at home, this administration is bankrupting our economy forcing us to make the worst kinds of false choices between national and homeland security, which they don't fund ..." [IOW, HRC would have preferred GWB raise taxes for more war and domestic surveillance. Interesting to think of in light of Snowden's revelations.]
-- 14:12 HRC is given a pink slip
-- 14:20 HRC goes off: "I am the Senator from NY I will never put my people at risk ..." [Yeah, like Saddam had anything to do with 9/11.]
(Score: 3, Touché) by khallow on Sunday December 11 2016, @04:05PM
Bear in mind that the very same people that are making such claims without proof also claimed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which to this day have not been found.
It's worth noting here that this isn't correct. The Bush administration created a separate intelligence processing system [theguardian.com] for the Iraqi invasion run by Vice President Cheney which bypassed the usual intelligence processing provided by the CIA. And the spectacularly bad stuff they accepted over objections by the rest of the intelligence community is the real basis for the accusations that "Bush lied" going into the Iraqi invasion.
Of course, the same pressure to deliver a desired result may be going on. But Obama will be gone in a bit over a month. There just isn't that much he can do. I think more that he's creating a deliberately embarrassing situation for Trump which sadly is probably one of the best things Obama has done during his entire two terms.
And my view is that Russia did help (or at least give the appearance of helping) the Trump campaign. Whether that help was done with the knowledge of Trump or with the purpose of actually helping Trump win (rather than merely sowing division), is a different story.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jelizondo on Sunday December 11 2016, @05:58PM
Ok, the maybe the WMD were invented by someone else with Isreali help, per the column you linked.
However, the CIA has lied before, numerous times; some examples:
CIA lied about Iran-Contra [chicagotribune.com]
Convicted CIA officer for lying to Congress [independent.co.uk]
CIA lied about torture program [theguardian.com]
CIA was spying on Senate [theguardian.com]
Anytime a "high-ranking officer" talks to the press and his/her name is not given, my B.S. detector goes off. Anytime someone from the CIA talks to the press I know there is a good chance they are lying, evidence or not. (As they have fabricated "evidence" before.)
I think, the whole "the Russians are coming" charade was an attempt by the DNC and HRC to discredit Trump and scaring people into not voting for him. Putin is too smart for such an operation to be directly traceable to Russia. Maybe he did do it, but before I believe that I want to see some kind of evidence and not anonymous sources telling the media the CIA "thinks" Russia hacked the election.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 11 2016, @08:39PM
Putin is too smart for such an operation to be directly traceable to Russia.
Unless, of course, he wants such an operation directly traceable back to Russia. It's no skin off his teeth what we do with that information or the infighting that results.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Sunday December 11 2016, @07:54PM
Putin: If I wanted to influence the US election, I would have donated to the Clinton Foundation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @02:17AM
> If HRC had used a secure (?) government server, the FBI would not have had anything to investigate
Are you joking?
Do you think who operates the server made any difference? Sure it made it more salacious, but what the FBI found would have been on the state.gov email server exactly the same as it was on the clinton.com server. But even more importantly it did not rise to the level of criminality anyway. But that doesn't matter does, she's guilty as far as you are concerned, right?
> ; if the DNC had not rigged the election in favor of HRC, there would not have been leaked emails;
Because a couple of DNC staffers talking shit about Bernie was proof of massive conspiracy.
The very fact that your version of events is so disconnected from the reality is the very problem the russians leveraged. That you can't even recognize your own credulous complicity is pretty damning.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday December 11 2016, @03:37PM
They were.
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs/ [theintercept.com]
Credit/points to dbv [soylentnews.org]
It's a sneaky and indirect way of disputing it, sure, but you could hear the FUD repeated by Podesta and others in interviews.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11 2016, @03:55PM
> It's a sneaky and indirect way of disputing it, sure, but you could hear the FUD repeated by Podesta and others in interviews.
What "interviews?"
I never watch MSNBC or look at their website and this is the first I've heard of any of this. That dailynewsbin site looks like a bottom of the barrel kind of thing.
So MSNBC spends a 10 or 20 minutes on this, sends a few tweets and it all disappears into the ether.
It certainly was not a denial that got any traction.
Apparently you never heard any of those denials either since you keep telling us that dbv pointed this story out to you.
What I did hear constantly was clinton surrogates deflecting discussion of wikileaks by saying they were stolen and then changing the subject. Just the typical deflection tactics that you hear any time a reporter asks a politician a question they don't want to answer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday December 11 2016, @04:14PM
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/oct/23/are-clinton-wikileaks-emails-doctored-or-are-they-/ [politifact.com]
https://twitter.com/johnpodesta/status/784539553281355776 [twitter.com]
"I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump, [I] don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked."
I remember other Clinton surrogates saying something similar, casting doubt on the authenticity of the emails in the weeks leading up to the election.
dbv pointed out The Intercept's article, which I linked.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11 2016, @05:11PM
"I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump, [I] don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked."
That's a far cry from saying they are faked. Maybe you are a just a political naif, but that's just generic deflection. You give it more importance than anyone on that show did.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11 2016, @06:19PM
Lets game this out.
If some clintonian does say the emails are legit and one of them turns out to be fake, what do you think is going to happen?
Whatever that faked one says has now been endorsed by the clinton team.
The only rational thing for them to do is to say what they said - that the emails are unreliable because they came from an unreliable source and that they aren't going to validate them for anyone.
That's not anything close to saying a particular email was forged. Its simply not giving anyone leverage to harm them further.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 11 2016, @04:21PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @10:05AM
Google validated the email with domain keys. There are very few ways for Russia to mess with that:
1. P=NP or similar earthshattering crypto break
2. Google is pwned
3. Russia used Hillary's pwned server, actually sent the email to the recipients, and this didn't result in conversation leading to a "what are you talking about, I didn't email you" moment.
None of those is even remotely likely. In other words, the email is real. The hacking is a distraction from this simple fact: the leaks couldn't happen if the emails hadn't been written. Next time, try not to be evil.