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A federal grand jury in Washington, DC has indicted 13 Russian nationals and a Kremlin-linked internet firm on charges that they had meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
The US government said Russian entities began interfering in US political processes, including the 2016 presidential election, as early as 2014, according to a court document.
[...] The charges – which include conspiracy, wire fraud, bank fraud and aggravated identity theft – are the most direct allegations to date of illegal Russian meddling in the election.
Link to the Indictment: https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download
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Mueller Investigation: Thirteen Russians Charged With Interfering in US Election
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Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
-- H. L. Mencken
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @06:48PM (8 children)
You all accept banning men from taking cute young girls as brides.
Law enforcement is the world wide enemy of males.
They enforce america's religion and are enemies of YHWH's law.
/
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @07:07PM (1 child)
Hey looney tunes, it isn't Saturday. Please stick to your schedule.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @02:29AM
Hey, give him a break. It's a holiday [wikipedia.org] in the United States today.
And besides, mental illness never takes a day off.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday February 19 2018, @07:27PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @08:11PM
Probably never left...
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 19 2018, @07:31PM (3 children)
Don't cite Yahweh as your god. Your posts make it pretty obvious that your penis is your god.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday February 19 2018, @09:37PM (2 children)
He's right, actually. Pick up your Bible and read the Old Testament; Yahweh is all about taking underage girls, preferably after you slaughter their parents, brothers, infant siblings, and everyone else around them who's not a virgin, as sex partners (read: rape toys). You're looking specifically for Numbers 31.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday February 20 2018, @02:03AM (1 child)
There's some shit in the Talmud that's worse. You're looking specifically for Sanhedrin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @04:25AM
Ah, so you believe you have a divine right? I'm not gonna look into that passage, I don't think I can handle finding out your end game on this fine night.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @07:43PM (13 children)
Uh, 13. Wow. Thirteen Russians supposedly spending a bit of change on Facebook and maybe expressing their free speech constitutes "meddling" in our election. If these 13 hadn't tipped us poor Americans off about Hillary's disregard for the law, we would have made the right, pre-ordained choice and elected Hillary.
What a fucking lame political witchhunt.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by vux984 on Monday February 19 2018, @08:28PM (9 children)
The crazy overflows
"Uh, 13. Wow. Thirteen Russians supposedly spending a bit of change on Facebook and maybe expressing their free speech constitutes "meddling" in our election"
The russian government seeking to partipate, influence, and shape american voters is election meddling. Yes. How many people are currently indicted for it is the stupidest fact imaginable to latch onto. (What's next? Will you'll declare world war 2 a minor conflict because only a few hundred people were tried for war crimes when it was over? How does your brain even function?)
"If these 13 hadn't tipped us poor Americans off about Hillary's disregard for the law, we would have made the right, pre-ordained choice and elected Hillary."
Clinton is beyond irrelevant now, this isn't about Clinton. They also attacked Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and other R primary challengers.
Perhaps without the interference the R's still would have won, but it would have been someone else on the ticket instead of Trump. To be honest, I think if any other R had finished the primaries it would have been a solid R victory even without any meddling. Clinton was a terrible candidate, Dem's had held the presidency for a decade, it was time for a change -- if the R's hadn't run a fucking drooling idiot they'd have won by a landslide.
In other words, I'm saying without the meddling, I think we'd have gotten a better Republican president with a stronger mandate. (Not that I liked Cruz much, but I think he'd have been less fucked up than the current hot mess. Either way, I'm miles away from suggesting Clinton should be president.
If the election was rigged the people responsible should be prosecuted, and the mechanisms used to rig it should be dismantled so they can't be used in the next one. What part of that do you disagree with exactly?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @08:46PM (7 children)
That's a new twist to this conspiracy theory.
Given the rest of your comment, I have no idea what "rigged" means here. Are you suggesting ballot tampering? Voter intimidation? Were votes for Cruz or Jeb! counted for Trump erroneously? (If I had voted in the R team primary, I would have voted for Kasich honestly.)
I mean... this is very weak sauce. I think you're better off involving the weather war. Perhaps if you can correlate the weather (temperature, humidity, cloud cover, etc) during different primaries with propensities for different voting demographics to show up to the polls. Maybe people who would have voted for Cruz or Jeb! tended to stay home when it's overcast, then we can establish that the deep state (something something Operation Jade Helm) deployed rain machines so that Trump voters would be over represented.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Monday February 19 2018, @08:58PM (6 children)
"Given the rest of your comment, I have no idea what "rigged" means here. Are you suggesting ballot tampering? Voter intimidation? Were votes for Cruz or Jeb! counted for Trump erroneously?"
In the context of the charges being laid, the term 'rigged' simply means voters were influenced by a foreign government via social media; by amplifying attacks on Trump opposition. In a lot of respects the Russian strategy wasn't to elect Trump so much as damage american faith in the election system and democracy itself, by creating chaos and noise and turning off 'reasonable people' so that only the far right and far left was left lobbing crazy back and forth. Trump getting elected is almost a side effect of that; since he openly pandered and fed off the crazy.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @09:14PM
God forbid I should listen to what a FURRINER has to say. I should cut out all potential sources of influence out of my life, except the correctly blessed American corporate media.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 19 2018, @09:31PM (3 children)
Do we know anyone was actually influenced in their vote? The people who think the Clintons ran a pedophile ring out of some DC pizza joint, probably weren't going to vote for Clinton anyway.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Monday February 19 2018, @09:56PM (2 children)
"Do we know anyone was actually influenced in their vote?"
Does a sincere attempt to interfere in an election cease to be a crime if you can't prove it succeeded?
And how would you ever prove it anyway? Do you think people who were undecided can name the specific facebook post, campaign ad, or yard sign that tipped them over the edge to one side or the other? Or can list every ad, post, sign, commercial, news coverage, and tweet they saw over a multi-year period and rate each one exactly by how much it 'influenced' their final position.
"The people who think the Clintons ran a pedophile ring out of some DC pizza joint, probably weren't going to vote for Clinton anyway."
True, but it might have resulted in people just staying home on election day, or voting 3rd party just because both candidates stunk worse then usual.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 19 2018, @11:33PM
You should at least have an understanding of what is success for such an enterprise. My take is that the current brouhaha exceeds Putin's expectations for the interference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @07:51AM
If it didn't work, can you prove it was a sincere attempt?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Tuesday February 20 2018, @02:45AM
And the environment in which this was done was already pretty well poisoned by hyper-partisanship and polarization by those who want you to think of your fellow Americans are enemies and traitors if they don't toe a particular ideological line.
That pre-existing environment gave the Russians a boost in creating more chaos and distrust of our countrymen and our social institutions.
This has been discussed, in detail, by R-style and D-style folks.
R-Style analysis: https://www.c-span.org/video/?439822-1/after-words-david-frum [c-span.org]
D-Style analysis: https://www.c-span.org/video/?440037-1/how-democracies-die [c-span.org]
While you D-style folks may cringe at R-style folks who wish to control women's bodies against their will, or impose their ideas about who and how you can love, they are *not* your enemies. They are your fellow countrymen whose views differ from yours.
And you R-style may bristle at the ideas of having a living wage, quality public education for all and other things, those folks who support such ideas are also your countrymen, not your enemies, not commie pigs and they don't hate America. They just disagree with you.
Politics has been described as "the art of the possible" where people who disagree can set those things aside to accomplish *other* things that help us all.
Calling your fellow citizens who disagree with you "enemies" who "want to destroy the country" is both untrue and quite unhelpful.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:02PM
It's still freedom of speech.
Or in the case of the USA, lack of freedom of speech.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday February 19 2018, @09:05PM (2 children)
Yup "lame" sums it all up.
I'm more interested in how the world could manage to contain and remove US nuclear capabilities so that the rest of us on this planet can avoid having all the lethal stupidity raining down on us.
If the US "citizens"/slaves (don't get insulted; we're all slaves elsewhere as well) aren't up to it one way or another (not so far) then someone else has to. The Chinese and Indians are having too much fun out-jewing the US to care and the Russians don't seem to get that the US is imploding. The UN failed long ago and aren't trying to be relevant either, not that I think they could be if they wanted to, of course I don't.
When it suddenly becomes extremely important it's going to be too late. The US is in a worse situation than the USSR was after the fall of the wall and if things are just left alone to run their natural course then it's not going to be anywhere as orderly or civilized as what happened there in the early nineties.
Yes I said orderly and civilized.
That's "relatively speaking" of course, and something which should give most Americans nightmares if they comprehended it. Instead they salivate at their own preconditioning for it. Maybe the 2020ies US is going to top the 1920ies Ukraine in gruesome evils? Judging by the worst crimes in the US they're halfway there already. If "US" elites are aiming for such a "feat" then Satan can take early retirement, it's the kind of level of evil which makes Joseph Mengele look like a saint.
It's really hard to make anyone give a flying fuck about Americans though :(
This all makes a (North) Korean EMP attack knocking the US out look like the humanitarian option and a win-win situation since it would force the issue while also removing the US "government" and "society" from the picture. It would arguably be better for US inhabitants as well since an EMP or five is far better than having their own stockpiles blowing up in their face. Personally I think it sucks for everybody not to have anything better to choose from but there's not a shred of evidence that anyone is trying to mitigate the coming fall of the US in the same way the fall of the USSR was mitigated.
A future US nuclear black market is worse, no matter how much Deep State shills like DeathMonkey are getting paid.
Keep in mind that the customers will be everyone that has a grievance with the US.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday February 19 2018, @09:38PM
You speak the contents of my nightmares...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Informative) by khallow on Monday February 19 2018, @11:27PM
Sorry, that's not even remotely credible. It's far stronger economically, definitely still in the upper tier of developed world countries while the USSR never made it to that far.
That was during the takeover by the USSR. Nothing major happened in the Ukraine till the Holodomor [wikipedia.org] in the 1930s when several million Ukrainians died due to preventable famine, due to the machinations of the USSR leadership.
Like what? In my alternate reality the US is nowhere close to the evils of the USSR. Maybe you ought to come over here. You'd probably like it better.
You mean aside from drawing down US nuclear weapons to under a thousand warheads? It's like you're not even paying a shred of attention to what's going on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @08:05PM (8 children)
Why did we have to post an article on this subject and give the trolls an opportunity to muddy the waters on this topic? It's tech related only in that tech was used, otherwise this is only political. Boo.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @09:02PM (5 children)
I take the opposite position, bringing this up also gives a chance for real people to address the trolls. Politics and tech intersect a lot these days, and we do have an obligation to speak up about how our favorite tools are used.
So far I'm seeing good discussions, with the trolls being incredibly obvious. "News for nerds, stuff that matters" pretty much encompasses this article. Tech angle? Check. Stuff a lot of users here care about? Check. User whining about politics on a tech site? Check. Yup, I typed in the right domain.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Tuesday February 20 2018, @02:54AM
A very interesting point. And a timely one. Jessica Rosenworcel [wikipedia.org] gave a speech on a related topic a couple weeks ago at the "State of The Net" conference [c-span.org].
This kind of stuff *is* a big deal, as it seeks to deligitimize and weaken our social and political institutions. While we certainly do have issues with those, allowing bad actors to attempt to destroy our society isn't the answer. Rather Loud voices, action and concerted efforts to strengthen and clean up those institutions is what is required.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @03:24AM (3 children)
Know of any good online Russian language courses?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @06:48AM (1 child)
No need, they speak english quite well. I bet a lot of them wear MAGA hats to get in character and laugh around the office.
I bet they even play a variation of "cowboys and indians" except they call it "cucks and alphas".
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 20 2018, @07:56AM
Yeah, but when they laugh, they laugh in Russian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday February 20 2018, @10:03PM
Pimsleur is excellent, the best i have ever encountered. When you get more advanced, netflix has several series and movies in russian.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday February 19 2018, @10:22PM
Because if you don't give people an outlet, the political discussion ends up splattered all over the tech stories.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday February 20 2018, @06:02AM
These stories are for registered users to blow all their unused mod points at the end of the day. Nothing here for ACs, sorry.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday February 19 2018, @08:51PM (1 child)
1. Yes, quite a bit of illegal stuff happened during the 2016 presidential election. That makes it not all that different from most other presidential elections, and hardly anyone is ever actually penalized in any significant way when it does.
2. Nobody has demonstrated that illegal stuff was the real reason that the general election turned out the way it did.
3. So far, everything that has been demonstrated that the Russians were doing, both major American political parties and more American-controlled corporations than I can count do on a regular basis. For example, bots and trolls? The Clinton campaign superPAC "Correct the Record" was pouring $millions into online astroturfing.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by slinches on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:05AM
Seriously, this story is way over-sensationalized by the media. The FBI absolutely should be investigating foreign interference in all national elections (not just presidential ones) on a routine basis and things like this story should be reported on. It just doesn't deserve front page headlines every day. Save the hyper-bold font, breaking news headlines read by panic stricken talking heads in case some actual evidence of collusion or other illegal activity from one of the campaigns comes out. Until then, continuing to cry "Russian interference!!!!" and wringing your hands over this "serious attack on our democracy" over a comparatively small amount of internet ads rather than soberly reporting the facts just makes you look like you're trying to manufacture outrage and undermines whatever appearance of objectivity you may have had.