If you want to get a reasonable and less US-centric understanding of foreign affairs, you need to think about this. Presenting Putin as some sort of mastermind in a secret lair, constantly plotting against the US while stroking his white cat (or akita, in this case) is a little hyperbolic.
The cause of this problem is your own National Security Agency and the way it operates. That’s what needs to be focussed on. There are many people in many countries around the world who are criminals or opposed to the policy of the US, and a failure to recognise that fact and to blame everything bad on some quasi-mythical “Putin” is getting a bit close to blaming everything on the Jews. Pointing this out is not “defending Putin” except in the mindset of someone who is Putin-fixated.
I can tell you what the non-secret Russian plan is. It is, in concert with China, to pursue an Eastern strategy involving the opening up of Siberia, as it becomes more accessible due to warming, and to weaken the petrodollar with oil and gas contracts in non-US currencies such as the yuan. Hence the massive development of Vladivostok and the new north-south rail links being constructed. China is considering investing in Saudi Arabia to lever it away from the US. It is a big, ambitious plan but suited to the psychologies of both Russia and China. Sakhalin is being developed and relationships with Japan being worked on to try to bring them into this new, non-military trading sphere. In short, they are trying to go around US dominance of the Middle East and the Western Pacific. This also goes some way to explain the number of Putin PR shots in Siberia.
If you think, with that going on, that he’s directing pinprick cyber-attacks in his spare time, then I think you’re in danger of confusing him with Trump.
You have to try to understand that for many people nowadays the most worrying country is not NK, Iran, or Russia but the US. It’s getting much more belligerent (not just Trump) and its attempts to enforce US law on most of the world is very imperialistic. The result is that while we may not like some of what goes on in Russia, including the nationalistic and theocratic stuff, we see exactly the same things in the US but with much more power behind them. It is not defending Putin, it’s just seeing which is the real 800lb gorilla in the room.
I guess based on your posting history you’ll simply regard this as a PR piece from St. Petersburg (погода 0 градусов, прогноз погоды и снег) and there’s no way to convince you otherwise. But I do urge other readers to look at what is happening in East Asia at the moment and get some perspective on what Russia is really up to.
Also an African strategy, the US control over non-oil resources there has been vastly undercut by a massive influx of Chinese and Russian money in just the last ten years.
How could anyone confuse Putin with Trump that way? Trump has no time to direct pinprick cyber-attacks. He’s busy devoting all his 7eet haxor skillz to track down and defeat his nemesis, The 400 lbs Guy.
The ultimate and simple reason why security services need proper oversight* is that secretive organisations will eventually acquire members who are working for themselves, or the opposition, and the culture of secrecy paradoxically makes it hard to detect them.
Snowden and Manning were always going to happen in some form or another, but the real risk is a Philby.
Unfortunately the idea of black ops was developed in the UK during WW2 (as SOE) and the US then copied and improved on it - as the CIA - after that war. There was blowback from a lot of SOE operations, but typically it was foreigners getting killed and in wartime that was considered to be acceptable collateral damage. The US agencies seem to be quite happy with the idea of blowback even when there is no overt war, but have not considered that their own cyber-munitions can be repurposed and will be leaked. Or, if they have, consider that their own security is more important than any question of national interest.
The tl;dr is that things like this are an expected result of the construction of black ops agencies. Not deliberate but institutional.
*but are unlikely to get it except where (for instance) a bigger agency is involved, e.g. Putin as a KGB officer being posted to Dresden to keep an eye on the Stasi. In this quis custodiet scenario, there is no agency to watch the US TLAs.
Good point(s). Also raises the question whether UK.gov should think about airgapping the chappies in the Cheltenham doughnut a bit from their colleagues at Fort Meade.
