Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/11/01/fbi-believes-russia-hacks-aime.html
…
3 Likes
WP and NYT keep hiding these stories behind paywalls, nobody will get to see them. Why do they want Trump to win?
9 Likes
Or, you know, maybe they want to survive in the ice age of print. The NYT is the paper of record for a reason. You don’t get this high quality top-shelf journalism from a blog or with click revenue. You get it from dedicated subscribers. Besides, they offer 10 free articles a month.
10 Likes
Based on F.B.I. Director James Comey’s unprecedented double standards, why would we trust any conclusions the FBI comes to in regards to this election? Especially now. They have no business making new conclusions about the election.
And frankly, it doesn’t even make sense. If Russia was interested in “disrupting the election”, they could have done so much more then hack into Clinton’s email.
I don’t buy it.
17 Likes
I have an epistemological problem with this conclusion. How many brains of top Russian officials have been deep-scanned with yet nonexistent thought-analyzing technology that we can claim to know their motivation?
7 Likes
How does one disrupt an election without choosing sides? Isn’t it a bit naive to think they don’t have a vested interest in the outcome?
Well, I guess they could just be disrupting the election to undermine American’s faith in democracy. Y’know, so America goes further down the road to authoritarian government. It’s not like there’s a candidate in this election with obvious fascist tendencies
14 Likes
“It’s about a threat to democracy.”
sounds like ideological gibberish. If Russia really is to blame (and I wouldn’t put it past them but the evidence made public so far is slim at best) I would imagine much more concrete goals when playing such a high risk game.
As a side note: I actually wouldn’t mind if this kind of leaking of info via different secret services (think Panama papers) would continue. It does widen the horizon.
3 Likes
This must be read in Early Cyler’s voice from Squidbillies.
11 Likes
I don’t doubt it, especially knowing about Putin’s efforts to destabilise and and demoralise Western democratic institutions (like fair elections, the free press, or peaceful and orderly transitions of power) by promoting authoritarian parties in Europe. Part of the effort involves spreading FUD about the benefits of democracy by incorporating unorthodox methods from the art and post-modern lit-crit worlds. Adam Curtis discusses one Russian practitioner in this short documentary:
3 Likes
Why don’t the FBI stop commenting on the election?
7 Likes
FIFY
“It isn’t about the election,” a second senior official said, referring to the aims of--Russia & FBI/Comely--- interference. “It’s about a threat to democracy.”
3 Likes
The key word is “destabilize”. And why would you want to limit your impact due to reliance on “concrete goals” with this sort of thing? The RF doesn’t need to get trump elected, they just need to sow discord and create distrust in American policies and practice…which has happened beyond their wildest dreams.
In fact, if I might be so bold, your own comment shows their success:
If the new way of life has us relying on hacked email to show us some sort of “truth”, then that doesn’t say much for our trust in American governance, now does it?
8 Likes
If I were Putin, I’d really want a non-interventionist United States right now, which means Trump over Hillary. Maybe the oddly neutral tone of this announcement is the FBI’s attempt to avoid destabilizing the election themselves.
2 Likes
The American electorate isn’t supposed to have “some sort of” “trust” in our government; we’re supposed to oversee it. Our present day duopoly finds this distasteful, but it is a core piece of our history and they cannot easily ignore it.
The speculations about Russian motives all seem pretty weak. The Clinton emails have been and are being reviewed. They are newsworthy documents, but not game-changing. Very few American voters are surprised by the fact that the Clintons run a highly effective political machine, that they are good at what they do, or that efforts to stay in power show up in their everyday correspondence. Their system is interesting and many other politician will probably benefit from reviewing these emails. However it’s all been kind of unsurprising so far.
What is distinctive and troubling is the rage-fueled high dudgeon coming off her supporters in response to the leaks. This is ostensibly a democracy; lese majeste is no longer supposed to be a criminal offense
1 Like
“Paper of record” means they print whatever anonymous “officials” tell them.
4 Likes
FBI = The Republican Party
3 Likes
Full disclosure: I am from Germany, not the US, but my
trust in [any state] governance
is very limited to certain areas. The secret services and the executive branch in general I don’t trust at all. They don’t exist to protect my interests but those of the less and less super rich and their money.
And as far as leaked information is concerned: I find it quite ironic that the powers that created the vast system of surveillance that the internet has become now also suffer from privacy breaches. Information still wants to be free - for better or for worse - and in a corrupt system the freed information will of course also be corrupt.
But information is information and it is always possible to learn from it. Corrupt or not.
1 Like
So you’re only ok with knowing how venal and fundamentally corrupt the government is if the government willingly tells us themselves?
We have an unprecedented view into the utterly disgusting depths of abject unmitigated corruption and collusion of the ‘good guys’, and we are just supposed to ignore it because it wasn’t revealed through official government channels, which would never happen anyways.
If Russia is behind any of these leaks, which there is literally no evidence of, except for assertions from the parties most compromised in the leaks and with the most to gain from deflecting them, then Americans should be grateful that Russia is ‘interfering with the elections’. We also going to ignore that Assange hinted very strongly that it was a DNC insider that leaked? Clinton apologists have literally lost their minds. I don’t care if the BoingBoing Clinton squad goes prolapse on me anymore, this is just getting ridiculous.
Also, just want to remind everybody (since apparently we are only into Democratic Party approved facts these days), that Wikileaks has a 100% accuracy rate over it’s decade of existence, and still protects it’s sources as a first principle. Americans should thank god that Snowden, Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning still have the guts to do what the media is supposed to do.
1 Like
If this really is Russia, I don’t see how it would make much sense for them to actually deploy any significant offensive tools at the moment or on election day. I think they’re just making sure that the US knows that Russia has capabilities and/or they are probing/observing for intelligence gathering purposes.
It’s like nukes, but with computers instead.
