Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/29/fbi-investigates-dccc-hack-of.html
…
“This meeting of the Democratic Party is in session. First up; to halt these hacks in to our systems we have to start using passwords. All for?”
“Ay!”
“All against?”
“Nay!”
“Very well. The Nays have it. Meeting adjourned. Pastor, please carry out the Democrat closing prayer.”
“Dear Lord, let us be well-meaning but feckless…”
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Regardless of whether they were hacked on behalf of the Russian government, another state actor, or a SuperPAC, the Democratic Party’s Internet OpSec has been demonstrably poor, and that is their responsibility. They need to be held to account, and they need to do better. That’s not even getting into the substance of what may have been leaked this time. I’ve not yet read any specifics. Were there new internal ethical, moral, or criminal scandals exposed?
It’s a strange juxtaposition of feelings: I want them to be secure against intrusion of the enemies of progress and liberal values, and yet I don’t trust this organization’s ethics or believe that they should be operating so under cover of darkness.
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Indeed… it’s a shame no one is leaking the RNC or Trump’s e-mails… that’s the revealing aspect here, honestly. As if the other side ISNT corrupt! hahaha.
Give it time. Although who needs leaks when Trump seems to put it all out there on Twitter.
I suspect RNC leaks would end up exposing something like this:
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Lots of righteous outrage against the Russians for tampering with the American political process by releasing documents which show the DNC tampering with the American political process.
Trump can always tweet something more outrageous than anything which would be in the e-mails, rendering the release of the latter a non story.
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Obviously the Demonocrats are getting their Soviet Pay Masters to carryout these attacks to make them look like the underdogs and undermine Trump’s campaign… hey, this right wing loony chap is really easy to write, and needs no attribution.
[quote=“lolipop_jones, post:6, topic:82344”]
Lots of righteous outrage against the Russians for tampering with the American political process by releasing documents which show the DNC tampering with the American political process.
[/quote]There’s a lot of smoke and no fire, unless you can link something more damning.
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They said a mean about Bernie!
Also, Trump says he doesn’t know anything about any hackers and maybe they were Chinese, so there!
I’m aggravated by the response to this affair in Progressive circles. For example a couple of Pacifica hosts rolled their eyes and said, “Oh, sure. Get found out, blame the Russians. Restart the Cold War. Uh-huh.” What frustrates me is the refusal even to consider that Russia might have had a hand in collecting and releasing these emails. Why wouldn’t Putin want to tip the scales? He’d gain very little from a Clinton presidency. On the other hand a Trump presidency would further strengthen ties between his oligarchy and Trump’s. It’s no secret that Trump cronies have hobnobbed with Putin, that a lot of Trump business money comes from Russian elites, that Trump has helped Russian millionaires offshore their dough through real estate deals, and that Trump people pressured the RNC to remove anti-Russian language from their platform.
Over the decades we of the Left have suffered from a special strain of the “My enemy’s enemy is my friend” virus. If someone performs an act in concert with our principles, we assume that person is above reproach. For example suggesting the Castro government had human rights problems was taken as a wholesale attack on Socialism and the Revolution. This false duality can blind us to crucial nuances. Suppose Russia exposes some Bad Thing the US has done, something of which we strongly disapprove. It doesn’t follow that Russia denounced the misdeed for our reasons. We might have outed the Truth in the name of legality or morality. Russia might simply have calculated that under the present circumstances, revealing this particular Truth at this particular time would offer political advantage.
I had great respect for Wikileaks and for Julian Assange. I lost some of that respect when Assange took a job with Putin’s home-grown version of Fox News. When one joins an organization with an agenda–left, right, or center–the organization will inevitably shape one’s output. In this sense there’s no such thing as an “independent” employed journalist. In his interview on Democracy Now, Julian Assange seemed to argue that Truth is devoid of context. Releasing the DNC emails was a matter of exposing the Truth about wrongdoing. Their source, selection, and timing were irrelevant. Taking Assange at his word, I can accept that he didn’t collude with the Reds to trash Hillary Clinton. I can imagine someone coming to him saying, “Julian, have we got some juicy stuff for you!” The Truth is the Truth. Out it goes and that’s the end of it.
But of course Truth does have context. If this were simply an exposure of backroom nastiness by political parties, we would have seen emails from Republicans, from Libertarians…from Greens, too, for all I know. Instead we got a particular subset of the Truth, chosen and timed to achieve a particular end. “Weaponizing Wikileaks,” one commentator called it. We Lefties are reluctant to accept the notion that even the noblest of actors can have conflicting agendas. That reluctance sometimes leads us to put too much faith in those we admire, or conversely to reject potential allies out of hand because they don’t fit cleanly into our picture of how things ought to be.
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That’s the big fundamental, Clinton’s recent history has demonstrated a disregard for how America keeps America’s most valuable secrets.
The difference between Clinton and Trump on this issue is that while Clinton’s incompetence may lead to a leak that would weaken America, Trump would sell America’s secrets to line his pockets.
Russia is not the heart of this story. Anons or China or Iran or Best Korea (lol at the thought) could have been the burglar getting in the door.
Assange has already said he leaked the DNC stuff with the intent of damaging Hillary Clinton, and basically said he’s OK witha Trump win because he prefers the devil he doesn’t know over the devil he does know. (Assange is really going out of his way lately to be an asshole. Edward Snowden recently criticized Wikileaks on twitter saying “Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped. But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.” Wikileaks responded saying “Opportunism won’t earn you a pardon from Clinton & curation is not censorship of ruling party cash flows.”
As for the DCCC hack, on it’s face there’s no justification for it. The names of contributors and the amounts they give are already part of the public record and are searchable on the FEC’s website. That was also true of the DNC, which IMO made Wikileak’s failure to redact evidence that they are weapons-grade assholes.
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What do you have against the DCCC? Maybe you didn’t like the way they supported the Occupy movement in 2011?
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No, I don’t care for a DNC and affiliates’ ethics that would be lax enough in their Internet OpSec to allow the enemies of progressive liberalism to pwn and exfiltrate their communications. They seem to believe that it’s “not a big deal,” given the insufficiency of their approach in 2016. I have made no statements about the Occupy Movement, and I don’t think I’d care to respond to your wildly accusatory tone, but I’ll add that the Occupy Movement did not likely benefit when their online correspondence with the DCCC was intercepted by the enemies of progress, either. Like me, the Occupy Movement doubtless wants a credible partner in government who can advance their goals with security sufficient to prevent intelligence-gathering and counter-strikes by the enemies of democracy and humanist decency.
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The DCCC operates pretty much independently of the DNC.
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Bleh, then I suppose they can only blame themselves for being pwn’d… and I should have probably said something suitably more articulate than lumping the DCCC into the DNC’s woebasket (as I see it). On a personal level, lots of psychological boundaries being crossed this election, should probably adopt a less hysterical response. Might as well, on some level, get used to the futureshocks, long-predicted. They aren’t going to go away, the only way forward is through, or something. 
Yeah; losing an election into which you’ve sunk your soul (especially if you’ve also worked hard on it in real space) can be a real body blow. My first big loss was working against this guy the first time he ran; we lost, after months of 12-hour days, sending me into a deep funk for month. To make matters worse he stuck around poisoning American politics for decades. I only ever got over that one by financially supporting his opponent (who to be honest I didn’t like very much) from 4000 miles away in her successful bid in 2004.
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