That’s not the way things work now, and we must judge behavior according to the reality we live in, not an imagined ideal - that kind of ethical reasoning is a major factor playing into our current political gridlock and perpetuates human suffering.
It’s good to remember, as I’d mentioned before, that some of the documents released were internal political planning docs like oppo research, and campaign plans, which are not the kind of docs that necessarily even ought to be transparent.
Anyway, my original point was that collusion with a foreign nation to engage in espionage against a political opponent is a big deal, even if the relationship isn’t adversarial, which I stand by. The goalposts have shifted a lot along the way, and I don’t think we’ll come to much greater understanding or agreement than where we’re currently out, so I’ll bow out here.
As you’re aware, the CIA has been constantly meddling in countless foreign elections from the day it was created.
If espionage aimed at influencing foreign elections is the act of war that some Democrats are trying to paint it as, those Democrats should have been calling for immediate armed resistance for the last fifty years.
Yes, it’s shitty when foreign powers fuck with your democracy. We all hate it, and it’s a substantial part of the reason why some people see America as their enemy. Dealing with murderous local kleptocrats is bad enough; having those murderous kleptocrats installed by a foreign power that does such things casually and carelessly is worse.
But it’s not an “attack”, despite how Maddow et al are framing it. Routine peacetime espionage is not “information warfare”. It’s fucked up and destructive, but it isn’t war.
I don’t think they have a line, as such; external reality seems to hold no sway. With these turkeys, it’s all just tribalism. So if the majority of their peers are still going along with it, most of them will remain on board.
We’ve already seen millions upon millions of these authoritarian dickheads led past the point of utter absurdity… Brace yourselves, cause it can easily get a whole lot worse.
The US deserves blame for what they do, and similarly other nations engaging in the same deserve blame for the same. Like the US (and UK), the KGB/FSB have been regularly meddling in foreign elections from the day it was created with the same results. Since 2008 and the Russo-Georgian War, the GRU’s gone beyond its original military cyberwarfare scope and has been engaged in ongoing attacks on elections across Europe and the ME. The recent attacks are very, very worrying to me since it’s a major escalation for the GRU to directly attack the US, and the mutual belligerence between Russia and the US isn’t going to be less tense after this latest attack (relations that were already very, very tense after the Ossetia and Ukraine invasions).
The act of penetrating the DNC/DCC/Podesta/RNC/et al systems and exfiltrating data was an attack in the usual parlance. That’s absolutely the correct term. That there are a lot of classes of attacks, and despite being perpetrated by a military agency, this wasn’t a military attack, but a cyberattack. The use of the same language/terms does confuse things, and the fact that those terms have overlap is something that does deserve attention and clarification, since you do get nitwits/thugs seeing those terms in use and getting jingoistic.
Cyberwarfare is a part of espionage, and it’s an unfortunate (and, personally, really grating) term, but the term is what it is. Part of espionage is information warfare, which is what you do with the exfiltrated data from the cyberops (blackmail/election manipulating/weakening political figures in power with scandals/etc.) Espionage has been ongoing and shouldn’t and doesn’t justify actual hot wars, despite the unfortunate terminology overlaps.
At the same time Russia invaded Ukraine after their preferred candidate lost, claiming (kind of dubiously) US interference in the Ukraine elections. So espionage and foreign electoral interference can lead to wars, which makes Russia’s belligerence in the US election even more worrying.
