Generic 2016 US Election Cycle Recycling Bin

He’ll be too busy running Arboria, fighting Ming, and courting Aura.

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Crazy thought; what if Washington didn’t just sit on their hands and let everything slide for once, and we actually ended up getting a Do-Over election?

(Yeah, yeah; I know. Shut up and let me cling to my thinnest, most frayed threads of optimism.)

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Given the election was swung by both a foreign power using their intelligence agencies to interfere in the outcome, and the head of the FBI violating the Hatch Act to ratfuck Clinton, there’s certainly reasonable grounds to see the election’s results as invalid. Unfortunately it’s all unprecedented, so there aren’t legal grounds.

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I was already seeing the election results as invalid back when the corporate media and the DNC establishment ratfucked Sanders.

BTW, what particular evidence do you have that supports such a firm sense of conviction that Russian intelligence agencies interfered in the election outcome? Surely more than just the “Trust us!” assurances of our own lying intelligence agencies?

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You just described pretty much everything that’s happened with this damn election cycle.

SMFH

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Hmm…

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There’s a thought…I wonder how much influence the Golden Cavalry of St George had on US elections through the 18th and 19th centuries? These tricks predate the CIA and KGB.

Don’t you think Nate Silver should be thoroughly discredited after the last few months? He was way off on the election results, and the thesis of this particular article is more than a little self-serving for him.

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He was a lot less off that many others, and he did suggest that Clinton was weaker in the rust-belt than people thought.

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I felt bad for Nate Silver – he went from being the go-to election guru to being widely mocked and more or less giving up near the end, saying that his model wasn’t made to predict the utter bonkers insanity he was seeing.

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No. He wasn’t off at all; he was one of the few pollsters warning that it wasn’t a certainty for Clinton, and the results were within the margin of error of his predictions.

The 538 podcast was and is one of the best sources of election analysis around.

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There’s also the concerted efforts by GOP governors to disenfranchise voters giving me the sense of invalidating the election, though going by the criteria of voter suppression invalidating elections, I’m not sure if the US has ever had a valid election.

I work in Information Security. I’m a programmer and focus on network security software, so not a pen tester/analyst, but I have to keep up on the field. Going by the private key in the malware found on that server, there’s a 1:9,223,372,036,854,775,807 chance that the GRU wasn’t one of the perpetrators of the attack. There’s also the C&C server IPs, the nature of the spear phishing attacks the GRU applied and other things that further confirm. It’s not a 100% thing, but it’s 99.999+%. From the forensics analysts determined that the attackers exfiltrated the DNC mails that wound up floating around and quickly found their way to Wikileaks. The Russians didn’t just send them to Wikileaks, but also posted some of the leaks via their Guccifer 2.0 account for which there’s a large body of evidence I’d rather not reiterate to establish.

You wouldn’t be talking about the DNC ratfucking Sanders for any reason other than that Russian intelligence worked very hard to make sure you knew about it and would talk about it. It was a very effective kind of campaign to manipulate voters.

Within the InfoSec world, the nature of the leaks was of great interest, and the independent analysts looking at this stuff were publishing many articles on various aspects of the DNC and Podesta attacks that all confirmed the same conclusion. Russia has been engaging in espionage against select targets, then releasing that data to attack political enemies. They’ve been doing this since 2008 against other countries, starting with their war on Georgia, and continuing in Ukraine, where they developed the patterns of cyberattack we saw in this one.

The leaks aren’t the only source of interference. There’s been active propaganda campaigning methods that mostly started around '14 to justify their invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. Those same methods were turned to attack Clinton and back Trump using the same sources. Part is creating targeted propaganda, part is promoting propaganda through sockpuppets on social media, part is using sockpuppets to manipulate what’s trending on Twitter/Facebook. You can read about some of that here:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

Distrusting intelligence agency reports is reasonable, but because Russian cyberwarfare divisions are targeting the US in various areas, it’s private security analysts who are generally on the front lines of the Russian attacks, and due to the nature of the biz being reputation based, if they make a false accusation of Russian interference they’ll lose standing and money, so the various independent analysts writing about aspects of Russian cyberwarfare attacks on the US (which during the election were primarily focused on aiding Trump and attacking Clinton) are generally quite reliable. At this point the FSB (was KBG) and GRU (military cyberwarfare division) are known actors with a lot of data to help identify sources, methods, attack styles, etc. in forensics.

There’s much more that could be said, but there’s a sea of evidence all pointing to Russian interference, most of which has no other possible explanation from their various vectors of attack. You don’t need to listen to the intelligence agencies to see what’s going on, and it’s better to ignore their high level, vapid propaganda.

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But his model wasn’t proven wrong. It correctly showed Trump having a better electoral map path than a popular vote map by a wide margin, he was the only one talking up the wide inconsistencies between the polls, and the only one speaking openly about the rust belt not being comfortably blue.

To top it all off the results were inside the 80% confidence of his model. Trump winning between ~160 and ~310 electoral votes was the model. It was the same chances of Trump rolling a 6 on a gold six-sided die that he would win the entire rust belt - and he won the entire rust belt.

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Yup.

The US includes many fantastic people and awesome things. However, it is a society that is fundamentally based upon white supremacy and the exploitation of poverty, and has been since day one.

The American government has never been truly representative of the American people.

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This is absolutely true; I mean more that the perception near the end was that his model wasn’t working, and his posts seemed more and more frustrated. I hope his validation redeems him after the fact.

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We also wouldn’t have been talking about it if the Dems hadn’t done it.

It’s harder to embarrass folks who aren’t bent.

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I just get very defensive about the few people that are not just staying the course with all that has happened. There are only a handful of people I can think of that are not treating this as an opportunity to make money, self-congratulate, or push forward with their fingers in their ears. Sometimes a mixture of two or three of those.

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I’m not sure those people exist. Even Sanders is no saint - the GOP oppo. research on him was absolutely brutal.

You can rest assured that if we had the capacity to see all the misdeeds in all party internals and candidates that spying could reveal we’d have much more negative opinions of the lot. But instead we had selective attacks on targets to gain and reveal damaging information to manipulate public opinion. In the world we have now with only flawed parties and candidates to select from, that approach is very effective at manipulating the public.

The scariest part is that it’s probable that Russia successfully penetrated the RNC as well, and probably have material to blackmail most of Washington.

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That puts 'em on par with the NSA.

The nastiest implication of the Snowden whistleblowing is that the intelligence agencies have a rich trove of blackmail material on every possible politician.

Campaigning to cut NSA funding? Oh, hey, someone just leaked your porn search history from your teenage years; what a coincidence.

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OK, so here’s the deal.

Bernie today post election gained a lot from Wikileaks and the leaks have done a lot to push for new leadership within the DNC to change the paths for the future. That is the positive change that the leaks brought regardless of the how and where and whatever else. He could have easily turned around and ran as an independent post primary, but fortunately he is a great guy.

However, before 11/8 Bernie Sanders used the DNC for its money and its platform while contributing nothing in return. Sure, he’ll pay in spades with the future with his passion and proven commitment but if there is anyone here claiming Bernie did not know he was advancing his own career by choosing to run as a Democrat is just wrong. Of course politics as usual runs its course and people working for the Democrats from long before 2015 favor his opponent. It didn’t even become salty as shit until the last month or so before the primaries ended.

It should have caused a shake-up in the DNC and it should push for a progressive head to the party. It should not have been a launching pad to attack Clinton that it was used for. Hell, we didn’t see anything Clinton said until the Podesta leaks which was the big “October Surprise” that Wikileaks advertised (again, it bears repeating - Wikileaks not only doesn’t curate despite claims to the contrary; they advertise, tease, and bump traffic to match political agendas) and I have yet to see anything that is bad for Clinton in those emails. Yet, here we are where people think John Podesta helped the Clintons run a child sex dungeon under a pizza joint.

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