“Congresswoman Elise Stefanik ® of Upstate New York’s North Country region has received $11,000 from individuals and interests that are trying to obstruct or interfere with the investigation into Russian interference currently being conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Stefanik sits on the House Intelligence Committee.”
It doesn’t matter if you send a soldier, a drone, a cyberweapon, or a weaponized puppy. Once you go down the road of government sanctioned military actions against a sovereign power you have entered in to very dangerous grounds. Putin isn’t so much of a fool as to admit he’s sanctioned such actions and it would be foolish for us to sanction them ourselves.
now… if some patriotic minded citizen/group were to take action of their own accord…
Probably for some specific things, like spying on American citizens. I’m betting they can do a fair bit of work on overseas targets without explicit presidential approval.
Counter-cyber attacks or espionage has been done by the US over the years and we’ve managed to avoid war with China, Russia, North Korea and other nations. Failure to take counter-engagements encourages continued action. Trump passed additional sanctions against Russia at the start of his term begrudgingly, you don’t think that’s telling?
Honestly, I couldn’t care less about Trump in this. No matter who is president, I do not want to read about them sanctioning military action cyber or not which may cause interference in a sovereign nations ability to hold an election.
Reacting to an immediate attack does not require presidential sanction any more than would a base under attack would need to defend itself from the attack.
What is concerning to me is ‘authority to disrupt Russian election hacking operations where they originate.’ which is a far cry from reacting or defending yourself from an attack. Also “we have not opted to engage in some of the same behaviors we are seeing” is to me a good thing because we should not sanction activity which we have deemed illegal.
And I challenge you to find any of those actions which we can link to a president publicly sanctioning them.
I get it. We put a terrible man child in charge but he’ll be gone soon enough so let’s not burn down the nation while we wait.
So just let the Dictator over there dictate to us? Last I checked, our experiment, here, was to take a stand against fascism and strongmen, whether they called themselves “King”, “Premier” or “President”. The message here is clear - the individual holding the office of POTUS is not in any way actively trying to defend the nation against attacks from a foreign power which they clearly, personally, benefit from.
It creates a fundamental conflict between those who took an oath to defend our nation and those who are in dereliction of their duty. Thankfully Admiral Rodgers is acting to fulfill his oath, regardless of his individual political opinions, as a patriot should.
The POTUS is neither capable nor qualified to form a strategy for cyber defense and that’s fine by me. We have people trained in that sort of thing.
And lets be clear here, Rogers is not talking about defense. He is talking about retaliation and attack. As I stated previously, we should be focusing on defense rather than retaliating against a foreign government. Escalation of hostilities rarely ends well for anyone involved.
You are saying you don’t want a “Cyberwar”. A dictator (more than one, last I checked) is actively engaging in cyberwar against us. “Maginot Line” much?
This should be the biggest story in the land. A foreign adversary
launches a cyber attack on America and the President refuses to protect
the country because he is likely to benefit from another such attack
– @danpfeiffer
Maybe I was naive, but I just never even considered the idea that Trump consciously/subconconsciously is going easy on Russian interference because he knows that they’ll be working in his interest for every future election.
Ya know, just when I thought it couldn’t get any crazier, any more insane, any more ludicrous or asinine, the orange one manages to piss me off again and send my sense of outrage right through the roof.
I hate this administration.
You are saying you don’t want a “Cyberwar”. A dictator (more than one, last I checked) is actively engaging in cyberwar against us. “Maginot Line” much?
I wouldn’t be so sure. Launching a significant cyber attack/counterattack on a foreign nation could have major diplomatic implications, so it seems likely that they would need explicit authorization to do so.
