No, Russia didn't hack Vermont's power grid

boing
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There are different ways to describe the creation of false news stories as political propaganda, and disinformation as propaganda is certainly a problem. My issues more with the term “fake news” which has already been used to mean many different things in this thread. The looseness is a problem, since it defeats clear communication. Disinformation, propaganda, poor investigative reporting, unreliable sources, these are all things that have separate terms to help make it clear what you mean. “Fake news” might mean one of those or something else.

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I would love to hear any example you consider to be not fake news, because by your example Greenwald’s response to this WaPo’s terrible reporting was fake news.

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Fair point, and something to think about when describing disinformation in the future.

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Just so you all know, the Burlington Electric Department building on Pine Street is also the home of my ward’s voting place, where optical readers are used on our paper ballots. Just sayin’.

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You could watch TrumpTV. They’ll play it straight.

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Thank you SM for the salient points concerning recent Democratic scapegoating and belligerence towards self-examination. It’s reassuring to know there’s still some people like you here at boingboing.

I’m not a Donald Trump fan. I’m no fan of Vladimir Putin. If it were up to me Bernie Sanders would be President today or Hillary Clinton a distant second. I’m also anxious to find out if there has been grave tampering of our elections whether it was from the Democratic National Committee in the primary election against Bernie Sanders or sinister Russian interference in the general election against Hillary Clinton.

With this Vermont power grid article’s inclusion on the blog, it’s consoling to see boingboing cooling their heels a bit with the Russian alarmism that I am terrified to say is teetering the world toward the brink of nuclear annihilation.

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Chomsky-Nuclear-War-More-Likely-Today-Than-During-Cold-War-20160207-0035.html

I’ve lurked on boingboing for countless years but I live an intensely busy life and never felt compelled to subscribe to the comment section until recently.

I don’t understand what is happening to my favorite blog and certain, favorite progressives in general that are acting more similarly to wacked-out conservatives than anything I would regard as progressive in nature. In recent years boingboing has had a heavier neoliberal rub than I would ever have expected from a passionate harborer of liberal ideals. This has been devastating to observe.

I’ve been feeling let down and frightened to see fellow progressives bullying people that question the media’s possible collusion with the U.S. government to deceive us on the probability or perhaps just the realistic extent that the Russians are truthfully involved with hacking into our election system. The saber-rattling and threats towards Russia that aren’t planted in levelheadedness are worrisome. I consider this behavior unprogressive. I consider this behavior warmongering neoliberalism, to be frank.

I am disheartened, but not surprised to see that boingboing has mostly skipped over the fact that the overall evidence thus far of Russian hacking is weak and we should demand that our government slows down and shows Americans firm evidence to support the radical actions of escalating tensions with another nuclear power.

I would like progressives to take a breather and look at the lack of concrete evidence we have at the moment. Please behave like prudent progressives instead of jumping down the throats of people that want a felicitous amount of substantiation before we provoke a nuclear power that’s already been pushed and strained by previous neoliberal provocations.

Progressives, please take a breather and read this article from an esteemed source that’s distant from any fake news association.

My husband and I had a serious discussion that if large scale nuclear war breaks out we won’t want to live through the repercussions. If we have enough time to make decisions before the fallout reaches us, we’ve begun planning on how we would end the lives of our children and ourselves as peacefully as possible.

For all our sake don’t allow the rich and powerful to scare us into irrational fear, rash decisions and threatening postures against other nuclear powers. The identical people did the same thing to press us into our needless war in Iraq; please meditate on that.

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It’s important to understand that while the govt’s reports so far have been pretty useless, there’s a lot of evidence to back the position that Russia was behind the DNC, DCCC, and Podesta hacks. This starts with identifying APT28 as the DNC attacker (which if true also proves they were behind the DCCC attack). Given the data CloudStrike provided that’s very clearly the case. The SecureWorks incident response team attributed APT28 to the Podesta attack. From there one has to do the work to substantiate that APT28 is the GRU. That attribution is tricker, but since APT28 has been an active attacker on the internet for nearly a decade involved in tens of thousands of attacks on US and European government offices, universities, think tanks, NGOs, and political orgs, generally working during Russian business hours, taking breaks on Russian state holidays, using their attacks for intel, rather than a profit motive, and being involved in Russian cynberwarfare military attacks on Ukrainian artillery units, that’s been heavily scrutinized by many different private security researchers, there are really good reasons to make that assumption. There’s also the Guccifer 2.0 debacle that further pins APT28 as a Russian intelligence agency. I’ve been hashing this out over and over recently since there’s lot of serious disinformation coming out about the attacks that misrepresent evidence, fail to present complete cases, make a number of very poor assumptions about data, and don’t take into account the full scope of research that’s been done on APT28 or their recent and ongoing attacks.

The most recent conversation is here, and I think is fairly exhaustive:

The realty is there’s a very large amount of evidence, a very, very compelling case can be made, and independent people in the InfoSec field in the best position to judge are in general agreement on the assessment that the GRU is the perp. There’s no Red Scare, there’s the reality that Russia was involved in a large scale cyberwarfare campaign against many US targets to manipulate the election, and the reality is also that their cyberwarfare division is still engaging in wide scale attacks against US targets.

Obama’s responses were very limited, very mild, are there’s no reason to think they’d provoke a nuclear response. He’s got a few weeks left, and then we’re looking at a Trump presidency that will undo virtually all of that and we’ll be looking at an administration planning to not only normalize relations, but also drop sanctions, probably recognize Crimea as Russian territory (there’s already been discussions of this from Trump staff), and probably recognize Ossetia. This will reward and justify Russia’s belligerence and military invasions, letting them off the hook for their wars on neighboring Georgia and Ukraine and invasions/annexations in Ossetia and Crimea, with a weakened NATO, and further risks of Russian attacks/invasions of other neighboring states like Estonia.

The reality is that our coming issues are far more serious than a Red Scare/Cold War. We’re more looking at an arrangement between Trump and Putin that’s a new Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact posing a far greater risk to global stability and security than the Cold War.

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Right now, at 1830 eastern time, NBC news is reporting it as an attempt by the Russians to bring down the power grid. Nobody is going to convince me that NBC staff have not followed up on the story, and are unaware of the actual facts. So as best I can figure out, they are either sensationalizing the story for ratings, or they are disseminating propaganda for political ends. I am cynical enough to suspect that it is the second option.
What political ends, is the big question. I hope I am wrong, but the only thing that makes sense to me is an attempt to justify to the public foreign policy decisions that are being made to hurt domestic political opponents.

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Seeing the quality of reporting from NBC on anything relating to InfoSec/hacking, I’d really not be surprised if they really were just credulously passing on misinformation even if that’s something you choose not to believe. Still if you want to invent a conspiracy theory about an alternative motive, I’d assume it’s seeking ratings. There’s no benefit to the Obama administration in this report, nor any benefit to NBC to be deliberately alienating the incoming president and admin with misinformation.

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I hope you are right.

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Who is defending Putin (in general and here on this site)?

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It was still being reported as fact by BBC a couple hours ago. Maybe all the people who would normally vet these things have the day/night off, and we’re dealing with the farm team and interns tonight?

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Oh for heaven’s sake, no one is launching nuclear weapons. Mutual assured destruction works because the other side also knows that millions (not billions - no one is nuking the countryside or uninvolved countries) could die.

Never mind that our defense spending is pretty close to what we spent during the peak of the cold war already, let’s be clear here: neither Russia nor China are the USSR. Neither one poses the kind of existential threat that the Soviet Union did.

We’re not going around the world trying to fight ideological wars against Russia or China. We don’t have to. We remain the world’s only superpower.

I’m not sure why you’d consider it jingoistic. Our foreign policy has been limited to economic sanctions which is hardly the aggressive foreign policy that jingoism refers to.

The only mistake WaPo made was saying that the grid itself was attacked. The language they used, at least in the version I saw, never said the hack on this laptop was perpetrated by the Russian government - just that the code itself is associated with a Russian hacking operation.

Further, they updated their article with the proper correction. That’s not fake news. That’s a mistake which they promptly corrected as any ethnical journalistic operation would.

Fake news is the intentional publishing of hoaxes, propaganda, misinformation and disinformation in order to deceive. There was nothing intentional about WaPo’s error.

Two independent security firms came forward evidence of Russian hacking as well as our own intelligence agencies. I can’t come up with a compelling reason why an independent security firm would lie about such a thing - especially considering all they had to lose if they made false allegations.

(stolen from the internets)

###FBI-DHS

###CrowdStrike

###ThreatConnect

###Reports Connecting Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear to the Russian Government

###Reports on APT 28 (Fancy Bear) and APT 29 (Cozy Bear)

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What concerns me most in this mess is that it shows, one again, that there are legions of journalists covering hard news stories who don’t know WTF they’re talking about, and therefore don’t know which questions to ask.

It’s a little late in the day for so many reporters to be so clueless about technology issues, yet they are. Instead, tech gets reported on as “gizmos” and trends (“The new iPhone is causing huge queues outside Apple stores!”), instead of, you know, tech.

Which leads to an uneducated public who can’t handle major tech stories, which leads to more dumb articles, and around we go.

Imagine a major pro sports story being reported like this. People (or rather, a lot more people) would be going ballistic.

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Reporters report what pays the bills for their employers. News is dead as a business except for the outlandish or click bait.

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This is true, the press generally does a crap job of covering tech (some reporters are quite good, but most are awful). The uselessness of the press goes way beyond tech, though. They’re constantly being manipulated by Trump, and even when there’s some good coverage from some sources, the corporate media’s mostly a bog of despair on any topic that matters.

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Wikileaks has made it abundantly clear that their documents were leaked by an insider, not ‘hacked.’ Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador, has taken the rare initiative to step up and confirm exactly when and how he flew to the US to receive the files. Although Wikileaks has a protect-the-source policy, Assange has taken the rare step of spelling out to anyone who can do a dot-to-dot puzzle exactly who provided the documents. If anyone is having trouble connecting the dots, look for the one occasion where Wikileaks has publicly offered reward money for information leading to a conviction.

But Occam’s Razor be damned, why believe the actual guy who received the files, a former Ambassador who is working at an organization built on transparency (love em or hate em), who provides exact date, location, method and motive, when you can instead believe an anonymous source working at an organization built on deception and manipulation, whose story is vague and shifting?

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Wikileaks has made that claim, but given the number of false claims they’ve made it’s worth taking with a truckload of salt. Craig Murray is an epic bullshit artist as well.

After the DNC attacks, Guccifer 2.0, the online persona invented by APT28 who were behind the attack stated they passed the data to Wikileaks. If you want to apply Occam’s Razor, that account’s far more parsimonious.

https://twitter.com/GUCCIFER_2/status/756530278982684672

It’s worth considering the fact that APT28 also was behind the Podesta hack, and his exfiltrated mail also appeared on Wikileaks.

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Emergency, everybody to get from street!

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