Why should we believe them?
If Assange said it was raining, I’d still go look outside.
Because Wikileaks has an agenda and Assange, for example, is a known liar and bad faith actor?
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If the situation weren’t so dangerous (both geopolitically and in terms of the escalating domestic witch hunt), our national fainting routine would be hilarious.
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We have multiple agencies with budgets bigger than most countries’ GDPs whose prime reasons for being include influencing the domestic political affairs of other countries.
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We have a supposedly cutting edge IT security infrastructure.
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We have party organizations whose leaders have presumably been trained to not send money to Nigerian princes or open the file attachment asking for personal information.
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And we have ethics guidelines to protect the democratic process including, and arguably especially, during the primaries (when the actual choice is not yet binary).
Yet our national clutching at smelling salts is based on the following:
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Someone released files showing that the supposedly neutral DNC had stacked the deck for Hillary and against Bernie. If there was any threat to our democratic process revealed, this DNC behavior was it.
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The method by which files were accessed was supposedly (if the Putin is everywhere conspiracy theory is to be believed) via a high-school level phishing email. Hell, if that’s what the Russians have up their sleeves and if it actually works, then lets replace the whole DNC IT team with a Hacking for Dummies book. And is that really the top-secret stuff they’re learning at KGB school these days?
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The motive was supposedly either to support Trump or make a mockery of our processes and thereby ‘undermine democracy.’ And this somehow makes sense to anyone?
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Ha ha ha.
Says who?
The government notoriously underpays all of its security and technical people. Talent and expertise go to the private sector, not the government. If you want cutting edge IT security infrastructure, look to Google.
It would probably work better if you did.
It makes sense to just about everyone but you from what I’ve seen. It makes sense to me. It isn’t “undermine democracy” it is “undermine Western democracies who oppose Russian interests and faith in their institutions.”
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It was Craig Murray who received the files, not Assange. And skepticism of unproven assertions is a good policy, best applied both to Wikileaks and to anonymous CIA sources whose stories are vague and at face value frankly ridiculous .
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According to Craig Murray and Assange, neither of whom I trust to be honest in the slightest.
Sorry, the days where people just trusted Assange because he said so are pretty long gone. He’s got his own agenda.
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So, are we at war with Eurasia, or Eastasia? I’m really fucking confused.
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I thought we were at war with ourselves?
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Doesn’t the fact that the same attacker was behind the DNC and Podesta attacks (who’s been solidly identified as the GRU), where in both cases email dumps were exfiltrated and appeared on Wikileaks, and where the attacker actually claimed they sent the data to Wikileaks make it seem like there’s a much simpler explanation?
Murray and Assange are buddies, both have a track record of being lying cranks (and both have a lot of traits as narcissists seeking attention and lying where convenient to boost their reputations). Murray’s been associated with Wikileaks for a while, and his account looks more to me like he’s making up a cover story to protect both an org. he’s involved with, and protecting a friend who fucked up badly and destroyed their last shred of credibility by being a dupe manipulated by a Russian intelligence agency (again - this isn’t the first time Wikileaks dumped docs sourced by Russian intelligence).
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OTOH, I don’t trust anyone in the FBI to be honest in the slightest, either. In fact, I would pretty much default to assuming anything any of them say is a lie, absent corroborating evidence to the contrary.
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Hell, I don’t trust any of you to be honest. The world is full of two kinds of folks: people with agendas and liars.
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Examples?
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Yes, but you don’t know that I’ve lied to you. I do know, from the experience of people who are personally known to me, that the FBI is very prone to lie about their actions spying on nonviolent domestic political organizations, and prone to lie in court if they think it’ll help them screw some hippies.
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Why should you believe the CIA?
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Because they’re just one of…17…agencies pointing to the Russians and independent security researchers (already documented repeatedly on the BBS) have pointed to Russian attribution as well.
Or we could believe the sex offender and his buddy.
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So the Russians’ master strategy was to undermine our confidence in our systems by phishing for information, which, when leaked, would cause great embarrassment and prove that the primaries were rigged? And they therefore targeted the DNC, apparently confident that the DNC themselves were harboring secrets so odious that voters would be repulsed?
And sure enough, the strategy worked! A phishing email which could have been sent by the stoner dude next door did indeed stumble on a nest of partisan nastiness, and the rest is history. If this makes sense to you, some interesting thoughts for further exploration:
- wonder why they were so confident that the DNC would be up to such shenanigans?
- wonder if they targeted RNC as well? (That would support the ‘undermining democracy’ canard, though not ‘support Trump’, the conspiracy theory seems to have shifting stories on this point). If so, was the RNC smart enough to not fall for a juvenile scam? Or were there simply no incriminating docs to share?
- when both sides have billions of dollars in budgets and armies of agents and analysts to exactly influence overseas affairs, is it not profoundly, one in a billion, coincidental that the Magic bullet was not a high tech voting machine hack or a well placed mole but instead a random phishing scam?
- should this whole episode point to lessons far more important than the sophomoric Russophobia currently hawked by the Washington Post (trying on their new National Enquirer hat)
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Nice straw man and mischaracterization of the overall argument but, whatever. I don’t believe you’re a good faith actor here, I’m sorry. I won’t say you’re a sockpuppet but clearly you’re some Wikileaks fanboy.
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Sounds like you believe what you want to.
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Unlike you and everyone else, of course?
As a security professional, I do tend to believe the analysis done by independent professionals though over whatever self-serving thing Assange says from his room in the embassy while he strives for relevance.
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You don’t need to believe or disbelieve intelligence agencies accounts to have an informed opinion but there is a lot of evidence and analysis by independent security researchers that makes a very solid case for Russia’s involvement. I’d strongly recommend going through the reading list nicely summed up here, get familiar with the evidence and analysis by independent researchers:
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