at the risk of going too far off-topic, i really need to know just how far you’re willing to take this. you seem to be setting up some kind of equivalence of trump and clinton as far as how awful they are. do you really think that clinton would appoint someone to lead the epa who has spent a career working against the epa? do you really think clinton would be appointing to attorney general a man who is so racist that a majority of republicans voted against his nomination for a federal judge post? do you really think that clinton would be looking for everyone in the department of energy who has worked on climate change and climate change agreements? is there nothing that trump has done since the election, or even before for that matter, that makes you wish that clinton’s large popular vote majority could be translated into an actual victory?
Absolutely not.
Clinton, in my view, was a clear example of business-as-usual pay-to-play plutocratic American politics, which routinely involves conduct that would be treated as felony corruption throughout most of the industrialised world [1]. Bad, but no worse than 90% of the rest of the US political class.
Trump is a fascist. Entirely different grade of bastard, and much more serious.
Of course I would have preferred a Clinton victory. That is why, once Bernie was knocked out, I was publicly advocating for a Clinton vote and holding my tongue on the many areas in which Clinton’s conduct could be justly and strongly criticised.
There’s no need for that now.
Yes, Clinton was better than Trump. But there is no need to whitewash her flaws or mythologise her failed campaign. Doing that just sets the situation up for a repeat dose.
This is drifting off topic, though. If you want to argue about Clinton’s virtues or otherwise, we could split off a subthread, but I doubt that it would be terribly productive.
[1] Just because the USSC declares bribery to be legal doesn’t make it non-corrupt.
I’ve intaeracted with you in the past. To be honest I expect you’re going to reply with some bullshit quibbles that are barely relevant, perhaps pull in some tangential topics to change the subject, or rathole on some misreading of something I said. So I want to make clear that this is my single reply to you in this thread in advance, since my time’s valuable and better spent on other pursuits.
Well that’s not very nice but it does tell me that maybe you are a little emotionally invested in this argument. I’m not forcing anyone to comment. Feel to engage to the extent you want. But ad hominem attack doesn’t increase the persuasiveness of your argument. Or to put it another way. … whatever.
The primary data from the attacks and metadata in the docs are germane, as is the analysis by independent security analysts who have nothing to gain from pointing fingers at the wrong, and much to lose in their reputation-driven field. Among security experts there’s a very strong consensus that the attack and docs posted to Wikileaks originated with Russia, with large amounts of disparate corroborating evidence and no relevant forensic evidence to falsify that position. That’s pretty significant if you think about it. If there was no political motivation to deny Russia’s involvement, there’d be no noe questioning it at all.
Yeah I know a few ex - cia types. Their views are consistent with John Schindler’s views as are often expressed on his website or the ny observer.
Similar this is Thomas Rids biography
In 2009/2010, Rid was a visiting scholar at Hebrew University and at Shalem in Jerusalem.[5] From 2006 to 2009 he worked at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University,[6] the RAND Corporation in Washington,[7] and at the Institut français des relations internationales in Paris.[8] Rid wrote his first book and PhD thesis at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, a Berlin think tank.[9] He holds a PhD from Humboldt University in Berlin.[10]
You notice the stint at Rand corporation? You realize he is a Professor in the Dept of War Studies at Kings?
So let me gently dispute the idea that those pointing the fingers are independent and have no axe. In the US, foreign intrusion into a domestic server is the FBIs turf. One might ask why the CIA feels so compelled to have an opinion, or why the DCI felt compelled to weigh in. Even now it looks like there is a lot of selective leaking to the press going on.
I think it’s highly suggestive that the agency responsible for investigating is not the agency making all the noise about Russian hacking. Clapper has previous. One could argue that anyone carrying water for the “Russians hacked the election” meme can expect a reward in the form of consultancy gigs and think tank fellowships. Of course this doesn’t prove anything but it is downright silly to suggest there were no financial incentives. Crowdstrike itself would have benefited immensely from all the publicity this had generated.
I have to defer to you. I don’t know Putin and I can’t read his mind. However he has occasionally done things which suggest his personal goals took second place to Russia’s state interests. It’s quite possible he hates Trump too.[quote=“nemomen, post:182, topic:90927”]
I feel like you're just being disingenuous here given your strange obsessions with Russia"
Pot, meet kettle.
But the key lines I wanted to introduce to you was this one from Craig Murray.
“Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”
“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.”
I take onboard your comments regarding Assange having apparently lied in the past. How do you feel about Craig Murray?
My only point is that the idea that this question is open and shut because of a disinterested analysis of meta data is naive. The idea that the DCI and political leaders wouldn’t lie is absurd. And dismissing the statements of those with the most direct knowledge of the situation might suggest unreasonable dogmatism.
I don’t know if this is apt 27. If it is I don’t know if they were working for the Russian state. If they were I don’t know if they leaked the emails to wikileaks. This might explain why Clapper statement on the subject was that the hack “was consistent with the methods and objectives” of russia. An astonishingly weak statement don’t you think?
This is a high stakes game. There are a bunch of defense companies and security companies who would benefit immensely from us having a new bogieman. Let’s not pretend that there is only one intellectually respectable position.
Just to be clear, your theory is that US defense and security companies are intentionally creating fake news so that they can profit from Russia being a “new” boogieman, and that they’re just now creating an antagonistic situation between the US and Russia?
Did… did you ever hear of the Cold War?
I suggest reading about a guy named Ronald Reagan and international politics of the 80s.
If this story (from July) is correct, I’m not sure I would dignify it with the term “hacking”.
If the leaks revealed email after email of the Clinton team saying things like, “Hey, let’s schedule the debates so the highest number of people can watch so both of our views get seen” and “You know, this Super delegate deal sure seems unfair.” perhaps it’d have gone a bit differently.
Applying Occam’s razor, ‘The government and/or ruling class is lying’ is hard to beat, especially when probable motives are obvious and the behavior (lying) is characteristic of the party in question. The reasoning for supporting claims about Russian manipulation of the election requires more steps. I’m not the biggest fan of Occam’s razor, but you brought it up. Of course it’s possible that the Russians did something underhanded – the governments of most large states do.
As for ‘conspiracy theory’, sure, there are in fact conspiracies (‘a secret agreement to commit a crime’). The fact that a theory is about a conspiracy doesn’t prove it’s wrong.
Do you want the general theory? Here’s the short form:
- (Good) knowledge is power.
- Therefore, those who have power weaken themselves if they share it (because now it is relatively less advantageous).
- Therefore, people in powerful positions of government, business, academia, etc. etc. etc. avoid sharing (good) knowledge and either hide, obscure, or obfuscate it, propagandize, or lie outright. (Especially when dealing with outsiders, for example, ordinary people.)
Anyone who has worked in a large corporation will have observed the phenomena I’m describing here.
The reason I’d brought Occam’s Razor up here is the explanation can’t be generic, but has to fit the existing data. The data for the DNC attack have a simple explanation that Russia was caught red-handed hacking the DNC servers, and dumping the docs. into the public. The existing data fit that explanation really well. If you want an alternate explanation it have to come up with an account of how it came to be that a hacked DNC box came to have an email with a spear phishing attack that the GRU had used in previous attacks on it, how that payload delivered malware that had a private key the GRU had used in previous attacks, and why that box was talking to C&C servers used by previous Russian attacks. Then you’d have to explain why when the attackers were caught a fake account named Guccifer 2.0 appeared and claimed to be a Romanian hacktivist responsible for the attack, dumped the docs., but engaged in a pattern of behavior that proved that false and in their behavior and in the docs they released left a huge number of fingerprints that also pointed to Russia.
You’d also have to explain similar things for the Podesta attacks (while we have fewer details, so less data, we have the same spear phishing attack and same class of malware on the exploited systems).
There’s more. There’s a lot of data that strongly suggests the Russian Web Brigades shifted from driving trollies from their typical pro-Putin/pro-Russian behavior to driving trollies for Trump in late 2015. There are researchers who looked at the behavior of Russian sockpuppet Facebook accounts and saw them engaging in patterns boosting “fake news” (ideally just called propaganda) in Facebook, and engaging in suspicious behaviors on Twitter.
There’s actually even more data than that, but I’m already rambling.
So you have a bunch of evidence across disparate domains, and you want to explain it. You can suggest that some secret shadowy figures in the US gov’t were involved in a really complex, very well hidden, shadowy conspiracy to do this stuff but look like Russia (though key bits of the evidence just can’t fit that explanation all without supreme ultimate wizard powers or large numbers of supercomputers toiling for centuries), but I can’t think of a US agency with that scale capacity. Russia’s really ramped up their cyberwarfare/online propaganda divisions - the CIA/NSA could pull off the hacks but not the rest. I can’t see the motive for them to take that kind of risk or put this amount or resources into stumping for Trump and against Clinton, while Russia’s motivations are very simple to explain, and given the insane risks Putin’s been taking, that’s consistent with previous behavior.
So we have evidence of the crime that points to Russia, we have a motive for the crime that points to Russia, and we have the capacity to commit the crime that points to Russia. It’s a simple, consistent, and well justified explanation. I’ve yet to see the alternate explanation pointing to the US actually fleshed out. It’d be insanely complex. It quickly turns to hand waving and the assumption of magical powers by mysterious unnamed figures in the US gov’t acting under very complex motivations to justify all the specific actions involved.
We do have the previous false flag of US defense and security companies invading Ukraine, pretending to annex Crimea for Russia, arming Ukrainian rebels with high altitude SAMs to shoot down passenger jets, and pretending to be Russia responding with belligerence to international diplomacy. Those same actors are engaging in Russian-appearing mass bombing campaigns of civilian area in Syria while responding with diplomatic belligerence against the US’s response to that, so this fits in well with that theory.
This is getting interesting
Although I don’t see anything coming out of this that stops Trump.
So, basically, you can’t refute the data (which you just ignored in your quotes) so you’ll conspiracy style attack the bona fides of various folks to imply various agendas?
You don’t understand, he knows people.
but clearly not how attribution works in security and attacks.
Note they also shifted from responding to a point about informed analysis by independent security analysts to talking about spooks. Also Nobby’s citing Thomas Rid as an authority supporting his case. Rid being the author of this piece completely undermining all of Nobby’s claims:
I thought I called that out! 
“I’ll just ignore the detailed evidence and debate and get into wingnut conspiracy land and personalities instead!”
Ironically, I’m about to start reading Rid’s newest book:
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Machines-Cybernetic-Thomas-Rid/dp/0393286002
I found out that 22 year old me got cited in it (ha ha ha) from the Cypherpunks email list when an excerpt was posted online a while ago: http://passcode.csmonitor.com/cypherpunk
So, clearly, I’m part of the conspiracy too!
Ture, I was just putting a finer line on the fact that in addition to skipping the inconvenient fact-based parts, when they did quote something, they then ratholed on a careful misreading of what I’d said to drag in an irrelevant tangent.
I can’t even imagine what could be running through someone’s mind that they could read, “To be honest I expect you’re going to reply with some bullshit quibbles that are barely relevant, perhaps pull in some tangential topics to change the subject, or rathole on some misreading of something I said,” and then decide to reply in a way that actually validates it perfectly.
I can’t imagine why you wrote a lengthy reply to someone driving trollies this particular topic so so hard. I mean, I enjoyed your reply but I knew most of it anyway since this is gone over ground both on Boing Boing and in general in infosec circles. The Russian involvement in these hacks isn’t seriously in question in any infosec circles.
When I see someone lying in a public forum, and lying in a way that’s so flagrant it’s Веб-бригады-class BS, I feel compelled to correct the record. I figured I’d correct the record once, and make it exhaustive enough that I could call it done. While I know most people reading the comments are well informed, the fact that a hostile foreign power was actively working to manipulate a US election is a huge fucking deal, but also difficult to really believe both due to the legacy of Cold War propaganda putting it in a dubious context, and because it’s so far outside any prior norms and such an uncomfortable truth that it’s easier to dismiss than seriously face. Permitting deceit to sow seeds of doubt about important truths empowers the authoritarians.
