Could we agree that someone, quite possibly hackers associated with Putin and the Russian government, hacked party computers and used the exfiltrated results to influence the election?
While some people would call that hacking the election, I wouldn’t, lacking evidence that polling results were directly changed.
Still not pedantry.
The Election is many things, not limited to the last minute polls. The US election takes far longer than any other nation and our media takes aim to shape results more than even gerrymandering and chicanery at the machines.
When you hack the process you hack the results.
I don’t have anything against specificity but you are arguing that the headline didn’t fit a statement that it did not have to fit for all of us to understand exactly what it meant, fit that meaning perfectly, and that corresponds to the article beneath.
Nobody is led astray here, you just have an inaccurately specific definition of “hack” that doesn’t fit the conventional definition and context in which it is used here.
Depends on what’s at the root of this deteriorating relationship. If the Russians despise the United States because it’s a bastion of liberal corruption, and the United Staters despise the Russians because it’s not a liberal society, Trump could take steps to clamp down on the press, return (a particularly Christian) God to the public sphere, and drive the homosexuals out of the country-- and as a result, many of the Russian criticisms of Western decadence would be allayed. Relations might improve, but I think many Americans would be rightly horrified by the prospect.
That very few of us are qualified to understand. Which means we’re back to the first couple of sentences in your paragraph.
And absent evidence of tampering with ballots, or evidence that what was leaked was forged, I think the kerfuffle is a wasteful distraction. We are the people that voted him in. If an army of blog commenters and selective leaks of truthful things is truly enough to throw us off, then we’re all a bunch of idiots who deserve whatever we get.
Everything old is new again. So Afraid of the Russians.
How is quibbling about the terminology being used, while not disputing the actions that the terminology is being used to describe, not pedantry?
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against pedantry; I think that one should use the words that best suit the meaning one is trying to express. However, “I agree with what you say but you’re misusing a word in how you’re saying it” is pretty much the definition of pedantry.
Not the ones that know Putin’s soul and think the Banana Republic interventions are not a big deal.
I thought pedantry involved ostentatious display of learning. I’m not trying to be ostentatious, I’m trying to participate. I think there’s a useful distinction between hacking and influencing, and I find the headline to be misleading confusing because it uses the word hack as it does. Other people disagree, so, OK.
Social engineering is the very definition of hacking. Your distinction is based on a willfully specific (to the point of inaccuracy) definition that ignores any subsets of the practice and focuses on what one might see in movies.
True. I work in InfoSec, watched the analysis of the DNC hacks with great interest, and the body of evidence pointing to Russian involvement in both the hack and transmitting the data to Wikileaks was very strong from the start and has only gotten stronger since then. There’s much I’m not qualified to understand, but the part where some hackers attacked the DNC, Podesta, et al, that part I have a fairly solid grasp on, and there’s very, very little doubt that there was another source, since the evidence is completely consistent with that explanation and the only plausible explanation for how the huge number of disparate fingerprints and patterns of activity is that the GRU and FSB perpetrated the attack. The use of the GRU’s keys and C&C server in the DNC attack make it such a miniscule chance that it wasn’t Russia that there’d need to be some incredibly compelling evidence of another party’s involvement, evidence that’s currently lacking. So at this point in time the most plausible explanation by many, many orders of magnitude is that Russia perpetrated the attacks.
I think you’re overlooking the fact that not everyone uses the term as you do. And with that, I think we’ve both adequately described our positions.
There is not one monolithic definition of many words, if you are only familiar with one, it is not surprising that you may argue, but that does not make your view that there is only one “correct” definition for this context useful.
Thanks for the thoughtful replies. I can live with a dirty relation where the elites are getting rich off of relations. I mean, it isn’t great, but ok. I don’t want any sort of new Cold War, or our right war war, or proxy wars. I guess this is a “take the less evil” reasoning, I admit.
That said, Russia would be foolish as hell to start serious bang-bang-pow directly against us. Their armed forces are a shell of what they once were, and eclipsed by the shear amount of shit the US has. I mean our carrier fleet alone is amazing. (more than almost the entire rest of the world combined) and the one carrier Russia has is a smoking mess that needs a tug boat to get around and their arresting cable system is having planes fall into the sea. I know that is just one example, but yeah, they have issues.
But because of MAD, they never would do that directly with the US. Probably. They might still fuck around in the Baltics or other regions though. If they do, I say let’s try something new and let the rest of NATO deal with it. Maybe we can send some supplies over, but I am less hawkish in my middle age and feel if NATO want security, they need to uphold their end of the NATO agreement, which includes 2% of their GNP for defense, which only 5 of the 27 member do. Though looking at a recent chart, the members near the Baltic have increased their defense budget lately.
I haven’t seen any evidence that voting machines were tampered with. There were a lot of of attacks before the election with Russia attempting to penetrate voting systems across the country with some successes. That really is a big deal, but there’s no evidence they got any payloads onto the voting machines, and the DHS hasn’t reported details on what they found or specifics of remediations. It’s something that we should be concerned with since the integrity of the election systems in several states were breached, but there’s very data at this point. Still, it should be considered a really fucking huge deal when a foreign country makes a large-scale effort at compromising US election equipment and has some successes.
There’s no evidence the leaks were forged, nor have the parties whose private data was breached by Russia and spread via Wikileaks claimed that the data posted was faked.
While there are certainly a lot of things to be very concerned about, the fact that Russia not only worked diligently to interfere in the US election through espionage and targeted privacy leaks and propaganda, but also made wide scale attacks on US electoral systems is a really fucking huge deal. There are other very massive concerns, like Trump being a narcissistic, mean-spirited, kleptocratic buffoon unfit to govern a PTA let alone a country, or Trump hiring a brigade of generals drooling at the prospect of invading Iran, etc., but that doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the fact that Russia was working diligently to interfere in the US election.
Naturally, this has been, and will be spun as “NATO preparing to invade Russia.”
It’s not just about the kleptocracy, though, but the spread of Russian-style right-wing authoritarianism to the US (and Russian attempts to encourage it in other countries). This blatant interference is ultimately going to do more to sour US/Russian relations, not prevent any sort of cold war (which didn’t really seem on the horizon, before).
Yeah, I think I would be doing, too.
I don’t think Russia will directly invade. I do think Putin will like to continue to foment trouble in places with significant Russian minority populations, like the Baltic states, Georgia, Moldova (Transdniester), Ukraine (Donetsk), Belarus etc, and pull a Crimea when he can. Just staying on that line of plausible deniability.
Putin hates Clinton’s guts with a burning passion. After Russia’s 2011 elections that had the appearance of wide scale electoral cheating, Clinton as SecState called this out, and Putin was livid (people being called out on serious ethical breaches typically get extra pissed).
Russia’s had serious ongoing human rights violations. The state controlled media’s propaganda against homosexuality and wide scale brutal oppression isn’t widely reported on, but it’s absolutely evil. The US under Clinton levied some sanctions on Russia for those human rights abuses.
Clinton was involved in some of the initial funny business (carried on by Kerry) in Ukraine that resulted in the 2014 election with Russia’s puppet losing and an EU friendly Poroshenko taking power, which ended in Russia invading Ukraine, triggering a civil war, and starting the continuing occupation of Crimea. After this, the US imposed major sanctions on Russia that are ongoing. Those sanctions have been very damaging to Russia’s economy. Clinton was open that she wanted to increase sanctions to push Russia on the issue of their illegal occupation of Crimea. She’s also been involved in
There’s much more, but US-Russian relations have been tense, Clinton’s been very steadfast in opposing Russian corruption, human rights abuses, and military buildups towards and attacks on neighbors, and Putin hates her guts for it.
Trump, on the other hand, not only has none of that baggage, but was so stupid he was fawning over Putin, and hired pro-Russian individuals in his campaign, some who were on Moscow’s payroll, and he even softened the GOP’s platform on Ukraine.
So between the option of the woman who would increase sanctions and pressure Russia on Ukraine, and the guy who wanted to cripple NATO, updated the GOP party platform to soften language on Ukraine, and could be easily manipulated into dropping sanctions, there’s a whole lot of reasons for Russia to back Trump. There are other angles are well, it’s complicated.
This article lays out some of the things I rambled about much better:
Depends if you prefer Popper to Eric S Raymond.
[quote]. This part of his social philosophy was influenced by the economist Friedrich Hayek, who worked with him at the London School of Economics and who was a life-long friend. Popper advocated what he (rather unfortunately) terms ‘piecemeal social engineering’ as the central mechanism for social planning—for in utilising this mechanism intentional actions are directed to the achievement of one specific goal at a time, which makes it possible to monitor the situation to determine whether adverse unintended effects of intentional actions occur, in order to correct and readjust when this proves necessary. This, of course, parallels precisely the critical testing of theories in scientific investigation. This approach to social planning (which is explicitly based upon the premise that we do not, because we cannot, know what the future will be like) encourages attempts to put right what is problematic in society—generally-acknowledged social ills—rather than attempts to impose some preconceived idea of the ‘good’ upon society as a whole.
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/social-engineering.html
When you engineer something, is it intended to last? Or is intended to work once?
And this is where I have the problem.
(1) What inherent right has the US to do this? - it appears to be the doctrine of “because we can”.
(2) Why doesn’t the same apply to Saudi Arabia, which is a state that applies human rights abuses to more than 50% of its population?
It’s worth mentioning that, unlike Saudi Arabia, Iran has an actual, codified legal system - and apparently while backward “Islamic” judges in the sticks had out vicious punishments, the educated judges on appeal find ways round them (e.g. in cases of adultery by demanding witnesses to establish the facts beyond shadow of doubt, which is almost always impossible.) There are plenty of reporters from the larger cities showing that things are much less backward than in Saudi, which doesn’t even have a legal system and allows Islamic judges to invent their own crimes if they wish. Saudi actors are also funding terrorists, and its government is bombing Yemen, in vicious wars compared to which Crimea is about as bad as a Trump property deal.
This doesn’t excuse Russia which, based on its history and the secular education of its people, ought to be up there with Western standards. But while the US (and the UK) continues to kiss the backside of the Saudi government, there is no conceivable moral ground for demanding and enforcing sanctions on Russia.
And don’t let me get started on China…
