'Russians were responsible for hacking the DNC,' says Obama in final 2016 press conference

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[quote=“Humbabella, post:104, topic:91329”]
The scariest thing said during this election was people talking about Trump’s call for Russia to release more emails. The phrase that was used was that he was calling on a “hostile foreign power” to influence the election. Are we calling Russia “hostile” now? Le’ts not.[/quote]

This is difficult to process. You’re saying that when Trump called for Russia to engage in more attacks with their military’s cyberwarfare divisions against US targets, that we shouldn’t call the attacker “hostile.” What should we call the attacker, then?

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It’s not about misinforming, it’s about information. If you’re playing poker against someone and it turns out there’s a guy standing behind you with a camera sending your opponent and the audience a view of your cards against your will, that’s not lying. That’s what was happening, though. Internal private campaign strategy docs were the very first thing Russia leaked. The issue wasn’t misinformation, but unfair, illegal obtained asymmetrical availability of information.

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A friend who we sometimes have disagreements with.

Terminological exactitude has never had any place in diplomacy.

I’m sure that Clinton’s campaign was very unhappy about that, but I don’t see how it delegitimizes the election.

In poker it is definitely cheating to see your opponent’s hand. In a democratic election it is not cheating to know your opponent’s election strategy. Managing the security of their information is up to political parties, not to the people of America.

The hacks were probably criminal, and if Trump’s team had any respect for democracy I would say they should have said that the information was clearly obtained illegally and vowed to not use leaked documents/called on others not to use them or publish them. I think that’s the proper response. Unfortunately American politics is a bloodsport, and anything that isn’t technically against the rules is fair game. Unless someone can prove that Trump himself was a conspirator in the hack (in which case he should be criminally charged) I don’t see what to do about it in a democratic country.

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Whether Russia’s called a friend or a hostile power doesn’t change the relation. They’re still a belligerent engaging in attacks. Using rhetoric to label them “friends” for engaging in military cyberwarfare attacks against the US just adds a Ministry of Truth layer to an already ugly situation.

I suppose it depends what your standards of electoral legitimacy would be. I’d say that a foreign nation using it’s military cyberwarfare division to engaging in mass scale espionage to break into and steal large amounts of internal electoral strategy docs. and vast amounts of internal communications from within the Dem. party, Clinton’s campaign manager, and the Dem. Congressional Campaign Committee which were then delivered to the GOP and the public is a serious enough manipulation that it delegitimizes the election. It does make the Watergate break-in look like a penny-ante game in comparison. If you disagree, I doubt I could persuade you otherwise, but would note that this is an incredibly dangerous thing to normalize.

Victim blaming. “It’s really their fault. We couldn’t help but break into their office and steal their data, the locks weren’t very good .”

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Isn’t it that anything that isn’t forbidden is mandatory?

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This Twitter crap is illegible. The max number of understandable tweets is one.

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Maybe that’s the issue I’m having is that when I hear “delegitimizes” I hear, “the election was not legitimate and the new president is not actually the president, we need another election.” I can’t see the case for that based on Russian interference. If you just mean that Trump’s mandate is weak and he ought to recognize that, I’d say that losing the popular vote by a huge margin should be enough to establish that already, and unfortunately it’s up to Trump to show some respect for how Americans voted and he’s not going to do that.

I don’t think we should call Russia “hostile” because diplomacy has been about doublespeak since way before Orwell. I mean, you and I can do it, but to have people who might be leaders of the nation doing it is disturbing.

I don’t think “victim blaming” is an appropriate term when you are talking about the DNC. The DNC isn’t a vulnerable person who has been victimized by a crime, it’s a huge national organization that really does need to improve it’s policies. And it’s leadership needs to live by an “everything leaks” mentality when writing emails.

Everyone ought to be concerned about Russian state-sponsored manipulation of US elections, but Obama is right, the kind of manipulation that Russia did was made possible by the fragility, divisiveness and partisanship of the American system.

Fundamentally I don’t think we even have a reason to believe that these hacks were terribly successful. I’m not saying they didn’t win Trump the election - the least popular candidate ever did need everything to go his way to win - but Trump still won in the most meager way possible. I don’t think Americans are particular vulnerable to this kind of psyops, I think intelligence agencies give themselves too much credit.

I actually think the most toxic thing that Americans could do right now is overstate Russia’s role. It will only encourage the absolutely morally bankrupt Republicans to further court Russian favour to get an edge in the next election as well. Next thing you know the talking point will be, “Well of course the Democrats have to cozy up to Russian intelligence, that’s how you get votes!”

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It’s worth repeating that the first document leaked wasn’t email. It was the DNC’s full oppo research file on Trump. That’s more like someone broke into a sports team’s office, stole their game plans, then gave them to the team’s opponent. Some the documents leaked were not emails, but internal campaign plans, oppo research, and other campaign related docs. This is important to be very clear about since the espionage wasn’t just embarrassing emails you might blame the victim for writing.

The DNC was attacked by a foreign cyberwarfare division, with the apparent intent to manipulate the election. You can say that the target of the attacks wasn’t a victim because they’re an institution, weren’t prepared enough to be attacked (in an unprecedented way), or blame the DNC for having internal discussions that were embarrassing and eventually aired, but I think victim-blaming is still the best description. They were victims of an unprecedented attack, and you’re blaming them rather than the attackers, while dismissing the seriousness of the asymmetry in the information warfare techniques Russia was using. One side had all of their dirty laundry and all of their plans and strategies aired through espionage with the apparent intent to manipulate the election, the other didn’t.

We can’t really meaningfully gauge how effective they were since that would require a view into a parallel universe where the RNC didn’t have all the full internal details of the Dems. strategies for their Presidential and Congressional elections as well as embarrassing information. One thing to note, though, is that the information only available due to Russian espionage about DNC’s internal politics to back Clinton over Sanders was something that I read references to virtually every day of the general and which seemed to matter a lot to a whole lot of people (often with a poor understanding). The very fact that Wikileaks posted the docs seemed to many to be a confirmation of Clinton’s corruption, regardless of the contents. I don’t know what an alternate election without that would look like, but it’s hard to imagine the early leaks of campaign strategies and the ongoing attacks rooted in leaked documents/emails didn’t have an effect.

[quote=“anon50609448, post:111, topic:91329”]
I actually think the most toxic thing that Americans could do right now is overstate Russia’s role. It will only encourage the absolutely morally bankrupt Republicans to further court Russian favour to get an edge in the next election as well. Next thing you know the talking point will be, “Well of course the Democrats have to cozy up to Russian intelligence, that’s how you get votes!”[/quote]

I’m quite sure the GOP’s strategies about how to manipulate future elections won’t be grounded in whether people imagine Russian influence was serious or minimal. They have the capacity to make independent judgments.

As time goes by and more investigations bring more facts to light it will have effects on future elections, but what those are remain to be seen. Regardless, we’d be better informed about what actually happened, and better off not minimizing/dismissing/victim-blaming, but realizing the very serious threat Russian military cyberwarfare division present and building up both appropriate defenses against attacks, and more appropriate/effective responses when espionage is discovered.

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[quote=“Humbabella, post:111, topic:91329”]
Maybe that’s the issue I’m having is that when I hear “delegitimizes” I hear, “the election was not legitimate and the new president is not actually the president, we need another election.”[/quote]
Since I introduced the word in this thread, let me emphasize that I didn’t mean that there is a clause in our election rules that such action triggers, only that it severs the connection between the vote’s outcome and the will of the people.

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Obviously the Russians are to blame. Practically, that seems about as useful to me as pointing out that hurricane Katrina was to blame for New Orleans getting flooded. If people asking, “What do we do now?” as asking how to retaliate against Russia rather than how to shore up American democratic systems, I don’t think anything good will come of it.

It would be a good idea to beef up security, but I say that recognizing it’s a red queen race and we a running to stand still - another breach will occur.

It would be a very good idea to talk about appropriate responses to elections being influenced in this manner, because I don’t think we are capable of having that discussion after-the-fact (i.e., right now, about this election) because everything is taken as partisan and I can’t think of any remedy that wouldn’t be worse than the current situation. People need to know what to expect when this kind of thing happens, and to believe they can expect it regardless of who foreign influence favours.

But unfortunately I don’t think that as time goes on more investigations will bring more facts to light because in the very near future all relevant agencies will be overseen by officials who will put pressure on them to not conduct any such investigations.

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I guess I’m caught up in this thing where I don’t feel like I can say what is an what is not a valid reason for the will of the people to be what it is. If, speaking hypothetically, one candidate was a narcissistic, racist rapist who advocated violence against those that disagreed with him and the other candidate had questionable email practices, I would like to think that people would choose the latter over the former.

If latter candidate’s poor emailing was kept in the news by a foreign government releasing hacked emails , I would like to think think the latter candidate would still win.

If the former candidate knew that he would be attacked for sexually assaulting many women and bragging about it because a foreign government gave him access to the latter candidate’s opposition research file I would like to think that there still wouldn’t really be a way to mitigate the fact that he did it and the latter candidate would win.

I’d like to think that, but that’s not the same as it being the will of the people. People voted the way they voted for their own reasons, even if I think those reasons are unfathomable. Hillary Clinton lost a vote in some county somewhere because someone just didn’t want to go out in the rain to get to the polling station, and that Donald Trump got a vote because someone flipped a coin.

To me, changing the voting tally by hacking election machines would subvert the will of the people, police increasing traffic stops against black people on election day subverted the will of the people, voter suppression laws subverted the will of the people, closing polling stations subverted the will of the people. Actually cutting people off from their ability to express their will delegitimizes elections. People voting for an awful result for unfathomable reasons might make us curl up in the corner and question the value of democracy but it doesn’t make that election illegitimate.

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And barring some serious computing security staff not many places are going to be able fend off a a targeted attack of that sort.
Should they have had better security in place, well yeah everyone has room for improvement. Would it have mattered in this case? Probably not.

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Again, to be clear, the people whose will it subverted was the whole electorate, not just the probably-small number of people whose vote (or decision not to vote) was directly affected.

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Personally, I’m very uncomfortable with the characterisation of non-destructive hacking as “warfare” or “attacks”.

Hacking the controls of a power station so it blows up: that’s cyberwarfare. Using hacks to reveal embarrassing information about a target: at most, that’s cyberespionage.

I think the terminology is important here. Language justifies wars.

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All evidence points to the hacking being primarily perpetrated by the Russian military (the KGB/FSB was also involved, but either weren’t the principle attacker or had better opsec, probably the latter IMO, but it’s hard to know). The standard term for a malicious party breaking into a remote computing system is “attacker,” and I don’t think there’s really better language for it. These attacks are not military attacks, but were engaged in by a foreign military against the US as a kind of espionage to deliberately manipulate the already weak integrity of US elections to install a Russian puppet as president of the US. What Russia did is incredibly serious and we shouldn’t soften language to minimize the unprecedented belligerence and seriousness of that attack. Since Russia won, there’s no point in worrying about about that language starting a war. The US just lost the war, and now a foreign government’s choice of leaders have been installed in the Presidency and Congress.

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I hope you guys know each other otherwise you shouldn’t be using the familiar “ti” form.

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A point made upthread is that there is nothing unprecedented about this.

The USA has been covertly interfering in foreign elections constantly for a century, in both hostile and allied countries. The USA has engaged in undeclared cyberattacks that actually did destroy physical infrastructure. The USA is currently attacking every computer it can reach for surveillance and blackmail purposes.

Yes, it’s a shitty thing when a foreign power subverts your democracy, and the ordinary people are right to be angered by it. The ordinary people of the not-USA have been angered by it, for a very long time.

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This isn’t unprecedented in the general sense, but it certainly is in terms of US elections, and that’s the sense I’d meant. Cyberwarfare is a new development. The US, Russia, China, Iran, the UK, and other state actors have all been engaging in plenty of shocking things in terms of cyberwarfare. The US gets more press (I think in part because leakers have a better chance of surviving), but Russia and China’s cyberwarfare orgs have been steadily growing in capacity for and execution of evil. It’s something where UN conventions and international law don’t exist to deal with the threat, and in the current electoral climates of hostility to international cooperation it’s not likely to come about soon, but much like other weaponizations of technology, that’s sorely needed.

FWIW, many people of the USA were angered by the NSA’s abuses, and other abuses by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Snowden’s a hero to many Americans (and me). They just have very limited power to rein the orgs. in.

[quote=“anon50609448, post:114, topic:91329”]
It would be a good idea to beef up security, but I say that recognizing it’s a red queen race and we a running to stand still - another breach will occur.

It would be a very good idea to talk about appropriate responses to elections being influenced in this manner, because I don’t think we are capable of having that discussion after-the-fact (i.e., right now, about this election) because everything is taken as partisan and I can’t think of any remedy that wouldn’t be worse than the current situation. People need to know what to expect when this kind of thing happens, and to believe they can expect it regardless of who foreign influence favours.[/quote]

The US has a corrupt antidemocratic autocratic Russian puppet with no respect whatsoever of the rule of law as Pres., and a Congress and soon a SCOTUS as enablers. If the claims that the RNC was also hacked are true, there’s may be enough blackmail material to keep the Congress in line. There’s some chance we’re past the point of recovery given the apparent goals of the new administration are to subvert every existing check and balance, and sell off much of the government to the Fortune 500.

Assuming that’s not the case, and Trump’s contained, defenses against these attacks aren’t that hard. There are ways to harden IT systems against spear phishing attacks, and the GRU’s attacks aren’t very sophisticated so much as persistent and massive in scale. It’s possible to build IT systems and train users to keep things much more secure. It’s just that despite many recent serious and devastating hacks, political organizations hadn’t realized they were targets and were lax. Up to now the GRU’s attacks haven’t been very sophisticated (The FSB, NSA, and China are far more scary in terms of penetrating hardened systems), so while they might adapt, awareness of the threat increases the chances of building a defense.

The good news on this front is that because these attacks are largely international and there’s minimal legal jurisdiction to deal with them, private InfoSec researchers and analysts abound, they did a lot of the initial reach on the DNC attacks, and they’ll likely be carrying on with that. Hard to know what’ll come of it.

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But you just described the Cold War itself, yeah? I mean, we know that both the US and Soviet Union were constantly meddling, but that also both sides often overestimated and overstated the “danger” posed by the other, in some cases as a means of legitimizing whatever they wanted to do domestically or internationally.

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