White House announces retaliation against Russia: Sanctions, ejecting diplomats
I'm aware there's a thread on this but I pose the question: Where does the US government and media alike get this rubbish from? Which analyst within the security services comes to the conclusion that Russia has hacked the US polls and which evidence, if any?
Also, given there's an abundance of techies here, I'd like to understand the technicalities of this; how can a government body in Russia find, hack into the network of and manipulate poll results from the motherland? I haven't looked into this too deeply but isn't it a manual counting exercise, every town/state have independent systems submitting results?
I remember reading an article in 2014 when The Interview movie was released. Sony got hacked - what was the immediate reaction? North Korea did it! Ok... I won't even start on this one as it was eventually found out to be rubbish, I believe and carried out by disgruntled employees.
I thought this was worth a discussion, as I said given it's a board of techies and I'm seeing 'we've been hacked by the Russians' more and more in the headlines.
Firstly, "hacking" is a terrible phrasing for this. Wikileaks and a former UK ambassador are stating that the emails were a leak from an insider, not a hack. Secondly, the case where John Podesta fell for a phishing scam where he followed a link in an email telling him he needed to reset his password, does not constitute hacking. A fifteen year old kid could have done it (example drawn from the Irish boy who hacked TalkTalk). It hardly requires a state actor to pull this off. First rule of dealing with the media on a specialist subject, is to check whether the terms they are using are actually accurate. They are not.
Secondly, evidence of it being Russia is shaky. If I wanted to hack somewhere, I could do it "from Russia" pretty easily. Proxies, VPNs... The CIA claim it was done from Russia and that the people who did it have known links to the Kremlin. Not really a smoking gun even if true, but the CIA are refusing to provide actual evidence. Not only to the public, but to the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee in their own government. The CIA have previously liked to a Congressional Enquiry about their use of torture. They are known to have lied about things on numerous occasions and have interfered in the selection of governments in multiple countries including Australia! It's the CIA, after all. They used to run drugs to fund their own operations independent of US government funding. None of this is "Conspiracy Theory", you can look it up easily enough. The head of the FBI has declined to prosecute Hillary Clinton for known criminal acts.
Against that, you have Julian Assange and Wikileaks who, though hated by many, have consistently disseminated true information and not been caught out lying to my knowledge. If one holds to logic, precedence and motive, their statement that it is not Russia beats the CIA's claims of "we found some evidence, trust us. No we wont show it to you but hey, we're American so we're honest, right?"
And I'm sure Saddam's WMD will be found any day now, too.
The Democrat party are attempting to force their geopolitical agenda through quickly before Trump - who favours reconciliation - takes office. Essentially, imo, a philosophy of "start the fire now so it can't be put out", which is why Trump is taking the unprecedented step for a President Elect of direct international communication prior to taking office. That's not normally done for good reason, but I'd say the hand is being forced in this instance given the current executive's determination to start down a road that can't be easily backed out of before someone else gets their turn at the wheel.
And finally, let us all remember that we're not talking about altering voting machine records or similar. We're talking about the US public finding out what the DNC and Hillary actually said and thought. From a democracy point of view, that's a good thing. The same doesn't apply to Trump because he can't be embarrassed and all the awful things he said are already out there. The DNC and Hillary, however, did have something to lose by their corruption being exposed.
My guess is that the KGB paid some independent hacker to hack the DNP servers.[/URL]
KGB was dismantled seventeen years ago. It had too much power and was broken up. A lesson the USA could benefit from with the NSA and CIA.