CIA report - Russia intervened in the 2016 election

[Raj Ahten]

So there are now multiple articles and reports out there detailing some of the evidence that this hack was a Russian job. It's not all Black bag CIA stuff. Private firms have also evaluated the evidence. A lot of media likes to portray anything cyber as unknowable, dangerous and arcane like magic. Since most people don't have a clue how anything works this flies, when in reality experts can discern a hell of a lot. All this evidence makes Trump's continued denial even more ludicrous and alarming. The fact that so many Republicans continue to just echo everything he says again shows us just how much loyal party stooges they are. The article has a lot of inline links worth looking at on the original site.

Original Article

In the wee hours of June 14, the Washington Post revealed that “Russian government hackers” had penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. Foreign spies, the Post claimed, had gained access to the DNC’s entire database of opposition research on the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, just weeks before the Republican Convention. Hillary Clinton said the attack was “troubling.”

It began ominously. Nearly two months earlier, in April, the Democrats had noticed that something was wrong in their networks. Then, in early May, the DNC called in CrowdStrike, a security firm that specializes in countering advanced network threats. After deploying their tools on the DNC’s machines, and after about two hours of work, CrowdStrike found “two sophisticated adversaries” on the Committee’s network. The two groups were well-known in the security industry as “APT 28” and “APT 29.” APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threat—usually jargon for spies.

This story is part of Motherboard's hacking theme week, The Hacks We Can't See. Follow along here.

CrowdStrike linked both groups to “the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services.” APT 29, suspected to be the FSB, had been on the DNC’s network since at least summer 2015. APT 28, identified as Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU, had breached the Democrats only in April 2016, and probably tipped off the investigation. CrowdStrike found no evidence of collaboration between the two intelligence agencies inside the DNC’s networks, “or even an awareness of one by the other,” the firm wrote.

This was big. Democratic political operatives suspected that not one but two teams of Putin’s spies were trying to help Trump and harm Clinton. The Trump campaign, after all, was getting friendly with Russia. The Democrats decided to go public.

Digitally exfiltrating and then publishing possibly manipulated documents disguised as freewheeling hacktivism is crossing a big red line and setting a dangerous precedent

The DNC knew that this wild claim would have to be backed up by solid evidence. A Post story wouldn’t provide enough detail, so CrowdStrike had prepared a technical report to go online later that morning. The security firm carefully outlined some of the allegedly “superb” tradecraft of both intrusions: the Russian software implants were stealthy, they could sense locally-installed virus scanners and other defenses, the tools were customizable through encrypted configuration files, they were persistent, and the intruders used an elaborate command-and-control infrastructure. So the security firm claimed to have outed two intelligence operations.

Then, the next day, the story exploded.

On June 15 a Wordpress blog popped up out of nowhere. And, soon, a Twitter account, @GUCCIFER_2. The first post and tweet were clumsily titled: “DNC’s servers hacked by a lone hacker.” The message: that it was not hacked by Russian intelligence. The mysterious online persona claimed to have given “thousands of files and mails” to Wikileaks, while mocking the firm investigating the case: “I guess CrowdStrike customers should think twice about company’s competence,” the post said, adding “Fuck CrowdStrike!!!!!!!!!”

Along with the abuse, the Guccifer 2.0 account started publishing stolen DNC documents on the Wordpress blog, on file sharing sites, and by giving “a few docs from many thousands” to at least two US publications, The Smoking Gun and Gawker. Mainstream media outlets quickly picked up the story and covered the Clinton campaign’s opposition research on Trump in hundreds of news items that revealed pre-rehearsed arguments against the presumptive Republican nominee: that “Trump has no core”; that he is a “bad businessman;” and that he should be branded “misogynist in chief.” Donor lists were leaked along with personal contact details and juicy dollar amounts.

The Guccifer 2.0 account also claimed that it had given an unknown number of documents containing “election programs, strategies, plans against Reps, financial reports, etc” to Wikileaks. Two days later, Wikileaks published a massive 88 gigabyte encrypted file as “insurance.” This file, which Julian Assange could unlock by simply tweeting a key, is widely suspected to contain the DNC cache. On 13 July, almost a month after the hack became public, the intruders leaked selected files exclusively to The Hill, a Washington outlet for Congressional and political news, and then made the original files available later.

Nine days later, on July 22, just after Trump was officially nominated and before the Democratic National Convention got under way, Wikileaks published more than 19,000 DNC emails with more than 8,000 attachments—“i sent them emails, i posted some files in my blog,” Guccifer confirmed by DM, when asked if he shared all files with Julian Assange. Two days later, on July 24, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of Democratic National Committee, announced her resignation—the extraordinary hack and leak had helped force out the head of one of America’s political parties and threatened to disrupt Hillary Clinton's nominating convention.

This tactic and its remarkable success is a game-changer: exfiltrating documents from political organisations is a legitimate form of intelligence work. The US and European countries do it as well. But digitally exfiltrating and then publishing possibly manipulated documents disguised as freewheeling hacktivism is crossing a big red line and setting a dangerous precedent: an authoritarian country directly yet covertly trying to sabotage an American election.

***

So how good is the evidence? And what does all this mean?

The forensic evidence linking the DNC breach to known Russian operations is very strong. On June 20, two competing cybersecurity companies, Mandiant (part of FireEye) and Fidelis, confirmed CrowdStrike’s initial findings that Russian intelligence indeed hacked the DNC. The forensic evidence that links network breaches to known groups is solid: used and reused tools, methods, infrastructure, even unique encryption keys. For example: in late March the attackers registered a domain with a typo—misdepatrment[.]com—to look suspiciously like the company hired by the DNC to manage its network, MIS Department. They then linked this deceptive domain to a long-known APT 28 so-called X-Tunnel command-and-control IP address, 45.32.129[.]185.

One of the strongest pieces of evidence linking GRU to the DNC hack is the equivalent of identical fingerprints found in two burglarized buildings: a reused command-and-control address—176.31.112[.]10—that was hard coded in a piece of malware found both in the German parliament as well as on the DNC’s servers. Russian military intelligence was identified by the German domestic security agency BfV as the actor responsible for the Bundestag breach. The infrastructure behind the fake MIS Department domain was also linked to the Berlin intrusion through at least one other element, a shared SSL certificate.

The evidence linking the Guccifer 2.0 account to the same Russian operators is not as solid, yet a deception operation—a GRU false flag, in technical jargon—is still highly likely. Intelligence operatives and cybersecurity professionals long knew that such false flags were becoming more common. One noteworthy example was the sabotage of France’s TV5 Monde station on 9/10 April 2015, initially claimed by the mysterious “CyberCaliphate,” a group allegedly linked to ISIS. Then, in June, the French authorities suspected the same infamous APT 28 group behind the TV5 Monde breach, in preparation since January of that year. But the DNC deception is the most detailed and most significant case study so far. The technical details are as remarkable as its strategic context.

The metadata in the leaked documents are perhaps most revealing: one dumped document was modified using Russian language settings, by a user named “Феликс Эдмундович,” a code name referring to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka, memorialised in a 15-ton iron statue in front of the old KGB headquarters during Soviet times. The original intruders made other errors: one leaked document included hyperlink error messages in Cyrillic, the result of editing the file on a computer with Russian language settings. After this mistake became public, the intruders removed the Cyrillic information from the metadata in the next dump and carefully used made-up user names from different world regions, thereby confirming they had made a mistake in the first round.

Image: Harry Popoff/Flickr

Then there is the language issue. “I hate being attributed to Russia,” the Guccifer 2.0 account told Motherboard, probably accurately. The person at the keyboard then claimed in a chat with Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai that Guccifer 2.0 was from Romania, like the original Guccifer, a well-known hacker. But when asked to explain his hack in Romanian, he was unable to respond colloquially and without errors. Guccifer 2.0’s English initially was also weak, but in subsequent posts the quality improved sharply, albeit only on political subjects, not in technical matters—an indication of a team of operators at work behind the scenes.

Other features are also suspicious. One is timing, as ThreatConnect, another security company, has pointed out in a useful analysis: various timestamps indicate that the Guccifer-branded leaking operation was prompted by the DNC’s initial publicity, with preparation starting around 24 hours after CrowdStrike’s report came out. Both APT 28 and Guccifer were using French infrastructure for communications. ThreatConnect then pointed out that both the self-proclaimed hacker’s technical statements on the use of 0-day exploits as well as the alleged timeline of the DNC breach are most likely false. Another odd circumstantial finding: sock-puppet social media accounts may have been created specifically to amplify and extend Guccifer’s reach, as UK intelligence startup Ripjar told me.

Perhaps most curiously, the Guccifer 2.0 account, from the beginning, was not simply claiming to have breached the DNC network—but claiming that two Russian actors actually were not on the DNC network at the same time. It is common to find multiple intruders in tempting yet badly defended networks. Nevertheless the Guccifer 2.0 account claimed confidently, and with no supporting evidence, that the breach was simply a “lone hacker”—a phrasing that seems designed to deflect blame from Russia. Guccifer 2.0’s availability to the journalists was also surprising, and something new altogether.

The combative yet error-prone handling of the Guccifer account is in line with the GRU’s aggressive and risk-taking organizational culture and a wartime mindset prevalent in the Russian intelligence community. Russia’s agencies see themselves as instruments of direct action, working in support of a fragile Russia under siege by the West, especially the United States.

***

The larger operation, with its manipulative traits, fits well into the wider framework of Russia’s evolving military doctrine, known as New Generation Warfare or the “Gerasimov Doctrine,” named after Valery Gerasimov, the current Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. This new mindset drastically expands what qualifies as a military target, and it expands what qualifies as military tactic. Deception and disinformation are part and parcel of this new approach, as are “camouflage and concealment,” as the Israeli analyst Dima Adamsky pointed out in an important study of Russia’s evolving strategic art published in November last year.

“Informational struggle,” Adamsky observes, is at the center of New Generation Warfare. Informational struggle means “technological and psychological components designed to manipulate the adversary’s picture of reality, misinform it, and eventually interfere with the decision-making process of individuals, organizations, governments, and societies.”

The Guccifer 2 operation appears to be designed and executed as part of a wider “informational struggle.” The implications are highly significant.

First, the operation is not over. The Russian spies got their hands on a large number of files from inside and beyond the Democratic National Committee. APT 29—the suspected FSB-controlled group—had protracted access to the DNC’s email messages, chats, attachments, and more. Russian groups have also targeted Clinton’s wider campaign organisation at least since October 2015. Guccifer 2.0, in an email to The Smoking Gun, even claimed to have “some secret documents from Hillary’s PC she worked with as the Secretary of State.” It is unclear if this assertion is accurate, and indeed it is unclear if all leaked documents are actually sourced from the DNC breach. About three weeks later, on July 5, the FBI’s James Comey assessed that it was “possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.” The DNC intruders are likely to retain or regain some of this access. Moreover, the Guccifer 2.0 account has now been established as venue to distribute leaked documents. More activity, if not escalation, is to be expected.

American inaction now risks establishing a de facto norm that all election campaigns in the future, everywhere, are fair game for sabotage

Second, stolen documents leaked in an influence operation are not fully trustworthy. Deception operations are designed to deceive. The metadata show that the Russian operators apparently edited some documents, and in some cases created new documents after the intruders were already expunged from the DNC network on June 11. A file called donors.xls, for instance, was created more than a day after the story came out, on June 15, most likely by copy-pasting an existing list into a clean document.

Although so far the actual content of the leaked documents appears not to have been tampered with, manipulation would fit an established pattern of operational behaviour in other contexts, such as troll farms or planting fake media stories. Subtle (or not so subtle) manipulation of content may be in the interest of the adversary in the future. Documents that were leaked by or through an intelligence operation should be handled with great care, and journalists should not simply treat them as reliable sources.

Third, the DNC operation is unlikely to remain an exception. The political influencing as well as the deception worked, at least partly. The DNC’s ability to use its opposition research in surprise against Trump has been blunted, and some media outlets lampooned Clinton—not a bad outcome for an operation with little risk or cost for the perpetrators.

Another takeaway: the deception does not have to be executed with perfection; it is sufficient simply to spread doubt. High journalistic standards, paradoxically, work in GRU’s favour, as stories come with the Kremlin’s official denials casting doubt as well as pundits second-guessing even solid forensic evidence. If other intelligence agencies also assess that this operation was a success, even if only a moderate one, then more such false flag influence operations are likely in future elections, especially in Europe.

Democracies, finally, have a double disadvantage. General election campaigns and their ad-hoc organisations offer a soft, juicy target: improvised and badly secured networks, highly combustible content, all combined with a reluctance on the part of law enforcement agencies and private sector companies to wade into what could easily become a high-stakes political mess.

Offenders, however, will also find such online operations newly risky. Operational security was rather different in traditional spying and offline sabotage ops. The Guccifer 2 team probably underestimated the remarkable crowdsourced forensic scrutiny that their advanced political trolling would trigger—with a good deal of that analysis playing out on Twitter, nearly in real-time, for example by one experienced analyst posting as Pwn All The Things.

Not reacting politically to the DNC hack is setting a dangerous precedent. A foreign agency, exploiting Wikileaks and a cutthroat media marketplace, appears to be carefully planning and timing a high-stakes political campaign in the United States that could escalate next week, next fall, or next time. Trump, ironically, is right: the system is actually rigged.

American inaction now risks establishing a de facto norm that all election campaigns in the future, everywhere, are fair game for sabotage—sabotage that could potentially affect the outcome and tarnish the winner’s legitimacy. Inaction also risks squandering the deterrent effects created by the White House’s reaction to North Korea’s role in the infamous Sony Hack, as well as the US Department of Justice indictments of Chinese and Iranian operatives. Remarkably, so far the only countries that have had the confidence to call out aggressive Russian operations are Germany along with Switzerland and France in a more limited way.

It is time for the United States (and the United Kingdom) to pull their weight: by publishing more evidence, by signalling political consequences for the perpetrators, by treating Wikileaks as a legitimate counter-intelligence target, and by providing not only physical but also improved digital security to candidates and campaigns in the future.

Thomas Rid works at King’s College London. He is author of Rise of the Machines (W.W. Norton/Scribe, 2016). You can follow him on Twitter @RidT.

[Vympel]

So there are now multiple articles and reports out there detailing some of the evidence that this hack was a Russian job. It's not all Black bag CIA stuff. Private firms have also evaluated the evidence. A lot of media likes to portray anything cyber as unknowable, dangerous and arcane like magic. Since most people don't have a clue how anything works this flies, when in reality experts can discern a hell of a lot. All this evidence makes Trump's continued denial even more ludicrous and alarming. The fact that so many Republicans continue to just echo everything he says again shows us just how much loyal party stooges they are. The article has a lot of inline links worth looking at on the original site.

The private firms peddle dogshit to layperson reporters who don't know any better out of financial/publicity-driven self-interest.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russi ... SKBN12X075

Last summer, cyber investigators plowing through the thousands of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee uncovered a clue.

A user named “Феликс Эдмундович” modified one of the documents using settings in the Russian language. Translated, his name was Felix Edmundovich, a pseudonym referring to Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the chief of the Soviet Union’s first secret-police organization, the Cheka.

It was one more link in the chain of evidence pointing to Russian President Vladimir Putin as the man ultimately behind the operation.

During the Cold War, when Soviet intelligence was headquartered in Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow, Putin was a KGB officer assigned to the First Chief Directorate. Its responsibilities included “active measures,” a form of political warfare that included media manipulation, propaganda and disinformation. Soviet active measures, retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin told Army historian Thomas Boghart, aimed to discredit the United States and “conquer world public opinion.”

As the Cold War has turned into the code war, Putin recently unveiled his new, greatly enlarged spy organization: the Ministry of State Security, taking the name from Joseph Stalin’s secret service. Putin also resurrected, according to James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, some of the KGB’s old active- measures tactics.

On October 7, Clapper issued a statement: “The U.S. Intelligence community is confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations.” Notably, however, the FBI declined to join the chorus, according to reports by the New York Times and CNBC.

A week later, Vice President Joe Biden said on NBC’s Meet the Press that "we're sending a message" to Putin and "it will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will have the greatest impact." When asked if the American public would know a message was sent, Biden replied, "Hope not."

Meanwhile, the CIA was asked, according to an NBC report on October 14, “to deliver options to the White House for a wide-ranging ‘clandestine’ cyber operation designed to harass and ‘embarrass’ the Kremlin leadership.”

But as both sides begin arming their cyberweapons, it is critical for the public to be confident that the evidence is really there, and to understand the potential consequences of a tit-for-tat cyberwar escalating into a real war.

This is a prospect that has long worried Richard Clarke, the former White House cyber czar under President George W. Bush. “It’s highly likely that any war that began as a cyberwar,” Clarke told me last year, “would ultimately end up being a conventional war, where the United States was engaged with bombers and missiles.”

The problem with attempting to draw a straight line from the Kremlin to the Clinton campaign is the number of variables that get in the way. For one, there is little doubt about Russian cyber fingerprints in various U.S. campaign activities. Moscow, like Washington, has long spied on such matters. The United States, for example, inserted malware in the recent Mexican election campaign. The question isn’t whether Russia spied on the U.S. presidential election, it’s whether it released the election emails.

Then there’s the role of Guccifer 2.0, the person or persons supplying WikiLeaks and other organizations with many of the pilfered emails. Is this a Russian agent? A free agent? A cybercriminal? A combination, or some other entity? No one knows.

There is also the problem of groupthink that led to the war in Iraq. For example, just as the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the rest of the intelligence establishment are convinced Putin is behind the attacks, they also believed it was a slam-dunk that Saddam Hussein had a trove of weapons of mass destruction.

Consider as well the speed of the political-hacking investigation, followed by a lack of skepticism, culminating in a rush to judgment. After the Democratic committee discovered the potential hack last spring, it called in the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in May to analyze the problem.

CrowdStrike took just a month or so before it conclusively determined that Russia’s FSB, the successor to the KGB, and the Russian military intelligence organization, GRU, were behind it. Most of the other major cybersecurity firms quickly fell in line and agreed. By October, the intelligence community made it unanimous.

That speed and certainty contrasts sharply with a previous suspected Russian hack in 2010, when the target was the Nasdaq stock market. According to an extensive investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014, the NSA and FBI made numerous mistakes over many months that stretched to nearly a year.

“After months of work,” the article said, “there were still basic disagreements in different parts of government over who was behind the incident and why.” There was no consensus­, with just a 70 percent certainty that the hack was a cybercrime. Months later, this determination was revised again: It was just a Russian attempt to spy on the exchange in order to design its own.

The federal agents also considered the possibility that the Nasdaq snooping was not connected to the Kremlin. Instead, “someone in the FSB could have been running a for-profit operation on the side, or perhaps sold the malware to a criminal hacking group.”

Again, that’s why it’s necessary to better understand the role of Guccifer 2.0 in releasing the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails before launching any cyberweapons.

It is strange that clues in the Nasdaq hack were very difficult to find ― as one would expect from a professional, state-sponsored cyber operation. Conversely, the sloppy, Inspector Clouseau-like nature of the Guccifer 2.0 operation, with someone hiding behind a silly Bolshevik cover name, and Russian language clues in the metadata, smacked more of either an amateur operation or a deliberate deception.

Then there’s the Shadow Brokers, that mysterious person or group that surfaced in August with its farcical “auction” to profit from a stolen batch of extremely secret NSA hacking tools, in essence, cyberweapons. Where do they fit into the picture? They have a small armory of NSA cyberweapons, and they appeared just three weeks after the first DNC emails were leaked.

On Monday, the Shadow Brokers released more information, including what they claimed is a list of hundreds of organizations that the NSA has targeted over more than a decade, complete with technical details. This offers further evidence that their information comes from a leaker inside the NSA rather than the Kremlin.

The Shadow Brokers also discussed Obama’s threat of cyber retaliation against Russia. Yet they seemed most concerned that the CIA, rather than the NSA or Cyber Command, was given the assignment. This may be a possible indication of a connection to NSA’s elite group, Tailored Access Operations, considered by many the A-Team of hackers.

“Why is DirtyGrandpa threating CIA cyberwar with Russia?” they wrote. “Why not threating with NSA or Cyber Command? CIA is cyber B-Team, yes? Where is cyber A-Team?”

Because of legal and other factors, the NSA conducts cyber espionage, Cyber Command conducts cyberattacks in wartime, and the CIA conducts covert cyberattacks.

The Shadow Brokers connection is important because Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, claimed to have received identical copies of the Shadow Brokers cyberweapons even before they announced their “auction.” Did he get them from the Shadow Brokers, from Guccifer, from Russia or from an inside leaker at the NSA?

Despite the rushed, incomplete investigation and unanswered questions, the Obama administration has announced its decision to retaliate against Russia. But a public warning about a secret attack makes little sense. If a major cyber crisis happens in Russia sometime in the future, such as a deadly power outage in frigid winter, the United States could be blamed even if it had nothing to do with it.

That could then trigger a major retaliatory cyberattack against the U.S. cyber infrastructure, which would call for another reprisal attack ― potentially leading to Clarke’s fear of a cyberwar triggering a conventional war. President Barack Obama has also not taken a nuclear strike off the table as an appropriate response to a devastating cyberattack.

In August 2009, there was a massive turbine explosion in a power plant at the Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam, on the Yenisei River, in a remote part of the Russian Republic of Khakassia. Cyberwarfare was suspected. It is the ninth-largest hydroelectric plant in the world, more than three times the size of Hoover Dam, and supplies thousands of square miles of western Russia with electricity. Seventy-five people were killed, and the dam, with 30 million tons of water pressure pushing against its 80-story-tall curved cement wall, was in danger of collapsing, potentially drowning thousands of people down river.

It was determined that the explosion was caused by computer code sent from hundreds of miles away. But how or why was the question. Even within U.S. Cyber Command, there were grave concerns about the blast. One Army study that discussed the explosion referred to Marine General Robert E. Schmidle, the deputy commander of Cyber Command, and suggested that he had “speculated this was a possible network attack.”

Shortly after the power-plant explosion, computers at the U.S. Department of the Interior were targeted and an unknown hacker stole a sensitive index of vulnerabilities at thousands of U.S. dams.

Russian engineers conducted a long investigation and concluded that the code was sent by accident from another Russian power plant. Nonetheless, U.S. Army General Keith Alexander, the commander of Cyber Command and director of the NSA, brought up the explosion during a conference and warned, “That's our concern about what's coming in cyberspace, a destructive element. It's coming. It's a question of time.”

If something similar were to happen following Biden’s warning, the Russians could assume the worst and launch a deadly counterattack, rather than wait months for the results of an investigation.

By now, Obama should also be wise enough not to trust the advice of his spy chiefs when it comes to cyber conflict. At the start of his first term, he authorized the Stuxnet cyberattack that destroyed about a thousand of Iran’s centrifuges used for enriching uranium. This was an illegal act of war, and the first instance of cyberwar.

Obama was told that the computer viruses would not escape the facility, would not affect any other computers if they did escape, and would never be traced back to the United States in any case.

All three claims turned out to be incorrect. The viruses did escape, they infected tens of thousands of computers in many countries and they were quickly traced back to the United States. The operation was also a bust: It destroyed a small fraction of the intended centrifuges and only slightly delayed Iran’s enrichment. It also caused Iran to create its own cyber command and retaliate by destroying 30,000 computers belonging to a U.S. oil supplier. U.S. banks were also attacked.

Rather than launch a dangerous covert cyberattack with unknown consequences ―as the administration did against Iran ― it would be far wiser for Obama to press for further economic sanctions, as the administration did with North Korea. At the same time, Washington could begin focusing on cyber defense, long neglected as billions go instead to cyber offense.

“I think the public believes that the U.S. government – Cyber Command, NSA, FBI, Homeland Security – has the capability to defend the electric power grid, pipelines, trains, banks that could be attacked by other nations through cyber,” Clarke told me. “The truth is the government doesn’t have the capability, doesn’t have the legal authority and doesn’t have a plan to do it.”

Washington could also begin exploring new Internet and cyber technologies that are not as easy to attack and destroy, as well as opening an international dialogue on ways to achieve cyberarms control.

“People say that’s going to be very, very difficult and verification will be very, very hard,” said Clarke. “I heard that a long time ago about nuclear arms control and then about chemical-arms control – about biological-arms control. But we achieved all of those . . . . Therefore, we should start talking about cyberarms control and cyber peace now.”

Starting with Vietnam, the list of wars the United States has entered with disastrous results continues to grow. Engaging Russia in a potentially endless cyberwar based on questionable evidence will only make it longer. It’s time to find better alternatives.

And more:

http://harpers.org/archive/2016/12/the-new-red-scare/

“OK,” wrote Jeffrey Carr, the CEO of cybersecurity firm Taia Global, in a derisive blog post on the case. “Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add Iron Felix’s name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker.” As Carr, a rare skeptic regarding the official line on the hacks, explained to me, “They’re basically saying that the Russian intelligence services are completely inept. That one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing, that they have no concern about using a free Russian email account or a Russian server that has already been known to be affiliated with cybercrime. This makes them sound like the Keystone Cops. Then, in the same breath, they’ll say how sophisticated Russia’s cyberwarfare capabilities are.”

In reality, Carr continued, “It’s almost impossible to confirm attribution in cyberspace.” For example, a tool developed by the Chinese to attack Google in 2009 was later reused by the so-called Equation Group against officials of the Afghan government. So the Afghans, had they investigated, might have assumed they were being hacked by the Chinese. Thanks to a leak by Edward Snowden, however, it now appears that the Equation Group was in fact the NSA. “It doesn’t take much to leave a trail of bread crumbs to whichever government you want to blame for an attack,” Carr pointed out.

Bill Binney, the former technical director of the NSA, shares Carr’s skepticism about the Russian attribution. “Saying it does not make it true,” he told me. “They have to provide proof. . . . So let’s see the evidence.”

[Raj Ahten]

The private firms peddle dogshit to layperson reporters who don't know any better out of financial/publicity-driven self-interest.

So some reporters don't do their homework? So that disproves all the evidence presented how? And your articles are far from refuting all the evidence presented. Who's to say that Russian intelligence doesn't leave their fingerprints all over everything? Since when do intel agencies not fuck up and leave attributable evidence that they are responsible for their operations? Oh that's right you can tell all the time who is actually behind things because covert agencies fuck up all the time regardless of which nation runs them. How many organizations have access to Polonium to poison people with again? And the Green Men in Crimea were so subtle they could have come from anywhere! Russia has hardly been light handed in operations in the past and saying that its not the Russians because there is evidence Russia did it (Half the point of your second article) is ludicrous. Just because it's hard to build attribution doesn't mean you can't do it. It happens all the time otherwise no one would ever be convicted with hacking because telling who did it is impossible.

[Vympel]

So some reporters don't do their homework? So that disproves all the evidence presented how? And your articles are far from refuting all the evidence presented. Who's to say that Russian intelligence doesn't leave their fingerprints all over everything? Since when do intel agencies not fuck up and leave attributable evidence that they are responsible for their operations? Oh that's right you can tell all the time who is actually behind things because covert agencies fuck up all the time regardless of which nation runs them. How many organizations have access to Polonium to poison people with again? And the Green Men in Crimea were so subtle they could have come from anywhere! Russia has hardly been light handed in operations in the past and saying that its not the Russians because there is evidence Russia did it (Half the point of your second article) is ludicrous. Just because it's hard to build attribution doesn't mean you can't do it. It happens all the time otherwise no one would ever be convicted with hacking because telling who did it is impossible.

The 'evidence' presented is absurd. Its the equivalent of saying that if someone killed someone with an AK-47, they must've been from the Russian government because AK-47s were made in Russia. Its 'evidence' by and for gullible idiots. Similarly, the notion that a moniker for 'Iron Felix' is legitimate evidence for Russian involvement is so asinine it beggars belief.

Your entire argument hinges on the Russian security services being stunningly incompetent (including using free yandex email accounts, for fuck's sake), and you think this is a credible argument? Its a joke.

I'm not sure how much the birtherfication of the Democrats - so pathetically desperate to hang their loss on someone other than themselves - will prevent rational discourse, but Jeffrey Carr has done numerous takedowns on the low, low quality of evidence from those full of shit private security firms:

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/the-dnc ... e89dacfc2b

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/the-yan ... .apoem7s33

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/putins- ... .ycwp55bak

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/can-fac ... .jmrc4fiyp

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/the-ari ... .3t8pexm27

As always with bullshit, it requires a shitload more effort to disprove it than to merely say it. So for example, the claim in the article you cite about the hacks being tied by the Germans to the Russians? False. That's an unproven assumption, never substantiated. The shared SSL certificate? Outdated and vulnerable. There's a lot more.

That last link points out the exceedingly low standards private security firms have when they attempted to tie the Arizona DNC hacks to the Russians.

-

[Sea Skimmer]

Even if the Russian's paid for it, they'd just be completely stupid to actually do it with elite red guards uniformed cybercommandos on the Kremlin public wifi while being filmed by tourists, and that's about the level of proof we'd need to be certain. They, or many others, could hire anyone in the world who can read English to do it and it'd never be possible to prove. This absurdly limits my ability to care about any claimed proof.

None of it could have ever mattered if the DNC wasn't so stupid, and Hillary wasn't so hated for so long. Sure some of it was irrational, but it's not someone's right to be president. That was like the whole point of shooting at the British until they left. The Trump campaign did not hide that it was campaigning hard in the rust belt states that won Trump the presidency.

Also as a strategic reality, even if Trump warms relations with Russia his plan to also literally put the oil companies in charge of America and drill to Victory won't do good things for the Russian economy either.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

The private firms peddle dogshit to layperson reporters who don't know any better out of financial/publicity-driven self-interest.

So some reporters don't do their homework? So that disproves all the evidence presented how? And your articles are far from refuting all the evidence presented. Who's to say that Russian intelligence doesn't leave their fingerprints all over everything? Since when do intel agencies not fuck up and leave attributable evidence that they are responsible for their operations? Oh that's right you can tell all the time who is actually behind things because covert agencies fuck up all the time regardless of which nation runs them. How many organizations have access to Polonium to poison people with again? And the Green Men in Crimea were so subtle they could have come from anywhere! Russia has hardly been light handed in operations in the past and saying that its not the Russians because there is evidence Russia did it (Half the point of your second article) is ludicrous. Just because it's hard to build attribution doesn't mean you can't do it. It happens all the time otherwise no one would ever be convicted with hacking because telling who did it is impossible.

Why do you think that reporters will do their homework? What incentive do they have to do their homework when they are expected to toe a certain line and just regurgitate someone else's 'homework'? You are making many suppositions based on "blind faith".

[Shroom Man 777]

Reporters who spew totally nonsensical crap *will* suffer consequences if they're caught making shit up. Like that guy photoshopping war images of Lebanon, making it look like the Israeli attacks were destroying entire cities or something.

There are disincentives for lying - yes, there are immediate profits for sensationalized stories but being caught will also screw over the liar.

There are also legitimate incentives for telling the truth and presenting the facts objectively and with nuance. Yes, it's not as immediate as sensationalized BS but this is why Glenn Beck and Alex Jones aren't hosting CNN and they aren't even in Fox News.

It's not "blind faith." There are existing - albeit dysfunctional, slow and not-as-thorough - feedback mechanisms. Or else you might as well go all the way and be solipsistic and say EVERY news, EVERY written piece, you read is manufactured by some agenda-having sinister conspiracy.

Climate change might as well be a hoax!

[cosmicalstorm]

Trump seems to have a very solid support from police, military and gun lovers in general.

WHAT IF the electors go with HRC in January? That would be one of the last Nails in the coffin for a civil war scenario to play out.

[The Romulan Republic]

He has support from some police, military, and gun nuts. It is not universal. Bernie was also quite popular with veterans.

Also, it is a hell of a long way from "support Trump" to "engage in violent revolt to install him". I don't doubt for one minute that their are many people willing to do so, and I'll admit that the apparent collusion of Republican leaders and the FBI in concealing Russian interference in the election and working to install Trump has shaken my faith in the willingness of our government institutions to uphold even the most basic rule of law or democratic principles, but still... that's a big leap, and many won't take it, or will do so only if its already a foregone conclusion. Especially when the military explicitly swears to defend the Constitution, not serve the President (much less President-elect), and as much as I hate the EC, Electors have every God damn right and arguably a duty, under how the EC was intended to function, to vote against Trump, and are not Constitutionally prohibited from doing so.

I should also point out that from what I've heard, a lot of the intelligence community loathes Trump, and he has done nothing to endear himself to the CIA here.

[Lord Revan]

Honestly I find it more likely that FSB planted "evidence" of trying to manipulate the US elections without actually doing so in an effort to discredit who ever got elected, then that Trump would be planning for a violent coup (note that no ever plans for a civil war as their main plan, those happen when a opposition to the current system isn't strong enough to fully overthrow the system but too strong to be crushed).

[The Romulan Republic]

I don't know about Trump planning it, but I could see some of his supporters trying it with or without instructions from the top. When you unleash the nut bags, it can be hard to reign them back in.

That said, I don't imagine for a second that Trump, or any of his fuck head brigade, has the organization and planning in place to pull off an armed uprising unless the bulk of the armed forces either sided openly with him or was at least willing to stay on the side lines. And like I said... I doubt that happening. And if we've gotten to the point, as a country, where that could happen... we're probably fucked any way you slice it.

On the other hand... I'd put pretty much nothing past Trump, because he's clearly an ego maniac with a raging entitlement complex and no clear understanding of his own limits or how the world works. And one who has flirted with political violence before. A major reason why I don't think he's likely to be organizing a violent contingency plan for if the EC rejects him is because he's a) too arrogant to think he'll need it, b) too stupid at anything other than conning people to pull it off, and c) not willing to jeopardize himself. Not because I think he wouldn't stoop that low out of any sort of principle.

[mr friendly guy]

I'm not sure how much the birtherfication of the Democrats - so pathetically desperate to hang their loss on someone other than themselves - will prevent rational discourse, but Jeffrey Carr has done numerous takedowns on the low, low quality of evidence from those full of shit private security firms:

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/the-dnc ... e89dacfc2b

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/the-yan ... .apoem7s33

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/putins- ... .ycwp55bak

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/can-fac ... .jmrc4fiyp

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/the-ari ... .3t8pexm27

As always with bullshit, it requires a shitload more effort to disprove it than to merely say it. So for example, the claim in the article you cite about the hacks being tied by the Germans to the Russians? False. That's an unproven assumption, never substantiated. The shared SSL certificate? Outdated and vulnerable. There's a lot more.

That last link points out the exceedingly low standards private security firms have when they attempted to tie the Arizona DNC hacks to the Russians.

-

Looking at your links, Jesus. Nancy Pelosi just knows Russia did it. She outright states it wasn't from intelligence agencies, she just knows. Fucking hell.

[Raj Ahten]

So some reporters don't do their homework? So that disproves all the evidence presented how? And your articles are far from refuting all the evidence presented. Who's to say that Russian intelligence doesn't leave their fingerprints all over everything? Since when do intel agencies not fuck up and leave attributable evidence that they are responsible for their operations? Oh that's right you can tell all the time who is actually behind things because covert agencies fuck up all the time regardless of which nation runs them. How many organizations have access to Polonium to poison people with again? And the Green Men in Crimea were so subtle they could have come from anywhere! Russia has hardly been light handed in operations in the past and saying that its not the Russians because there is evidence Russia did it (Half the point of your second article) is ludicrous. Just because it's hard to build attribution doesn't mean you can't do it. It happens all the time otherwise no one would ever be convicted with hacking because telling who did it is impossible.

The 'evidence' presented is absurd. Its the equivalent of saying that if someone killed someone with an AK-47, they must've been from the Russian government because AK-47s were made in Russia. Its 'evidence' by and for gullible idiots. Similarly, the notion that a moniker for 'Iron Felix' is legitimate evidence for Russian involvement is so asinine it beggars belief.

Your entire argument hinges on the Russian security services being stunningly incompetent (including using free yandex email accounts, for fuck's sake), and you think this is a credible argument? Its a joke.

I'm not sure how much the birtherfication of the Democrats - so pathetically desperate to hang their loss on someone other than themselves - will prevent rational discourse, but Jeffrey Carr has done numerous takedowns on the low, low quality of evidence from those full of shit private security firms:

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/the-dnc ... e89dacfc2b

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/the-yan ... .apoem7s33

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/putins- ... .ycwp55bak

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/can-fac ... .jmrc4fiyp

https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/the-ari ... .3t8pexm27

As always with bullshit, it requires a shitload more effort to disprove it than to merely say it. So for example, the claim in the article you cite about the hacks being tied by the Germans to the Russians? False. That's an unproven assumption, never substantiated. The shared SSL certificate? Outdated and vulnerable. There's a lot more.

That last link points out the exceedingly low standards private security firms have when they attempted to tie the Arizona DNC hacks to the Russians.

-

Well if the current public evidence isn't good enough for you fine. Supposedly that is far from what the Intel agencies also have on hand which from what's been reported in the New York Times for one are human and technical sources inside Russia such as computers or networks that the US has compromised. But as I've said earlier in the thread I don't expect everyone to just buy what Intel agencies are selling these days. Really we need to get over this knee jerk secrecy given the stakes but Its more likely for gravity to fail than for the US government to do that.

Secondly for fucks sake I hardly believe Russia alone stole the election so we can stop with saying blaming Russia for Clinton's loss is the only reason myself or others are bringing it up. Maybe there should be a response when foreign powers mess with a US election. Or at least a real thorough investigation. Without that we have the media reports etc to go on here. The response shouldn't be "shut the fuck up, Trump won get over it."

The hacks are especially concerning given how blatantly compromised Trump and his appointees are to Russian interests but they would be concerning regardless of who the candidate is.

[aerius]

Summary: The emails were leaked by disgruntled DNC insiders and couriered to Wikileaks by the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. The entire "Russian did it" narrative just got exploded.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... iders.html

EXCLUSIVE: Ex-British ambassador who is now a WikiLeaks operative claims Russia did NOT provide Clinton emails - they were handed over to him at a D.C. park by an intermediary for 'disgusted' Democratic whistleblowers

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and associate of Julian Assange, told the Dailymail.com he flew to Washington, D.C. for emails
He claims he had a clandestine hand-off in a wooded area near American University with one of the email sources
The leakers' motivation was 'disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the 'tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders'
Murray says: 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks'
'Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that,' Murray insists
Murray is a controversial figure who was relieved of his post as British ambassador amid allegations of misconduct but is close to Wikileaks

A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers - and not hacked by Russia.

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'

His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.

Murray is a controversial figure who was removed from his post as a British ambassador amid allegations of misconduct. He was cleared of those but left the diplomatic service in acrimony.

His links to Wikileaks are well known and while his account is likely to be seen as both unprovable and possibly biased, it is also the first intervention by Wikileaks since reports surfaced last week that the CIA believed Russia hacked the Clinton emails to help hand the election to Donald Trump.

Murray's claims about the origins of the Clinton campaign emails comes as U.S. intelligence officials are increasingly confident that Russian hackers infiltrated both the Democratic National Committee and the email account of top Clinton aide John Podesta.

In Podesta's case, his account appeared to have been compromised through a basic 'phishing' scheme, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

U.S. intelligence officials have reportedly told members of Congress during classified briefings that they believe Russians passed the documents on to Wikileaks as part of an influence operation to swing the election in favor of Donald Trump.

But Murray insisted that the DNC and Podesta emails published by Wikileaks did not come from the Russians, and were given to the whistleblowing group by Americans who had authorized access to the information.

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' Murray said. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'

He said the leakers were motivated by 'disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.'

Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary.

His account cannot be independently verified but is in line with previous statements by Wikileaks - which was the organization that published the Podesta and DNC emails.

Wikileaks published the DNC messages in July and the Podesta messages in October. The messages revealed efforts by some DNC officials to undermine the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was running against Hillary Clinton.

Others revealed that Clinton aides were concerned about potential conflicts and mismanagement at the Clinton Foundation.

Murray declined to say where the sources worked and how they had access to the information, to shield their identities.

He suggested that Podesta's emails might be 'of legitimate interest to the security services' in the U.S., due to his communications with Saudi Arabia lobbyists and foreign officials.

Murray said he was speaking out due to claims from intelligence officials that Wikileaks was given the documents by Russian hackers as part of an effort to help Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election.

'I don't understand why the CIA would say the information came from Russian hackers when they must know that isn't true,' he said. 'Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that.'

Murray was a vocal critic of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan while serving as ambassador between 2002 and 2004, a stance that pitted him against the UK Foreign Office.

He describes himself as a 'close associate' of Julian Assange and has spoken out in support of the Wikileaks founder who has faced rape allegations and is currently confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Assange has similarly disputed that charges that Wikileaks received the leaked emails from Russian sources.

'The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,' Assange told John Pilger during an interview in November.

'Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That's false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.'

The Washington Post reported last Friday that U.S. intelligence agencies had 'identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails.'

The paper said U.S. senators were presented with information tying Russia to the leaks during a recent briefing by intelligence officials.

'It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,' a senior U.S. official familiar with the briefing told the Post. 'That's the consensus view.'

The paper said U.S. senators were presented with information tying Russia to the leaks during a recent briefing by intelligence officials.

'It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,' a senior U.S. official familiar with the briefing told the Post. 'That's the consensus view.'

The Obama administration has been examining Russia's potential role in trying to influence the presidential election. Officials said Russians hacked the Republican National Committee, but did not release that information in a deliberate effort to damage Clinton and protect Donald Trump.

Several congressional committees are also looking into the suspected Russian interference.

While there is a consensus on Capitol Hill that Russia hacked U.S. political groups and officials, some Republicans say it's not clear whether the motive was to try to swing the election or just to collect intelligence.

'Now whether they intended to interfere to the degree that they were trying to elect a certain candidate, I think that's the subject of investigation,' said Sen. John McCain on CBS Face the Nation. 'But facts are stubborn things, they did hack into this campaign.'

President elect Donald Trump raised doubts about the reports and said this was an 'excuse' by Democrats to explain Clinton's November loss.

'It's just another excuse. I don't believe it,' said Trump on Fox News Sunday.

[The Romulan Republic]

Because a "Wikileaks operative" is such an impartial source on this subject who should obviously be taken at face value. As is the Alt. Rightist cesspit that is the Daily Mail.

Seriously, aerius, how much is the Kremlin paying you to post this tripe? Or are you just being a useful tool pro bono?

[Titan Uranus]

Wikileaks is the only source mentioned which has demonstrated some reverence for the truth, so yeah, until some actual evidence is presented, I'm willing to believe them.

You are arguing that "the Russian Government purposefully interfered with a foreign election in a manner which could be easily traced back to them and backfire spectacularly" with no real evidence, is more likely than "disguntled democratic insiders, disgusted with the complete takeover of their party by corperatists, funneled documents to Wikileaks through intermediaries" the second event describes essentially every release Wikileaks has ever made, while the first describes the plot of a third-rate Hollywood thriller.


So, little corperate whore, did CTR pay you for your comment, or do you play an enemy of all republics for free?

[The Romulan Republic]

Wikileaks is the only source mentioned which has demonstrated some reverence for the truth, so yeah, until some actual evidence is presented, I'm willing to believe them.

Want to back up that assertion? Or is "reverence for the truth" a euphemism for "they agree with my biases"?

You are arguing that "the Russian Government purposefully interfered with a foreign election in a manner which could be easily traced back to them and backfire spectacularly" with no real evidence, is more likely than "disguntled democratic insiders, disgusted with the complete takeover of their party by corperatists, funneled documents to Wikileaks through intermediaries" the second event describes essentially every release Wikileaks has ever made, while the first describes the plot of a third-rate Hollywood thriller.

I do know that the alternative theory needs more than a Wikileaks operative (i.e. one of the guilty parties in aiding Trump) cited by the Daily fucking Mail.

Also, Russia has been known to interfere in other countries' elections before. As has America. The only "shocking" thing about these allegations is that they would have the audacity to do it to America. And thus far, it hasn't backfired on Russia. Barring a miraculous stand by the Electoral College, Trump has won, and they have their business partner/enabler/useful idiot in the White House.

So, little corperate whore, did CTR pay you for your comment, or do you play an enemy of all republics for free?

Aw, you think you're being clever.

I don't stand for corporatism, but for democracy.

[Flagg]

Wikileaks is the only source mentioned which has demonstrated some reverence for the truth, so yeah, until some actual evidence is presented, I'm willing to believe them.

Want to back up that assertion? Or is "reverence for the truth" a euphemism for "they agree with my biases"?

You are arguing that "the Russian Government purposefully interfered with a foreign election in a manner which could be easily traced back to them and backfire spectacularly" with no real evidence, is more likely than "disguntled democratic insiders, disgusted with the complete takeover of their party by corperatists, funneled documents to Wikileaks through intermediaries" the second event describes essentially every release Wikileaks has ever made, while the first describes the plot of a third-rate Hollywood thriller.

I do know that the alternative theory needs more than a Wikileaks operative (i.e. one of the guilty parties in aiding Trump) cited by the Daily fucking Mail.

Also, Russia has been known to interfere in other countries' elections before. As has America. The only "shocking" thing about these allegations is that they would have the audacity to do it to America. And thus far, it hasn't backfired on Russia. Barring a miraculous stand by the Electoral College, Trump has won, and they have their business partner/enabler/useful idiot in the White House.

So, little corperate whore, did CTR pay you for your comment, or do you play an enemy of all republics for free?

Aw, you think you're being clever.

I don't stand for corporatism, but for democracy.

Accusing people who disagree with you of being paid shills to post pro-Russian propaganda is disgusting and beyond obscene, and that's without how fucking dumb the premise is to begin with. You should be a man, grow a spine, and fucking apologize to aeris.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Wikileaks is the only source mentioned which has demonstrated some reverence for the truth, so yeah, until some actual evidence is presented, I'm willing to believe them.

Want to back up that assertion? Or is "reverence for the truth" a euphemism for "they agree with my biases"?

You are arguing that "the Russian Government purposefully interfered with a foreign election in a manner which could be easily traced back to them and backfire spectacularly" with no real evidence, is more likely than "disguntled democratic insiders, disgusted with the complete takeover of their party by corperatists, funneled documents to Wikileaks through intermediaries" the second event describes essentially every release Wikileaks has ever made, while the first describes the plot of a third-rate Hollywood thriller.

I do know that the alternative theory needs more than a Wikileaks operative (i.e. one of the guilty parties in aiding Trump) cited by the Daily fucking Mail.

Also, Russia has been known to interfere in other countries' elections before. As has America. The only "shocking" thing about these allegations is that they would have the audacity to do it to America. And thus far, it hasn't backfired on Russia. Barring a miraculous stand by the Electoral College, Trump has won, and they have their business partner/enabler/useful idiot in the White House.

So, little corperate whore, did CTR pay you for your comment, or do you play an enemy of all republics for free?

Aw, you think you're being clever.

I don't stand for corporatism, but for democracy.

Accusing people who disagree with you of being paid shills to post pro-Russian propaganda is disgusting and beyond obscene, and that's without how fucking dumb the premise is to begin with. You should be a man, grow a spine, and fucking apologize to aeris.

The forum mod concurs.

You will not shit up my thread.

[The Romulan Republic]

Some of the Russian apologists on-line certainly deserve such an accusation. But as I have no proof that aerius is one of them, I apologize for that post.

[aerius]

Some of the Russian apologists on-line certainly deserve such an accusation. But as I have no proof that aerius is one of them, I apologize for that post.

Just like you have no proof that Russia did anything. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence refuses to endorse the CIA's report, as does the FBI. Why? Because the CIA can't prove shit.

By the way, I'd like to give a shout out for Vladimir Putin. Thanks for all the gold bars you've been shipping me, I appreciate it, but you don't have to, I'm just doin' the lord's work here.

[Flagg]

Some of the Russian apologists on-line certainly deserve such an accusation. But as I have no proof that aerius is one of them, I apologize for that post.

Just like you have no proof that Russia did anything. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence refuses to endorse the CIA's report, as does the FBI. Why? Because the CIA can't prove shit.

By the way, I'd like to give a shout out for Vladimir Putin. Thanks for all the gold bars you've been shipping me, I appreciate it, but you don't have to, I'm just doin' the lord's work here.

Can you send some my way? I promise I'll never laugh at him riding a horse with no shirt on again.

Never mind, that's a promise I can't keep.

[The Romulan Republic]

Yes, the "paid troll" jab was a step too far, and I've already apologized for it.

I do hope you will not use it as an excuse to simply dismiss any other arguments I make however, aerius.

Can we be absolutely sure that Putin illegally intervened in the election in a manner that benefitted Donald Trump? I suppose not. However, what cannot be denied is that multiple investigations have reached that conclusion. Russia has also been accused of interfering in other nations' elections, so we have a pattern. And frankly, it would be in their interests to do so, if they could pull it off. Its not like America hasn't interfered in other countries' democratic process itself.

As to the FBI- they have zero credibility in this either, considering their blatant electioneering using the email scandal. Why in God's name Obama hasn't demanded Comey's resignation I don't know.

Ultimately, what should happen is that the CIA report should be released to the media, public, and especially the Electors, while a full investigation is conducted. Then we would know for certain, or as close to certain as you can get. In the meantime, will you at least acknowledge that their are sufficient grounds for reasonable people to be concerned about the possibility of Russian intervention, and to want further investigation, rather than dismissing it out of hand as people using "the Russian bogeyman"?

[aerius]

The so called investigations have already been debunked by Vympel in his previous posts. As for the CIA, why the fuck should they be trusted? Do I have to bring up Iraq and WMDs again? They're proven liars. No one has shown conclusive evidence so why the hell should I take any claims seriously? At this point I might as well claim that the NSA hacked the DNC and framed Russia because they knew it would cause a bunch of hysterics that would enable them to grab more surveillance powers. What's that you say? Where's my proof? Well my proof is that the NSA are professionals, they're the only ones who can frame Russia and not leave their fingerprints all over it, therefore it was the NSA. My proof is the lack of evidence.

Do you see how fucking stupid this is? This is like saying the cheque's in the mail and I won't cum in your mouth.

[The Romulan Republic]

The so called investigations have already been debunked by Vympel in his previous posts. As for the CIA, why the fuck should they be trusted? Do I have to bring up Iraq and WMDs again? They're proven liars. No one has shown conclusive evidence so why the hell should I take any claims seriously?

First off, the Obama CIA is not quite identical to the Bush CIA in its make-up or its leadership.

That said, I don't trust the CIA. In fact I consider them to be more or less a tax-payer-funded, state sanctioned mafia. But they aren't the only ones who have made similar allegations against Russia. And while I don't think that their claims should be taken at face value on their own, I also don't think Iraq and WMDs give you a blank cheque to simply dismiss any claim the CIA makes in perpetuity.

Again, I'm not even asking you to concede Russian guilt. Just to acknowledge that their are enough grounds for concern that a reasonable person might be worried and support further investigation.

Especially since if the allegations are even close to true... it would be catastrophic. Sure, innocent until proven guilty, but let's at least take the allegations seriously.

At this point I might as well claim that the NSA hacked the DNC and framed Russia because they knew it would cause a bunch of hysterics that would enable them to grab more surveillance powers. What's that you say? Where's my proof? Well my proof is that the NSA are professionals, they're the only ones who can frame Russia and not leave their fingerprints all over it, therefore it was the NSA. My proof is the lack of evidence.

Except its not just the CIA making allegations of Russian interference, and you know, or ought to know, perfectly well that your analogy is false, because the suspicion of Russia is based on more than simply "Russia could theoretically have done it".

Do you see how fucking stupid this is? This is like saying the cheque's in the mail and I won't cum in your mouth.

I'm sorry, was that bit of incoherent vulgarity supposed to mean something?