America Uses Stealthy Submarines To Hack Other Countries' Systems (washingtonpost.com)

When the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump asked Russia -- wittingly or otherwise -- to launch hack attacks to find Hillary Clinton's missing emails, it caused a stir of commotion. Russia is allegedly behind DNC's leaked emails. But The Washington Post is reminding us that U.S.'s efforts in the cyber-security world aren't much different. (could be paywalled; same article syndicated elsewhere From the report: The U.S. approach to this digital battleground is pretty advanced. For example: Did you know that the military uses its submarines as underwater hacking platforms? In fact, subs represent an important component of America's cyber strategy. They act defensively to protect themselves and the country from digital attack, but -- more interestingly -- they also have a role to play in carrying out cyberattacks, according to two U.S. Navy officials at a recent Washington conference. "There is a -- an offensive capability that we are, that we prize very highly," said Rear Adm. Michael Jabaley, the U.S. Navy's program executive officer for submarines. "And this is where I really can't talk about much, but suffice to say we have submarines out there on the front lines that are very involved, at the highest technical level, doing exactly the kind of things that you would want them to do."

The so-called "silent service" has a long history of using information technology to gain an edge on America's rivals. In the 1970s, the U.S. government instructed its submarines to tap undersea communications cables off the Russian coast, recording the messages being relayed back and forth between Soviet forces. (The National Security Agency has continued that tradition, monitoring underwater fiber cables as part of its globe-spanning intelligence-gathering apparatus. In some cases, the government has struck closed-door deals with the cable operators ensuring that U.S. spies can gain secure access to the information traveling over those pipes.) These days, some U.S. subs come equipped with sophisticated antennas that can be used to intercept and manipulate other people's communications traffic, particularly on weak or unencrypted networks. "We've gone where our targets have gone" -- that is to say, online, said Stewart Baker, the National Security Agency's former general counsel, in an interview. "Only the most security-conscious now are completely cut off from the Internet." Cyberattacks are also much easier to carry out than to defend against, he said.

Comments

Pretty soon they'll use TiSP protocol...

[Anonymous Coward]

https://archive.google.com/tis... And anyone with a sewer drain can be spied upon. Actually, they probably already have sewer eavesdropping.

Underwater cables

[Iamthecheese]

The futurist in me wonders if they can latch onto a submarine cable, cut it, insert a passively recording hub, and leave with only having changed the impedance and signal time (a little) and caused a brief outage.

Re:Underwater cables

[khallow]

Wouldn't cause a brief outage, if they did that during a scheduled downtime of the cable.

Re:Underwater cables

[ColaMan]

You don't even have to cut it, just bend the strands enough so the some leaks out the side of the glass.

I've got a fiber tester here that does exactly that with normal fiber patch leads, and it can tell me which direction the light source is coming from, if there is modulated data on it, or if there is one of it's own light source ID modules on the end of the fiber.

Super handy for fiber test work and only $1000. Imagine what you can get when you've effectively got an unlimited black ops budget.

Re:Underwater cables

[Anonymous Coward]

The futurist in me wonders if they can latch onto a submarine cable, cut it, insert a passively recording hub, and leave with only having changed the impedance and signal time (a little) and caused a brief outage.

The futurist in you is 45 years behind the times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

Re:Underwater cables

[Aighearach]

That is exactly what they do. It probably does cause a brief outage for fiber, but not for copper.

They have special subs for it. The summary seems pretty clueless. It has been widely reported for decades.

Re:Underwater cables

[pepsikid]

As khallow said, they add the taps during scheduled downtime. They also add the taps during an outage. And you can imagine how easy it is to arrange for a trawler to "accidentally" drag it's anchor across the ocean floor. There is some risk of being detected by diagnostic equipment at either end of the cable, since they can determine the distance to the break, but if the trawler break and submarine tap are 10 miles apart, the sub should go unnoticed, and the difference in distance is within a margin of error.

Re:Underwater cables

[PPH]

You don't even have to cut it, just bend the strands enough so the some leaks out the side of the glass.

This is exactly what they do. They have something like a diving bell that they can loop a submarine cable through and seal it. They can then transfer some technicians from the mother sub to the bell through an airlock where they can peel the armor off the cable, isolate individual fibers and wrap them around such optical couplers.

Re:Underwater cables

[Anonymous Coward]

All that and you can't tell it's from its?

Re:Underwater cables

[rtb61]

Let's not get carried away with cutting cables, the idea is quite amusing when you consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... so not just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Obviously hacking into the repeaters makes a lot more sense and is of course exactly what they do and that is with the cooperation of the companies involved, so the hacks go in as the cable is being laid. So at the repeater they of course copy data, delete data and more importantly inject data, think questionable attacks from questionable sources. Likely the hardware is permanently locked in place and they only maintain it when it fails.

The catch with that is any claim they make about hacks is now questionable as they inherently can and will corrupt the evidence. We you set out to so publicly corrupt global infrastructure than you will no longer be believed for any claims you make that result from attacks on that infrastructure ie you are always the initial and most likely suspect for any attack. Much like the US Navy and it's policy of not declaring which vessels have nuclear weapons and which do not. Result is when ever a US naval vessels approaches a foreign country it is not just a naval vessel approaching but a first strike city destroying nuclear threat approaching and that is the US government approach when sending vessels upon that basis, they are in fact at that moment threatening the targeted nation with a first strike nuclear attack.

It is really a messy, arrogant approach, factually the number one suspect in any cyder attack must always be the NSA/CIA, they have the greatest capability, they have declared their intent to dominate every other countries internet infrastructure and US laws claim that US government departments are not bound by other countries laws and are free to break them at any time for any reason.

Re:Underwater cables

[ColaMan]

I always sneak in an grammatical error to annoy the anonymous cowards.

Re:Underwater cables

[jittles]

As khallow said, they add the taps during scheduled downtime. They also add the taps during an outage. And you can imagine how easy it is to arrange for a trawler to "accidentally" drag it's anchor across the ocean floor. There is some risk of being detected by diagnostic equipment at either end of the cable, since they can determine the distance to the break, but if the trawler break and submarine tap are 10 miles apart, the sub should go unnoticed, and the difference in distance is within a margin of error.

Is this why someone keeps cutting the fiber in the SF Bay Area? I had wondered if someone was putting in taps while the cable was cut further up the line.

Re:Underwater cables

[darkmeridian]

We have been doing this since the 1970s. Look up Operation Ivy Bells and you can read the book Blind Man's Bluff. The subs would install espionage devices that wouldn't require the cable to be cut. Or you would cut the cable at some shallow point pretending it was a trawler that made the cut accidentally, then you tap the deep water portion of the cable while the cable is down, then when the guys repair the cable, the characteristics would have been expected to change.

Re:Underwater cables

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen a submarine cable? The thing is huge, and has high voltage copper conductors running down the cable coaxially around the glass. The fiber is only 100um, but the cables are anywhere from 3 to 12 inches thick.

If you just carelessly cut into a cable, you would explode from the electrical discharge.

There would be no point in doing this anyway. Almost everything going over a submarine cable is public information anyway. The vast majority of lambdas in a modern submarine cable go to IXPs, which are shared pairing points that would be much easier to intercept the signal at, than in an undersea cable. Also it would and is trivial to show up at an IXP and send bullshit BGP notifies to intercept traffic. It would also be trivial and pointless to put wirespeed crypto on both ends of a teleport link (the technical term for lambda layer international connections). Pointless because everything going through a teleport or IXP is public networks anyway. If someone is renting a lambda for a private link, then they are likely using wirespeed AES boxes already to prevent wiretaps, not in the cable, but at the location where the users SMF is reframed and remodulated for international transmission. The transmission parameters of submarine cables are proprietary, and usually state secrets, and the users of the service often require connections at below 1 lambda carrier, so the service operator converts from standard SMF with OTN framing, does digital multiplexing and then proprietary conversion to the transmission parameters of the cable. That way a user, such as an ISP or a big business, doesn't need to concern themselves with the finnicky details of ultra long distance transmission, and gets a product that is familliar in the regular optical networking space.

The engineering of a submarine cable is an order of magnitude more complex than any other optical data system. It has to be self-powered from both ends of the cable, the launch power, polarisation, and wavelength all have to be critically controlled. These cables do not, as people have frequently suggested here, use EOE repeaters to repeat the signal, the chromatic dispersion is managed during the design phase of the cable with negative index fiber, and the signal is amplified in sections along the cable with Erbium doped fiber amplifiers, which are powered by pump lasers in modules along the length of the cable. Those pump lasers are in turn powered by the large copper conductors running the length of the cable at high voltage.

There is talk of newer generation optical fibers which are doped with a radio-isotope, so the light emission from the radio isotope is a pump source for the fibers intrinsic gain medium. I don't know any of these cables are in production yet.

Anyway, I'm highly sceptical about this whole story, because of the lack of utility you would get from these taps, the ease with which they could be thwarted (just install a line-rate AES box on each lambda or fractional lambda, send a guy with a suitcase to deliver a private key or HSM), and the difficulty of extracting the fiber from it's very complex cable.

Also just think about the bandwidth involved: a typical submarine cable has 96 lambdas with 50GHz spacing or 192 lambdas with 25GHz spacing, with signalling rates of 40Gbps or 100Gbps per lambda. A typical OTN to terminate one of these cables fills a large room and requires 10-100kW of electrical power. If you were to take the state of the art, 192x25GHz at 100Gbps using 16QPSK modulation, that is 19.2Tbit/s, in each direction. To bug that effectively, you would either need to run all your data extraction at the cable tap point, or trunk it somewhere else. I find it impossible to believe the US government, or anyone, is running a secret network of ocean fibers to every legitimate fiber, to capture it's contents. The cables to backhaul the bugged signal would need to be longer, and thus more expensive than the cable they purported to be bugging! Also they would need to be higher quality than the original cable, as the CD and power of the signal is only marginally good enough to maximise bandwidth and minimise costs of a very expensive and technically challenging engineering task.

Sorry, it just doesn't stack up to scrutiny.

Re:Underwater cables

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't even have to cut it, just bend the strands enough so the some leaks out the side of the glass.

This is exactly what they do. They have something like a diving bell that they can loop a submarine cable through and seal it. They can then transfer some technicians from the mother sub to the bell through an airlock where they can peel the armor off the cable, isolate individual fibers and wrap them around such optical couplers.

How do you know? are you there? have you seen it?

Where does the data go? current industry practice is to run submarine cables at 192x100G. That's 19.2Tbit/s.

Without a fiber backhaul from their underwater tap to a safe harbor for analysis, there is just no way to process that level of data.

And for what purpose, all a country would have to do, is mandate that all it's teleports use symmetric encryption and all those expensive taps, and phantom backhaul network (which would cost more than the worlds existing submarine network, as it would have to be longer in total path length, and laid by submarines to be unknownabout) would be useless. Also the connection where the cable splits into 2 cables would be noticed when the cable operator hauls the cable on deck for inspection and repair.

Re:Underwater cables

[djinn6]

Tapping the cable is easier than figuring out what's inside. A huge amount of web traffic is encrypted, and most of the time it'll be Netflix and Porn. You would need massive datacenters to decrypt all of them, and then come up with an AI that could watch all of it and figure out if any of them contain hidden messages. Something like a high-contrast mask applied to a few seconds of video would be easily visible to a human, but near impossible to see with a machine.

Re:Underwater cables

[jon3k]

It's neither "messy" nor "arrogant". Those are both poor choices of words to describe it. It's a very clear tactical goal, an obvious one is so the US adversaries don't know which ships to attack to stop a nuclear strike. I'd be shocked if any major nuclear power told everyone exactly what ships carried nukes. Unless their Navy is so small it's just obvious.

Re:Underwater cables

[khallow]

The catch with that is any claim they make about hacks is now questionable as they inherently can and will corrupt the evidence. We you set out to so publicly corrupt global infrastructure than you will no longer be believed for any claims you make that result from attacks on that infrastructure ie you are always the initial and most likely suspect for any attack. Much like the US Navy and it's policy of not declaring which vessels have nuclear weapons and which do not. Result is when ever a US naval vessels approaches a foreign country it is not just a naval vessel approaching but a first strike city destroying nuclear threat approaching and that is the US government approach when sending vessels upon that basis, they are in fact at that moment threatening the targeted nation with a first strike nuclear attack.

I notice two things. First, most countries have the ability to "publicly corrupt global infrastructure", but it's only the US's capabilities that you care to complain about.

Second, what is the point of faking a massive cyber espionage campaign from China and Russia? If the US or allies were doing a false flag operation, they've gotten remarkably little return on the effort. To illustrate the kind of return you can get from false flag operations, Nazi Germany staged a fake military attack on a German radio station in order to rationalize the successful invasion of Poland. Nazi Germany didn't need to fake Polish assaults on every single German radio station.

And any such effort would have been leaked by now, given the various whistleblowers that have come out over the past couple of decades.

Sorry, but this is the sort of retarded reasoning that comes from not understanding the situation. We shouldn't trust evidence because USian cooties.

Re:Underwater cables

[AK Marc]

Wouldn't cause an outage if you tapped it by capturing light from a bend. Doesn't work on BI fiber, and is detectable in that the tap will cause a signal loss, but if they have standard fiber and poor monitoring, it's undetectable.

Re:Underwater cables

[AK Marc]

And if they use BI fiber, it'll break before it bends enough to leak. Also, the bend is detectable, but not in a detection war. A bend enough to leak light will cause a loss of about 3 dB. Do that in a human-possible time frame, and the management server will detect the sudden loss as a critical event. So the tappers will make a machine to bend it slowly over a week, and tap in over a time that the management servers won't recognize as a significant critical event.

Re:Underwater cables

[AHuxley]

Before and at the start of what is now NSA and GCHQ projects to get to Soviet and other nations communications was well funded. In the late 1940's the USS Cochino and the USS Tusk got used and the UK used the HMS Turpin. Converted to super-T specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... a lot of effort was made to get near Soviet sites.
The problem for the UK was the need for submarine broadcasts. Would the Soviet Union find their locations?
What slowed the UK's operations was the discovery of a UK scuba diver near a Soviet ship in Portsmouth harbour, the Crabb Affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... After that the UK was aware it had to be more careful. The US seemed ever more fixated with Murmansk and by the 1960's the UK was helping again with submarine work e.g. via HMS Taciturn and long term snorkelling to stay on site.
Later the newer upgrades became available into the 1970's. By the 1980's everyone knew of the Soviet underwater Ivy Bells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... work that tapped Soviet communication cables.
Why any of this history made Slashdot is strange... given the CIRCUIT, REMEDY and GERONTIC news "Snowden doc leak lists submarine'd cables tapped by spooks" (26 Nov 2014)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://international.sueddeuts...
The bending of the optical ensures no telco staff will be aware. The taps stay in place collecting all e.g.
political, business, negotiations and all other national and international calls given decades of cheap peering.
The only questing left is to ask is did the Soviet Union know? Could they detect the 1950's missions or well placed top staff mention the missions gaping back to the late 1940's? The Soviets knew about Ivy Bells.
The ability to pipe decades of disinformation deep into the NSA and GCHQ would have been successful given the US and UK's total collection dependance on such collection missions.
Thats the problem with huge budgets and a total reliance on electronic intelligence, signals intelligence once discovered.
Decades of overtime, medals and complex networking vs the thought that it was all for sorting disinformation.

Re:Underwater cables

[Solandri]

That's pretty much what NR-1 was built for. Ostensibly it was for researching the deep ocean environment. But really, when you build a nuclear powered deep ocean submersible which can stay on the ocean floor for weeks at a time, it's pretty obvious the purpose is to tap undersea cables.

It was most likely retired because ROVs and telepresence had become advanced enough that they could do the tapping remotely, without the need to put people right next to the cable.

Re:Underwater cables

[rickb928]

If repeaters in any way convert those photons to electrons so that they can be amplified, cleaned up, and converted back to better, stronger photons, then that is the point where interception does not require breaking the cable or even attaching to it. Certainly the technology exists to extract signals and so listen in.

You doubt this? We've been treated to a few clever ways to listen into PCs, ways we have not thought could be, and some defy shielding.

Remember, every state is eavesdropping on every other state, every single one that has even minimal capabilities. The differences? Some are detected and thwarted. Some are detected and manipulated, and then some recognize it and some don't. Some are completely deceived. Some cannot detect the eavesdropping. And some are victimized by the delivery of supposedly secret information, alteration of that information, and selective disclosure.

But none are innocent, and should not be. Any state that is not doing this is either incompetent or derelict.

Re:Underwater cables

[crbowman]

You're talking commercial fibers. Over the last 20 years the most attractive cables to hack via submarines would be dedicated military channels which are probably not as sophisticated.

Find replace walkie-chatter

[Anonymous Coward]

He just admitted basically to having the capability to rewrite walkie-talkie chatter realtime using these subs.

He also just threw some companies under the bus.

Said too much.

Again with this?

[ScentCone]

Plenty to dislike about Trump. But why keep making stuff up? He didn't call for Russia to hack Clinton's email. He made a very tired joke (it's been made here and elsewhere for weeks) about maybe the Russians, if they can find her email in the stuff they already have, could turn it over to our FBI, who couldn't find most of what she deleted. Go after him for his abundant riches of nonsense, but don't make crap up. Makes this site look sillier than usual.

Re:Again with this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because as everyone saw with the Wikileaks DNC release, Democrats fund astroturfers to spread lies all around the internet. I wouldn't doubt the Republicans do it too, but the DNC ones are 100% proven. As more and more negative Hillary evidence is revealed, they only thing they can do is deflect and try to pin the blame on somebody else. Hence all the "evil Russians" stories this last week.

Re:Again with this?

[Nyder]

Right, everything he ever said is a joke. Why can't people understand that?

Because it's easier to go on about Trump then accept the reality of what Clinton has done so far with power.

Re:Again with this?

[ScentCone]

It didn't say it was funny. But what it wasn't was a "call for the Russians to hack blah blah blah." Which you know.

Re:Again with this?

[Aighearach]

I hate to resort to the guardian, but... https://www.theguardian.com/us...
There are better reasons than email idiocy.

Re:Again with this?

[Frank Burly]

Aren't the emails just people talking about a story about astroturf on Fox News? I haven't read them, but does talking about a story prove it is 100% true? And of course the stories about Russians (100% proven to astroturf BTW—and not always with ACs) are because the Russians are widely believed to have supplied the info to wikileaks.

Re:Again with this?

[Alomex]

He made a very tired joke

Nobody laughed when he first said it on a Tuesday, and at his first chances to clarify it he doubled down on it, it took until Thursday before he claimed was a joke. Here's what happened in between:

From the Washington Post:

1. Trump campaign officials never said he was joking on Wednesday. They mounted a robust defense, mind you, but they didn't say it was a joke.

2. Trump doubled down. In a tweet after the comments exploded on social media, Trump sought to explain a little bit â" apparently suggesting he simply meant that the emails should be turned over to the FBI "if Russia or any other country or person has" them. Again, no mention of joking around.

3. He said it twice. This wasn't a one-off quip in Trump's news conference on Wednesday. He initially said he hoped the Russians had the emails, and then he returned later to say that if they didn't have them, he hoped they would obtain them.

4. A reporter gave him an out -- that he didn't take. NBC's Katy Tur, later in Wednesday's press conference, basically asked Trump twice if he was serious. In response, Trump indicated he had no qualms about, in Tur's words, "asking a foreign government â" Russia, China, anybody â" to interfere, to hack into the system of anybody's in this country."

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Lastly, even though very clearly he wasn't joking, even as a joke this is wholly unpresidential. So to sum it up, he clearly wasn't joking and even under this absurd excuse concocted two days after the fact Trump still loses points with this one, As simple as that. And all around fscked up for him anyway you see it.

But as Trump himself said, he could go and shoot someone in Times Square and his voters would still support him. That part he did get right.

Re:Again with this?

[h33t l4x0r]

Apparently, when you ask a hacker to find an email you mean for him to look for it in his couch cushions. Also when you ask a hitman to take care of your enemies you mean to make sure they have enough to eat.

Re:Again with this?

[Anonymous Coward]

We already knew Clinton was spending at least a million dollars to 'correct' people online.

I'll never understand how she managed to get the nomination, it's one scandal after another with that woman.

Re:Again with this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing Clinton has done with power is use it to gain even more power. Clinton is the poster child for the entrenched political establishment. Just look at all the money she has collected from wealthy individuals and special interests. These donors expect a ROI when they buy a candidate. Just think about how upset both democrat and republican donors are going to be if Trump wins and they end up getting nothing for their millions if not billions. And Trump asking Russia if they could locate the missing e-mails is actually pretty funny. And have you noticed how fast the media has shifted the focus from the content in released e-mails over to blaming Russia for the hack? And I guess Assange likes living in Ecuador's embassy after openly acknowledging he is releasing the leak e-mail for the express purpose of damaging the US in some way. He could have kept his head down a little longer and slinked away unnoticed but he has just fucked himself once again.

Re:Again with this?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are both morally bankrupt. Regardless of who wins everyone loses, however Clinton is at least predictable with her corruption and lies whereas TRump makes them up on the fly. Trump is definitely the scarier cunt, but only by degrees.

Re:Again with this?

[Boronx]

They are going to destroy Trump with garbage because the American people are too stupid to reject him for the truly horrible things he's said and done.

It's like getting Al Capone for tax evasion.

Re:Again with this?

[Boronx]

There's a lot of made up bullshit going around about the emails. The emails are easily searchable, so it doesn't take long to disprove them, but then another pops up.

Re:Again with this?

[Boronx]

Maybe she got the nomination because those aren't scandals.

Re:Again with this?

[aevan]

I'd happily sacrifice Trump if it means all the "Kill all cops" "Kill all men" etc were taken as incitement to violence, attempts to hire hitmen, and accessories to any murders that occurred of the targeted group. Until then, I'll take his rejoinder as humour.

Takes a lot of spin to turn "If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton's 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!" to 'hack please'. First off, that nasty present tense.

Re:Again with this?

[longk]

Go watch his FULL UNEDITED press conference. He was asking for existing materials (if any) to be released. He was not asking anyone to go and hack them now.

In case you didn't hear: Hillary deleted her e-mails and her server was handed over to the FBI. There's simply no way to hack those e-mails anymore. It's really not very hard to understand. They can only be released from existing materials, if those exist.

Re: Again with this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump is scarier because he seems to be focusing on the really important issues, but once he is done fixing the country it will again be a nice place. Maybe not "great again", but definitely better.

You can't prolong the status quo forever.

Re:Again with this?

[jafiwam]

Right, everything he ever said is a joke. Why can't people understand that?

Because it's easier to go on about Trump then accept the reality of what Clinton has done so far with power.

This does two things, Trump's opponents are thinking and listening to Trump. Not Hillary. Free publicity. Millions of dollars worth.

It keeps the "strategists" in the DNC and on the left spinning for bullshit spin (which the "russians did it" little "fact" is) and every day they do that, is another day they are behind in the election and another day's worth of money down the tubes. The longer things go with the emails leaked the better chance someone will connect more of the dots which will be another blow.

So whatever, I enjoy the lefties flop around like a dying fish as much as... I enjoy watching a dying fish... cuz, fresh fish on the grill is delicious.

Re:Again with this?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Because it's easier to go on about Trump then accept the reality of what Clinton has done so far with power.

Folks go on about Trump, because he's a bit of a loose canon.

However, there is one good thing about a loose canon . . . it will clear the deck and this is something Washington DC badly needs. Clear the deck of the government.

Re:Again with this?

[jafiwam]

He made a very tired joke

Odd. I didn't hear anyone laugh. Not even a twitter, but there was a whole lot of tweeting.

Why would a room full of leftist lapdog "journalists" laugh at a joke mere seconds after he was done beating on them? Losers don't laugh. Especially those that take themselves very seriously.

Re:Again with this?

[SuricouRaven]

Poe's law in politics. Politicians routinely say things in all seriousness that are so outrageous that when one does make a joke, it's hard to tell if it's really a joke or not. Especially true of Trump, as he has a history of hyperbole and general offensiveness.

Re:Again with this?

[sumdumass]

Give it up. This guy is a through and through shill. The joke used to be that we would just ask the NSA to find the missing emails because they scoop everything up. It was made about the IRS 5 failed harddrives without backups so emails concerning targeting conservative organizations couldn't be turned over to congress. It resurfaced with Hillary and her deleted emails. Now that the story being pushed is that Russia is doing the same to help trump, very little needed changed to make it again.

Make no mistake, It was a joke. But we know from the leaked emails that Hillary and the DNC pay shills to correct people online. We also know blinded partisan hacks will contort anything they can to maintain a fictional worldview. You are trying to reason with one or the other here.

Re:Again with this?

[Ol Olsoc]

Plenty to dislike about Trump. But why keep making stuff up? He didn't call for Russia to hack Clinton's email. He made a very tired joke (it's been made here and elsewhere for weeks) about maybe the Russians, if they can find her email in the stuff they already have, could turn it over to our FBI, who couldn't find most of what she deleted. Go after him for his abundant riches of nonsense, but don't make crap up. Makes this site look sillier than usual.

Its such a pity that the lad needs an interpreter, don't you think? Spouting off like the Oracle at Delphi, then the sycophants have to write many passages about what heactually said.

Which was: "But it would be interesting to see — I will tell you this — Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next."

Without any interpretive tap dance, that's a person telling another head of state that there will be a huge reward for obtaining and releasing possibly classified material to the public.

But its such a shame, that a person who presumably is a straight talker needs so many people to restate and massage what he says, to make it seem like he didn't say what the words said at face value.

There are things you just don't say, like telling a foreign country to find classified emails on our countries systems and releasing them to the public for a mighty reward, or walking into a Victoria's Secret store, and asking if they have any of their stuff in children's sizes.

Re:Again with this?

[reboot246]

Correct. Trump didn't ask the Russians to hack anything at all. The emails may or may not be in the possession of Russians, but if they do have them, they've had them for years.

It doesn't make slashdot look silly. It makes it look biased, which is much worse than silly.

Re:Again with this?

[Alomex]

The felonies she committed didn't require intent,

They do, you are missinformed. Mens rea is crucial in this case. Read it up.

I'll vote for a clown over a known corrupt person any day.

Trump is equally corrupt. Haven't you read about Trump university or his 1,300 lawsuits against him or the fact that is damn nearly impossible to find a business partner of his that wasn't screwed over by him? That the only people they could find that would say a good word about him in the convention were D listers and his children? that he spent the last eight years slandering Obama as a Kenyan muslim only to cry like a baby when he's challenged by tough questions from the press? Lying about supposed evidence of his citizenship that was never forthcoming? Trump oozes corruption.

Re: Again with this?

[merky1]

Sorry, but security violations are criminal offenses. Just like adultery in the military is a federal offense. But the "lock her up" mentality is maybe a bit extreme. Usually its just a revocation of all clearances, and blacklisted from ever holding a position of trust ever again. And maybe some fines.

But the fix is in, so no use in arguing over it.

Re:Again with this?

[Ol Olsoc]

Takes a lot of spin to turn "If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton's 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!" to 'hack please'. First off, that nasty present tense.

And it takes a person who is willing to outright fucking lie and do it unashamedly to reformat what Trump said, the put quotations around it.

Here, and please feel free to interject more lies because I find it incredibly entertaining and illustrative is the direct quote, that is referenced by multitudes of videos:

"it would be interesting to see — I will tell you this — Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next."

Wow, you see, I put that in quotes because that is what he said. What you put in quotes wasn't, and you can lie all you want, but in the end, it proves at long last that you and the other sycophants have no shame.

Re:Again with this?

[ScentCone]

Who needed an interpretation? The only thing that needs commentary is the smack-down the Hillary camp deserves for acting like their supporters are so dumb that they'd actually fall for the absurd faux-outrage and phony "he asked the Russians to hack" narrative. There's nobody that could have mis-interpreted that lame bit of humor as anything other than what it was. The only people who took it any other way are PRETENDING to think that, or didn't actually hear the words, and are swallowing their liberal friends' cheesy memes rather than the facts. As usual: there's plenty to dislike about Trump, but breathless lefties feel like they have to make stuff up in order to distract from the really galling hypocrisy, corruption, and insulting behavior on display within their own ranks.

Re:Again with this?

[blindseer]

I did look it up and Hillary Clinton did commit several felonies, one specifically being 18 USC Sec. 793(f). Look it up.

Through negligence she has permitted national defense secrets to exist outside of a properly secured system. Intent is irrelevant, it is not important that she intended to expose state secrets to potential adversaries only that she has not taken care to prevent the secrets from being discovered by an adversary. Additionally, there does not need to be proof that an adversary has discovered this information, only that it is possible for them to do so.

Re: Again with this?

[Ol Olsoc]

Sorry, but security violations are criminal offenses.

Seriously? You have the citations for any security violation being a criminal offense?

But the "lock her up" mentality is maybe a bit extreme.

It isn't just "lock her up, as Al Baldasaro, an advisor to Trump's campaign said, “Anyone that commits treason should be shot,” “I believe Hillary Clinton committed treason. She put people in danger. When people take confidential material off a server, you’re sharing information with the enemy. That’s treason.”

Then again, I suppose this is just another thing that needs massaged until it doesn't say what it said, And I'm not certain that it is a good tactic for Trump to take at the moment. Now if I might bring up another case of White House level shennagins as a comparison, let us take the Iran Contra mess.

In the 1980's direct intentional circumvention of the law was being practiced out of the White House. Oliver North was working on deals to have Isreal sell weapons to Iran, and have proceeds go to the Contras in Venezuela . In return, the Iranians were going to talk to terrorists in Lebanon who were holding some American citizens hostage. This complicated scheme was indeed selling weapons to an avowed enemy of the United States, and was indeed siphoning off proceeds to the Contras, an act prohibited by the Boland Amendment.

Details are the Iranians got some 1000 TOW missiles and other weapons and parts.

The cover was that Isreal would sell them the parts, then we'd replace them,

Things went along swimmingly, until a airlift of weapons were gunned down in Nicaragua.

As the wheels were falling off, Oliver North, and his secretary, Fawn Hall, started shredding documents specifically in order to eliminate the evidence of the illegal activities. Hall was caught smuggling classified documents under her clothing.

In the end, Hall recieved immunity, North had his conviction overturned on a technicality, and Poindexter who was convicted, was pardoned by Bush 1, and Reagan invoked not recalling or it's equivalent at least 124 times during testimony..

So if a bucket list of intentional illegal criminal activity resulted in essentially nothing, then it gets pretty hard to get spun up ofer what amounts to a security violation.

Unless the political intent is to just make it seem like treason. Whic sorta pales in comparison to the documented shenanigans that went on before to no avail. There is that.

Re:Again with this?

[Ol Olsoc]

Who needed an interpretation?

Only everyone who has been re-interpreting what he said. Only the people who make up new things that he said and put it in quotes, as if he actually said the stuff they just made up. Only the people who are so smitten with the guy that they will accept anything that he says, and if he says something that is obviously bad, they have to Astroturf him. You interpreted what he said as a joke.

The only thing that needs commentary is the smack-down the Hillary camp deserves for acting like their supporters are so dumb that they'd actually fall for the absurd faux-outrage and phony "he asked the Russians to hack" narrative.

Seriously, nice deflection try. I'm no supporter of Mrs Clinton, but I can tell you that if I had an employee with a clearance that said that publicly, he would be gone immediately. You are willing to have Trump say whatever he want to say, and if it is outrageous, you'll be the agressive apologetic, " It's only a joke, and then try to pin it on the enemy - who is rapidly becoming everyone.

There's nobody that could have mis-interpreted that lame bit of humor as anything other than what it was.

You are obviously wrong.

The only people who took it any other way are PRETENDING to think that, or didn't actually hear the words, and are swallowing their liberal friends' cheesy memes rather than the facts.

I've heard the words, I've posted the words. I'm not a Democrat, and the words have said to me that he is encouraging Russia to hack us, with minimal to no interpretation. Sorry, but you can't demand that we adhere to your interpretation of what he actually said. Because if everything a person says has to be interpreted, you really don't have control of the interpretations now do you?

Re:Again with this?

[Alomex]

18 USC Sec. 793(f). Look it up.

Part (f) explicitly refers to gross negligence. Gross negligence, while not the best defined of legal terms, has always implied mens rea. So we are back to square one. Nothing that you have said places extreme carelessness in the same realm as gross negligence.

Re:Again with this?

[SvnLyrBrto]

Because the vast majority of the "scandals" are hyperbolically exaggerated BS or made up from whole cloth by the republicans. The one case where she could legitimately argued to have done something wrong was a bog-standard case of "shadow IT". And most of us have been in situations ourselves where... if we could have gotten around the obstructive BOFH going on about "my precious" network that they don't want tainted by the frivolity of those "dirty hobbitses" and gotten our email and notifications on our iPhones instead of those decrepit old blackberries and pagers... we most definitely would have, or did.

Even Bernie Sandars is on record as considering it a non-issue, saying in the debates that he's "sick and tired of hearing about her damned emails.":
http://www.cnn.com/videos/poli...

Re: Again with this?

[Boronx]

We've found out that Department of State networks have been hacked for years. She made the right call security-wise.

Re:Again with this?

[Boronx]

That's the name of the game.

Re:Again with this?

[ScentCone]

Seriously, nice deflection try.

What? Show me where he said that he "called for the Russians to hack" - what he said was he hoped they could find (by inference, in the stuff they'd already long since had - how are you not seeing this) the stuff that she'd deleted. Deleted: past tense. You know, as in: the only way to have them would be for the hacking to have occurred years ago. Are you really not understanding this? And, how is it a security issue involving clearance? Clinton assures us that the 30,000 messages she deleted were all about yoga classes and wedding plans, right? Regardless, she wiped those records out a long time ago. Nobody, including Trump, is or could be "calling on the Russians" to hack those messages - they DON'T EXIST ANY LONGER. So, are you clear on that now?

And speaking of you not tolerating somebody making that sort of joke, enough that you'd fire them because they couldn't be trusted ... then you certainly are calling for Hillary Clinton to be barred from office, right? Because nobody with her history of casually storing above top-secret communications on a home computer, and then repeatedly lying about it, would ever pass a clearance review, let alone for access to the sort of ultra-secret stuff with which she was playing fast and loose.

Re:Again with this?

[Type44Q]

You mention corruption yet describe a lack of ethics; they're not the same thing...

Re:Again with this?

[blindseer]

"Gross negligence, while not the best defined of legal terms, has always implied mens rea."

Wrong. Try again.

Murder is the act of intentional homicide, manslaughter is the lesser offense of homicide through negligence. What differs here is that the law makes no distinction between negligence and intent in the securing of classified data. Whether Clinton intended to break the law or not is irrelevant. Paragraph (f) that I pointed to above spells out that negligence is also a crime, other paragraphs before it address intentional leaking of data. The question of intent is frankly moot, the FBI found classified data on her unsecured computers so therefore she broke the law.

What the FBI has done is claim that they interpret the law to require intent and that they were tasked with investigating an intentional release of secured data, but since no intentional release was found then therefore they cannot recommend pressing charges. The claim that Clinton did transmit classified information on unsecured systems, but there was no evidence of it being intentionally transmitted to an adversary, means that she was negligent. Therefore, I assume, if the FBI was asked to investigate unintentional release of classified data that they'd have to recommend charges.

At best Clinton may be able to merely claim she was incompetent, not that it matters in this case, she still broke the law. However by claiming ignorance and/or incompetence she might be able to dodge a greater charge of treason but that does not save her from being barred from holding public office.

Whether she is ignorant, incompetent, stupid, or a traitor should not matter for her run for POTUS. She belongs in Miramar, not DC.

Re:Again with this?

[blindseer]

Rather than just looking for what Google gave as a definition for "gross negligence" I went to a legal resource: https://www.law.cornell.edu/we...

"A lack of care that demonstrates reckless disregard for the safety or lives of others, which is so great it appears to be a conscious violation of other people's rights to safety. It is more than simple inadvertence, and can affect the amount of damages."

Clinton did not seem to give any regard to how her handling of state secrets might affect others, that fits the definition of gross negligence to me.

Re: Again with this?

[Bing Tsher E]

If I tell my boss that there are many documented cases of Exchange Servers being penetrated, and that is why I am using my @yahoo.com email address to forward attachments containing trade secrets to another of my company's engineers in China, guess what happens?

Re:Again with this?

[Bing Tsher E]

Just think about how upset both democrat and republican donors are going to be if Trump wins and they end up getting nothing for their millions if not billions.

For a mini preview of that, just look at how pissed the Jeb Bush donors are already, today.

Re: Again with this?

[Bing Tsher E]

Trump is the 21st century version of President James Polk.

Polk was a one termer, and Trump will be a one-termer too.

The political establishment HATES one-term Presidents, because once they are elected they are unaccountable to anybody.

Re:Again with this?

[Bing Tsher E]

The optimist in me says that the auctions of surplus office equipment when they empty out buildings in D.C. full of useless bureaucrats in the first year of the Trump administration will mean cheap staplers (and lots of them even RED staplers!) for all of us!

Re:Again with this?

[AHuxley]

Given the US has a long history with secret informants (Watergate) and the walking out of data vs entering, staying undetected in and moving data from a network only to allow the ip range and tools used to be found?
The interesting part is to listen to the comments.
Julian Assange: 'A lot more material' coming on US elections (July 27, 2016)
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07...
"Perhaps one day the source or sources will step forward and that might be an interesting moment some people may have egg on their faces. But to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are,"
For any group or nation to have the skills to enter a network, stay in, not be detected, exit with a lot of data and then get sloppy with something as simple as ip ranges, tools used seems strange.
EXCLUSIVE – NSA Whistleblower: Agency Has All of Clinton’s Deleted Emails (31 Jul 2016)
http://www.breitbart.com/jerus...
..."surmised that the hack of the DNC could have been coordinated by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community"...

Re:Again with this?

[Solandri]

Mens rea is irrelevant to cases concerning classified information. All that's required is gross negligence, not intent. Kristian Saucier is currently serving 6 years in jail because he took photos of the reactor room where he worked aboard a U.S. Navy submarine. He didn't intend to distribute them, and AFAIK the Navy never found any evidence he intended to distribute them. Merely possessing them (gross negligence by taking the photos) was enough to bring him up on charges, to which he eventually pled guilty last month.

I don't plan on voting for Trump so I haven't been following what he said about Russian hackers. But I suspect his quip was aimed at getting the Russians to reveal if they had in fact hacked Clinton's email server. If they did, that would pretty much seal the case that Clinton's negligence in setting it up was in fact gross.

(I'm sorry for the outdated article, but nearly all of the manstream media is refusing to carry anything about this story. And that old article was the one with the most details. People like you who believe Mens rea is required are eating up the lie being fed to you by those in the media who support Clinton. Talk to anyone with a security clearance and ask them what the standard is. Clinton's polling numbers actually dropped after the FBI announced no charges were going to be filed, not increased as you would expect after having this shadow lifted from her future. I suspect that was due to her losing the support of lots of people with security clearances. Most of us weren't expecting jail time like the Right wanted; we were however expecting something minor like a reprimand, and rescinding her access to classified info (if she still has it). But for there to be no charges at all...)

Re:Again with this?

[ScentCone]

Its such a pity that the lad needs an interpreter, don't you think?

No, it's a pity you're pretending that what he said wasn't perfectly clear. It's a pity that you think so little of the people you're talking to that you expect them to be that dumb.

There are things you just don't say, like telling a foreign country to find classified emails on our countries systems

What? Telling them to find them on "our countries [sic] systems" ? Hillary Clinton deleted those messages years ago. The only place where her yoga class and wedding planning emails (remember? that's what she said she deleted) could be would be in the hands of someone who hacked them years ago. The FBI has already said there's no place remaining that they could get to them, since she deleted them. So the joke people have been making for a year and a half is: Gee, maybe the NSA/CIA/Russians/Chinese/Anonymous/etc has copies, ha ha ha. Yes, the joke stopped being funny a long time ago. So, Trump should have told a different one. But you seem to be, or are pretending to be, very uninformed about the events being discussed, especially the timeline of Clinton destroying her work records.

Re:Again with this?

[david_thornley]

I'm not a lawyer here, and I'm not saying she didn't break the law.

What I do know is that nobody has come up with a good account of anyone else facing criminal prosecution for what Clinton did. There have been criminal prosecutions for deliberate violations of the law, sure, but that's not what Clinton did. Nobody has shown me a case of criminal prosecution for negligence without intent involving a relatively small number of classified documents with no known harm. In practice, what she did has consistently been dealt with by yanking security clearances or maybe firing the perpetrator.

Re:Again with this?

[david_thornley]

You're confusing negligence with intent. If Clinton's actions were tantamount to a conscious decision, I'm sure there would have been many more classified documents on her systems. You're not providing evidence, other than your own opinions, that Clinton's negligence looked like a conscious decision, rather than incomplete attempts to keep classified documents off her personal systems.

Re:Again with this?

[david_thornley]

So, you say that Saucier deliberately took photos of his reactor room? That sounds to me like a conscious decision to break the law, which Clinton hasn't been shown to have.

I note that nobody has yet shown me a case of criminal prosecution for negligence involving a relatively small number of classified documents with no harm known. Instead, people persist in coming up with cases of deliberate violation of the law and trying to tell me they're equivalent.

Re:Again with this?

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Trump is scarier, but let's keep in mind that the POTUS has limited power. It's possible Trump would do less damage simply because Congress (where even most of the GOP members hate him) would tell him to get bent.

Re: Again with this?

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Here are a few citations that explicitly state what she did was a criminal offense.

Re:Again with this?

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

And yet, that's still not asking the hackers to find the emails.

Re:Again with this?

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

I think the end of the quote - "Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next." indicates that he was being sarcastic. Moreover, saying "I hope you can do this" isn't the same thing as asking someone to do it.

Re:Again with this?

[rjstegbauer]

Ironically, I'm sure that had she been reprimanded and had her access revoked, last Friday they would have probably been reinstated since then she was the Democrat's candidate. At this point she is given daily national security briefings.

In fact, if she is elected she could have been charged with treason and still be president getting all the same briefings. Sigh.

Re:Again with this?

[Ol Olsoc]

Plenty to dislike about Trump. But why keep making stuff up?

Yeah, libtards and commies and socialists just make shit up, all out of whole cloth. Trump is just constantly being misinterpreted/

Well, since I have a loyalist sucking at the Don's teat, I want you to explain exactly why the Veterns of Froeign Wars are in that group of people making shit up. Tell me EXACTLY what Trump said, and tell me EXACTLY why it was misinterpreted? Was it a joke about a Gold Star Mother? Hey that's pretty funny. Or was it the liberal media tricking him? Inquiring minds want to know.

Do you accept the challenge? Use words, not just respout people are making shit up pussy way out. And in case you try th eecuse that I'm making this shit up, here is the link for you to astroturf. http://www.vfw.org/News-and-Ev... Here are their words. Fortunately Your man is on of th only people who needs constant reinterpretation. These are well chosen words that need no astroturfing.

TO RIDICULE A GOLD STAR MOTHER IS OUT-OF-BOUNDS

August 01, 2016

WASHINGTON — Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump has a history of lashing out after being attacked, but to ridicule a Gold Star Mother is out-of-bounds, said the new national commander of the near 1.7 million-member Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States and its Auxiliary. “Election year or not, the VFW will not tolerate anyone berating a Gold Star family member for exercising his or her right of speech or expression,” said Brian Duffy, of Louisville, Ky., who was elected July 27 to lead the nation’s oldest and largest major war veterans organization. “There are certain sacrosanct subjects that no amount of wordsmithing can repair once crossed,” he said. “Giving one’s life to nation is the greatest sacrifice, followed closely by all Gold Star families, who have a right to make their voices heard.”

I'm really looking forward to your defense of Trump here.

Perspectives sure have changed, haven't they?

[DNS-and-BIND]

In the past, when America would do this, it was cheered by the American populace. It was thought a good thing that America should have an advantage, and quite natural and obvious that we should do these things. After all, everyone else is spying on us, and fair's fair!

Now, the American media works overtime exposing every advantage America tries to get over other countries, and when writing about it, uses a chiding, tut-tut-tut tone that clearly indicates that what America is doing is wrong. How times have changed, eh? Americans aren't even allowed to be pro-America any more. The elites in the media heartily disapprove of these sorts of America-helping shenanigans and disapprove more of those Americans who want their own country to have an advantage.

Re:Perspectives sure have changed, haven't they?

[dunkelfalke]

Well, by that logic the WTC attack was natural and obvious. After all, USA had repeatedly bombed the middle east, killing civilians, and fair's fair.
Surprisingly Americans reacted in a very different way.

Re:Perspectives sure have changed, haven't they?

[dbIII]

It was obvious enough that a group was set up to deal with Bin Laden in 1999, it was obvious enough that Tom Clancy used it in a book, it was obvious enough that "The Lone Gunman" pilot used it as a plot.

Baby Bush came to power and worrying about such things became a low priority. His very strong Saudi connections blinded him to the danger.

Treason

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump has committed treason.
Wittingly or not, he asked a foreign government to publish information which he asserts to contain state secrets.

Trump Wants To Launch Hack Attacks

[poity]

I distinctly remember Trump having said that Russia should find Hillary's deleted emails -- the implication being that he believes, as many do, that her server had already been hacked -- and those emails only need to be found from within the FSB archives in which they're being kept. I distinctly don't remember Trump saying Russia should hack any server that is currently online, or even using the word "hack".

But now, not only has this "Trump called Russia to hack Clinton" meme propagated, it's being treated no longer even as speculation but as an accepted truth that premises other stories. WTF?

Re:Trump Wants To Launch Hack Attacks

[imidan]

Manufactured outrage allows people to feign wounded astonishment that their opponent would sink so low. Right now, liberals are manufacturing outrage about what was quite obviously a throw-away, sarcastic statement from Trump. The other day, conservatives in North Carolina were trying to stir up outrage by accusing Tim Kaine of wearing a Honduran flag lapel pin during his convention speech (their accusation ended with the one-word sentence "Shameful."). Turns out they were just ignorant, and Kaine's pin was not a Honduran flag but a service pin in honor of his son, who is in the Marines and deployed at the moment. I'm not totally sure why we do this. I mean, it's not persuasive, it's only reinforcing for people who already believe their side is right. Maybe if one side were constantly being accused of bullshit without accusing the other side as well, it would appear weak? https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Re:Trump Wants To Launch Hack Attacks

[dbIII]

quite obviously a throw-away, sarcastic statement from Trump

Only if you argue that everything from Trump is a throw-away sarcastic statement, which would actually make a lot of sense.
Keep on looking at the big loud Trump instead of the close to nothingness behind the curtain of a casino boss pretending to have a big heart.

America Outsouring: China, Russia Don't Need Subs

[theshowmecanuck]

Since America has outsourced so much of its IT and software to China and Russia, they don't need submarines to hack into American communications networks. American companies hire Chinese and Russian programmers to do it directly. Even some ostensibly American telecom software companies like Netcracker and Amdocs do most of their development overseas. Netcracker has a major development shop in Moscow. I think America is doing this wrong.

Re:Slashdot's in the tank for Hillary

[Boronx]

That just means they love America.

Youa re not supposed to joke as a candidate

[aepervius]

Well at least not that sort of joke. There are certain joke which makes relationship with other country difficult, or makes you look like a fool, and you should avoid as a candidate for the highest office. this is one of those. If you want to see others , see Borris Johnson. Note that nominating such a person may be a political sign , a finger shown to group of people, I leave it up to slashdotter to decide which groups. But as a candidate for POTUS you should pretty damn fucking check what sort of joke you do, and joke about catastrophe or attacks (e.g. 9/11, pearly harbor), jokes about foreign president or countries, or jokes about attacks (be it physical or cyber) are certainly not something one should do.

Re:Youa re not supposed to joke as a candidate

[SuricouRaven]

I'm waiting for the day when President Trump jokes that he just launched a nuclear strike on Russia.

He'll probably then blame the Russian government for not realising it was a joke. Via the emergency broadcasting system, from his bunker underneath what remains of Washington.

Re:Youa re not supposed to joke as a candidate

[BarbaraHudson]

I'm waiting for the day when President Trump jokes that he just launched a nuclear strike on Russia.

He'll probably then blame the Russian government for not realising it was a joke. Via the emergency broadcasting system, from his bunker underneath what remains of Washington.

Why wait? Reagan made that particular joke decades ago.

Re:Youa re not supposed to joke as a candidate

[tsqr]

I'm waiting for the day when President Trump jokes that he just launched a nuclear strike on Russia.

I guess you're too young to remember Reagan's "The bombing begins in five minutes" joke.

He didn't ask anyone to launch hack attacks

[longk]

Hillary's e-mails have already been deleted. No "hack attack" is going to reveal them. The suggestion that a hack is wanted to reveal the e-mails (made by the press, not Trump) is plain ignorant.

If you go back and look at Trump's speech he wasn't anyone asking to go and hack. He simply asked that if someone has those e-mails already (from older hacks), to please share them.

Re:He didn't ask anyone to launch hack attacks

[dbIII]

The hair splitting doesn't matter. Just treat everything that comes out of Trump's mouth as not mattering, whether it is a demand to see Obama's penis (yes he really went there during the birther shit) or asking the Russians to hack the Democrats. Of course the guy wasn't serious. He's treating America as a plaything.

Where are the editors?

[RubberDogBone]

This block of text inside ( ) has NO NEED to be bracketed like that. It is a thought consistent with the one before and the one after and not some sort of abstract that needed to be separated. It's also huge, much too large to be an aside. Where are the editors and proofreaders these days? A properly written and constructed article should never need to break out into brackets.

... Soviet forces. (The National Security Agency has continued that tradition, monitoring underwater fiber cables as part of its globe-spanning intelligence-gathering apparatus. In some cases, the government has struck closed-door deals with the cable operators ensuring that U.S. spies can gain secure access to the information traveling over those pipes.) These days, ....

Re:Not comparable

[sumdumass]

Russia is not an enemy though. You can call them the enemy but it doesn't make it so. Only congress or the president can define enemies unless in an actual invasion which cyber espionage isn't.

Listen. All the way back to the IRS targeting conservatives and their missing emails the joke was that the NSA could release them. It was the same with Hillary's missing emails, just ask the NSA for them. Now they claim it is Russia doing all the spying so the joke shift to just ask the Russians for it.

I know you are passionate about supporting your side but let's not ignore actual facts in recent history in order to press an agenda that doesn't otherwise survive a cursory investigation into the real meaning.

Re: Slashdot's in the tank for Hillary

[Boronx]

The only payment I get is the sweet, sweet outrage from the misogynists and racists when someone does not believe as they do, but it's payment enough.

Trump doesn't understand even the basic philosophical concepts on which our government is based. You assholes don't give a crap because he's finally saying the right things about the wrong people. Plus he's an idiot who doesn't understand foreign policy, but you guys don't care about that, either.

For the record, I'm with Bernie, but I'm not sad that Hillary won, because Bernie doesn't know shit about foreign policy, either.

 

Re:Not comparable

[SvnLyrBrto]

Putin very much wants to be an enemy though. He is on record as pining for the "good old days" of the cold war, KGB and Soviet Union; having said publicly that he considers their dissolution "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century". And he's been taking increasingly aggressive steps towards bringing all three back over the last several years.

Re: Slashdot's in the tank for Hillary

[Boronx]

I don't approve of Hillary's foreign policy. It's just better than the alternative available. Trump doesn't understand that the US nuclear umbrella keeps Japan from wanting to get nukes, and that's very good thing. Trump doesn't understand that NATO security guarantees prevents an arms race in Europe. Any student of history knows that's a very good thing. Trump doesn't understand that banning Muslims will not prevent terrorism, but will hurt our image, tramples over our founding philosophical concepts, and probably will promote terrorism.

He doesn't get any of these basic concepts. He's too dumb to be president. Heck, he's famous for this piece of advice he gave to Reagan's nuclear negotiators: arrive late to the meeting, then the first thing you do is say "Fuck you!" to the Russians. That will throw them off their game.

As if the Russian negotiators were small time businessmen from Peoria with dollar signs in their eyes.

I actually think Hillary is a bit too dumb to be president, but she's way smarter than Trump.

Re:Not comparable

[sumdumass]

That may be true but your elected leaders don't think it makes Russia an enemy though. Perhaps one day they might but not as of now.

It's what most of them are for

[dbIII]

It's what most of them are for - even Australia's submarines are mainly for sitting quietly on the sea floor and listening.
Nuclear subs are a bit noisier (coolant pumps are apparently running all the time) but it's all relative since at a distance background noise is going to mask them.

Re:Not comparable

[dbIII]

Putin very much wants to be an enemy though

No.
He wants to be faced with nothing but the current situation of empty saber rattling while he does a Tsar Peter on bits of territory he'd like to have.
He'd be much happier to have to listen to distant ranting of an isolationist like Trump than be an enemy. He'd be much happier to move slowly and still get what he wants than move quickly enough for Hillary to even remotely consider putting troops in his path.

Expect history to repeat similar to Marines getting moved out of China to avoid having to fight the Japanese that they were posted there to stop.

Re:Not comparable

[dbIII]

How about we ask the Russians for the emails the NSA got :)
If Snowden working for a subcontractor in Hawaii could get it then the Russians, Chinese and anyone who wants the stuff enough to cover a Vegas gambling debt already had it.

So Reagan was not an actor?

[dbIII]

Bullshit. Reagan had decades of experience of treating every microphone as live. It was a joke obviously delivered deliberately to an audience to make Reagan look "tough". It really pissed off a lot of people because it depended on drunken people in the fractured Russian leadership with English as a second language hearing it as a joke - though the risk of anything happening as a consequence was close to zero if not actually zero.

See how a comment about "we will outlive you" being spun as a deadly threat going in the other direction to get an idea about how the joke pissed people off like a roast pig in a synagogue.


It was deliberate and "sending a message" to get people angry and make Reagan look really tough at home. The "thought the mike was cut" thing is utter bullshit from gutless weasel apologists and the joke never would have been taken seriously anyway. The saying about making sausages and making politics being very ugly to watch applies very much with that petty incident.

Pity you're a coward...

[denzacar]

You just went so hilariously overboard with ad hominems and lack of knowledge of history - you would be elected the local rightwing loon faster than you could come up with another crazy conspiracy.
If only you had the balls to sign your name...

Ah well... It is the roads not taken that made you the man you are today... or the man you're not, to be precise.
All those times you lacked the courage to voice your opinion, hiding in the crowds, helplessness and despair silently eating you from inside...
To the point you don't even have the balls to be an internet tough guy any more. And prepubescent boys whose balls haven't dropped yet can do THAT.
What a truly pathetic creature you are.

Time for Copy/Paste vs. ModTrolls again...

[denzacar]

Even if all the scandals she's been involved in were "made up bullshit", that would just mean that the public does not fancy her, which should be enough for her to lose the nomination.

You misspelled rightwing birther loons. And other assorted paranoid schizos who've been jerking off to Clintons since... forever.
Well, since the last millennium at least.

Would you look a that?
Some "people" simply can't stand the fact that "some people" are conspiracy theory rightwing birther loons who have been inventing conspiracy theories about Clintons since the early '90s at least.
And those same "people" like to present their own loony conspiracy theories as the views "of the people".

Hmm... where did I hear that kind of rhetoric recently... Calling personal political goals "the will of the people"? Oh that's right!
It's the guys running for office in order to shut down the government against the will of the ACTUAL people.
Imagine people like that also labeling as "trolls" anyone disagreeing with them. Naaaah... They wouldn't do THAT?

Re:What's that Hollow Ring I hear?.

[rickb928]

It's also the media characterization of Trump's statement as 'asking the Russians' anything.

The sarcasm was dripping off of the last line, the one rarely included in the quote.

What virtually all the media reports:

"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said at a press conference. "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."

What was actually said, as one statement, from one site:

"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said at a press conference. "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be nice."

Let's unpack this:

- Trump says "Russia, if you're listening,". Sure, they listen. Is Trump actually addressing the Russians?

- Next, "I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,". This is where so many burrow in and wonder if Trump realizes the servers are gone, the emails are no longer 'out there' according to conventional wisdom, so what is he actually saying here? Maybe this is the first line of sarcasm? For those of you at home, yes, this is your signal that Trump is on a roll here, playing all of you and sticking his thumb in the Democrats' eye.

- And then, "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press". And here, if you're even marginally paying attention over the approximately 51 years or so, you are immediately thinking 'oh, yeah, like THAT's gonna happen'. Unless you're a lickspittle Lefty, and you're thinking absolutely nothing. Vacant stare.

- And Trump, as he does so often, delivers the punch line we, mostly, already know is coming: "Let's see if that happens. That'll be nice.". This cannot be reported by the media, for they cannot bring further attention to their abject failure. As we now know, they lie by commission and omission.

And frankly. I hope you still do not get it. We are at the beginning of the post-postpolitical era, where consensus politics that has led to a concerted challenge to capitalism, rise of the Liberal State, emergence of newly reconstituted tyrannies such as, but not limited to, Russia, China, and ISIS/ISIL, and the assertion of political power as the defining, organizing, and exclusive means of social organization. Trump is the anti-politician, who speaks plainly, the way his core constituents/prime audience/fan base do, and they understand him completely. He speaks as a man of action, which a man of business must be, not as a policy wonk or apparatchnik, which most of his opponents are, and not as a thoroughly compromised/complicit globalist politician, who are his enemy and adversaries.

Keep mistaking this campaign for anything approaching conventional. Please.

Re:Slashdot's in the tank for Hillary

[david_thornley]

Look at how many anti-Hillary comments there are. If you think Slashdot's in the tank, you're either ignorant or delusional.

I have not talked to anyone in the Clinton campaign about saying anything about her or this campaign. I certainly wouldn't accept money for such a thing. I bash ignorant and spiteful and stupid people for free. Consider it a public service.

Old Hat

[brunnerabda]

Nothing new here, been doing this for 50 years.

Talking out their asses

[beastofburdon]

Our submarines do not have such capabilities, unless they are talking about the Dolphin, which is far too highly classified for these jokers to know about. Hell, rumors abound about what that boat does because nobody really knows. It is a diesel though, so it can only stay submerged for a little over a day at a time which would make something of this magnitude highly unlikely.