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US Investigating Potential Covert Russian Plan To Disrupt November Elections (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are probing what they see as a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions, intelligence and congressional officials said. The aim is to understand the scope and intent of the Russian campaign, which incorporates cyber-tools to hack systems used in the political process, enhancing Russia's ability to spread disinformation. The effort to better understand Russia's covert influence operations is being coordinated by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence. The Kremlin's intent may not be to sway the election in one direction or another, officials said, but to cause chaos and provide propaganda fodder to attack U.S. democracy-building policies around the world, particularly in the countries of the former Soviet Union. U.S. intelligence officials described the covert influence campaign here as "ambitious" and said it is also designed to counter U.S. leadership and influence in international affairs. One congressional official, who has been briefed recently on the matter, said "Russian 'active measures' or covert influence or manipulation efforts, whether it's in Eastern Europe or in the United States" are worrisome. It "seems to be a global campaign," the aide said. As a result, the issue has "moved up as a priority" for the intelligence agencies, which include the FBI and Department of Homeland Security as well as the CIA and the National Security Agency. Their comments came just before President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin talked privately about cyberspying and other matters on the sidelines of the Group of 20 talks in China.
if Hillary looses, you can be sure the left will point the finger at Russia. Any election the left looses is automatically "Unfair!".
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
.... so now the same party is looking for an excuse in case their forced candidate loses the election.
And no ... the allegation of electoral fraud is not just an allegation. The fraud was confirm and well documented, but the DNC refuses to even address it.
Unless somehow Russia manipulated who the final candidates wound up being "sowing public distrust in the upcoming election" is like bringing sand to the beach.
I'm still amazed that so many people think he thinks Russian can hack a server that no longer exists, rather than simply revealing what Hillary left open to all the world with her illicit email server.
If Russia is with Trump, then electing Trump will mean we will not go to war with Russia, and we almost certainly will if we elect Hillary (which she is already inclined to anyway because of the DNC and email leaks).
The media try to paint Trump as some kind of warmonger, but he's not even sure about backing all NATO countries! Meanwhile Hillary is no stranger to war, having started the war in Libya from scratch for no good reason, and with even flimsier pretext than Iraq... Libya was slowly opening to the west under Gaddafi, there was no need to take him out and now that country is utterly screwed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, it's the Russians, not the post Iraq war and post financial crisis revelations that have sown mistrust in institutions.
Uh huh.
both parties run bitches of big corporations, which money trail do we follow?
you're funny, paper ballots are counted by machine and even if tallied by humans are subject to fraud and error just as any other system
And you are desperately naïve.
Obviously, any voting system is vulnerable to fraud if it is easily compromised by bad players. But what would you prefer? A tangible, macroscopic paper-trail of the choices that voters have made, or an ephemeral whisper of them in the ones and zeroes on the magnetic domains of a hard-drive that are written and read by computer software?
You tell me which of these two options is more susceptible to fraud. You tell me which is harder to verify by all interested parties. You tell me which is more easily tampered with.
I'll wait...
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
So, just to be clear, what Trump meant was her emails that Russia probably already have in their possession because Hillary Clinton doesn't know how to secure stuff. And apparently Colin Powell was a bad actor too. A bad actor being a person acting in bad faith while possibly managing to stay within the letter of the law.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm not going to debate most of your opinions, but...
The info source does not matter.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The source absolutely matters, especially considering the recent fad of leaking classified documents under the guise of "whistleblowing". Due to the classified nature of the information, there usually can be no official explanation beyond what is leaked. This means that the leaker has absolute editorial control over what can be discussed, and by exercising that control can manupilate public perception. Since nobody else can offer a rebuttal, the deception can last for decades.
Consider the well-known ethics thought experiment of a runaway railroad trolley heading towards five people tied to the track. You stand at a switch with the ability to divert the trolley to a different track, but there is one person standing on that path.
Depending on the circumstances involved, a wide variety of ethical outcomes may be selected. Sometimes it's considered more ethical to do nothing, and remain innocent. Sometimes it's considered more ethical to kill one person rather than five, and save a net of four lives. Sometimes less-conventional solutions are proposed, like sacrificing yourself to try to stop the trolley.
The perception of ethics also changes when more circumstances are known. If the one person on the other track is the villain who tied up the other five, he is almost universally chosen to die instead. If he's an innocent child, he's usually chosen to live in preference to five elderly people.
The circumstances matter, and selecting which circumstances the audience does or does not know means the ethical perception of the issue can also be selected. This was seen directly in the "Collateral Murder" video, where WikiLeaks made extensive use of editing to minimize the evidence that the targets were hostile, and emphasizing the evidence that they were innocent. They also edited around the protocols used to confirm a target, and intentionally made no acknowledgement of the fog of war, letting the viewers know from the beginning that the victims were innocent.
Even if the original footage were unclassified ("honestly and transparently", as you put it), a full understanding of events requires an expert's knowledge. As we've seen from other cases where official full reports were released, they're usually ignored because they don't agree with the earlier biased reports released to the public.
Always consider the source for all information, and consider any bias they may have. The more outrageous the scandal, the more incentive there is to editorialize it, or even to outright fabricate the information. Even if the US government were fully transparent, it would always be possible to claim that there is some secret agency (or department, or program, or person) that isn't transparent, and exists to do all of the distasteful things the rest of the government can't do.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Snowden's revelations of how our government betrayed us, combined with the farcical attempt at representing the public that the current crop of candidates makes, is more than enough to ruin the world's faith in America's "democratic" process.
Any American that has been paying attention has known for years that our government is corrupt to its core.
We deserve to be doubted. Right now, "trustworthy" does not apply to anything any politician says or does.
That is inevitable at this point anyway because Russia has not been countered for eight years.
If that had even an inkling of truth to it the Ukraine and Baltic States would have been gone years ago. The Crimea was a difficult one to oppose. Historically it was never a part of the Ukraine and even after it was assigned to the Ukraine in 1954 (by the Soviet government) it retained a certain level of autonomy. Add to that the native population of the Crimea was relocated and/or killed after WWII for Nazi collaboration so the population was close to 50% pro-Russian. On top of all that Putin performed a fairly masterful job of brinkmanship maneuvering to split it off. Yes the West was badly out maneuvered but it was also a bit of a wake up call. And key, the Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
But regardless it wouldn't be AMERICA starting the war, as it would be under Hillary.
If you mean Hillary would actually oppose a Russian invasion of say Latvia rather than sit blindly on the side as Trump has hinted he might, I would back Hillary 100% in that. Trump's appeasement stance would result in a situation much like that which occurred in WWII. At some point you would have to oppose him. Do you do so when he invades Latvia? Or do you wait until he goes into Poland? Or even wait until he crosses the German border? The longer you wait the stronger his the position will be and the weaker the West's will be.
Who is John Galt?