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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.
They are just doing what Trump asked them to.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
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.
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The current 2 party duopoly is a corrupt manipulative mess as the US presidential candidate choices.
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Both Hillary and Trump are AWFUL candidates. So a huge number of voters are stuck voting against who they think is worse. There is NO positive choice.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
Yeah, it's the Russians, not the post Iraq war and post financial crisis revelations that have sown mistrust in institutions.
Uh huh.
if Hillary looses, you can be sure the left will point the finger at Russia. Any election the left looses is automatically "Unfair!".
It's not about left or right; it's about the process. Both sides are happy to manipulate electoral math in any way which helps them--this is the ONLY reason states still use winner-take-all allocation in the electoral college, for example.
The process should be managed very carefully and respectfully, and should at the least allow paper recounts of any electronic votes.
Real lawyers write in C++
Russia and Putin are going to try to help whichever candidate they think would weaken the US the most.
You are welcome on my lawn.
both parties run bitches of big corporations, which money trail do we follow?
The fraud was related to evading campaign finance laws, not Bernie: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/dnc-leak-clinton-team-deflected-state-cash-concerns-226191
What they did to Bernie wasn't fraud, at least not in the legal sense, just a slap in the face to those in the dem voter base who thought their party's candidate would be determined by a fair and democratic process. Of course the DNC, as a private entity, is free to hand-pick their candidate and skip the entire primary process - as they used to long ago - but decades of at least the illusion of democracy has led people to expect something vastly different.
Smells like complete bullshit. don't get me wrong I would not put this past Russia (or the US) to engage in such practises but the US election is a world wide laughing stock at this point, If Russia had been manipulating it all along they could not have created a better 2 candidates themselves. I think more likely they are sitting back having a good old chuckle knowing that no matter who wins this election the US loses.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Trump is being financed by Russian banks with very close ties to Putin, which is not the same thing but that's why people are saying Trump is working with them.
Trump is working for Trump and is not going to work for either the Russians or the American people.
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.
Yeah, that's it, I'm pretty sure.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The media try to paint Trump as some kind of warmonger, but he's not even sure about backing all NATO countries!
Wow. You Trump supporters are terrifyingly ignorant. It should be obvious (at least to anyone who's read even a bit of history) that Trump's wishy washy support of NATO is far more likely result in war in Europe than strong support for NATO would. If or when the US participates is another question but I would strongly suggest you read about a little period of recent history in the 1930's. Putin wants his Empire back and one requirement to accomplishing that is the weakening of NATO to the point they don't oppose Putin when he starts taking it back. You sound like you would be a Neville Chamberlain fan. You might ask him how well an appeasement policy against an aggressive state works out. You'll see how well a weak Western Europe and an isolationist US turned out last time. The most efficient and effective time to oppose an aggressive state is before their tanks start rolling through neighboring countries.
Who is John Galt?
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?
if Hillary looses, you can be sure the left will point the finger at Russia. Any election the left looses is automatically "Unfair!".
It's not about left or right; it's about the process. Both sides are happy to manipulate electoral math in any way which helps them--this is the ONLY reason states still use winner-take-all allocation in the electoral college, for example.
The process should be managed very carefully and respectfully, and should at the least allow paper recounts of any electronic votes.
Okay, that much is true. We also need something better than first past the post, which in various ways is probably more important, since it would have helped third parties and maybe improved the candidate results from the primaries.
Speaking to the actual issue of things..
Clinton hasn't said if she loses the system must be rigged. That's Trump.
Clinton hasn't benefited from Russian hackers. That's Trump.
Clinton isn't particularly approved by people like Putin and David Duke. That's Trump.
Clinton didn't win the lie of the year last year from politifact. That's Trump. In fact if you add up each of their true, mostly true and half of their half true statements, Clinton is at 61% compared to Trump's 22.5%, so Trump tells the truth about a third as often as Clinton does.
Clinton didn't basically ask for foreign espionage to be done on Hillary Clinton to help his campaign. That's Trump.
Clinton didn't call most Mexicans rapists and criminals. That's Trump.
Clinton didn't make up medical problems about her opponent. That's Trump.
Clinton didn't change the core of her key policy proposals so many times that not even her surrogates can keep up. That's Trump.
Clinton didn't do his best to get the Central Park 5 killed, completely bypassing due process. That's Trump. (The turned out to be innocent.)
Clinton isn't the one that paid bribes That's Trump in Florida and texas.
Clinton isn't the one funnelling what money she can back into herself. That's Trump.
Trump hasn't spent her whole life as a public servant, with a long record to show for it. That's Hillary. Trump just has multiple bankruptcies, failed businesses and ruined lives.
Trump isn't the one with a charity that has saved millions that is rated very highly. That is Hillary and Bill.
Trump has focused on improving the Trump brand. Hillary has focused on improving the country.
The Washington Post has a bit of bias in this, so take it with a grain of salt. When will the Washington Post start investigating themselves for holding illicit fundraisers with the DNC? Or is it Russia's fault they did this? Those damned Russians, how dare they expose our corruption!
Source: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699
Bzzt - fail.
Get a grownup to tell you about the bombing raid on Libya after the terrorist attack on a Pan-Am flight.