NSA Chief: Nation-State Made 'Conscious Effort' To Sway US Presidential Election (aol.com)

The head of the US National Security Agency has said that a "nation-state" consciously targeted presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, in order to affect the US election. From an AOL article:Adm. Michael Rogers, who leads both the NSA and US Cyber Command, made the comments in response to a question about Wikileaks' release of nearly 20,000 internal DNC emails during a conference presented by The Wall Street Journal. "There shouldn't be any doubt in anybody's minds," Rogers said. "This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily. This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect." Rogers did not specify the nation-state or the specific effect, though US intelligence officials suspect Russia provided the emails to Wikileaks, after hackers stole them from inside DNC servers and the personal email account of Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta. At least two different hacker groups associated with the Russian government were found inside the networks of the DNC over the past year, reading emails, chats, and downloading private documents. Many of those files were later released by Wikileaks.Further reading: Quartz and MotherJones.

Comments

Blah blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

I am tired of the military-industrial complex requiring a boogie man to support their funding.

Re:Blah blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, when the commies invade a scrappy band of high school students will defeat them.

Re:Blah blah blah

[cayenne8]

You know....I hope they find exactly who did the break-ins AND the meddling and there are consequences for that.

That being said, however....if Hillary hadn't been such a weak candidate, and not had so many skeletons in her closet, and hadn't been involved with SO many shady things over her career, then none of her staff would have been talking about all this on those emails that were leaked, and there wouldn't have been so much dirt on her to be leaked.

While I detest the meddling in our country's election, regardless of the source....this info DID come strait from the Democrats showing their dirty laundry and underhanded tricks, being in bed with much of the main stream media.....and from the Clinton campaign where her staff was rightfully worried about all the baggage she carried and how poorly she was adept at handling it and not causing more problems for herself and public image.

Re:Blah blah blah

[ShanghaiBill]

You know....I hope they find exactly who did the break-ins AND the meddling and there are consequences for that.

I totally agree that there should be consequences for whoever exposed this corruption. Maybe a Congressional Gold Medal, or a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Re:Blah blah blah

[budgenator]

Yes Everybody is BooHooing the Russians interfering with the US election by having the audacity of telling the American Electorate the truth.

They didn't succeed though

[Anonymous Coward]

Hillary didn't lose due to Wikileaks. She lost because she promised absolutely nothing other than to be not Donald Trump.

Donald Trump promised to bring back jobs lost to off-shoring. He promised to bring back the parts of America that are hurting.

Hillary Clinton promised to say one thing and public and other things in private. She promised to continue the status quo of the elite ruling over us with little to no input from the public. She lost because her selling point was "first woman president!" and not policy.

She lost for a thousand reasons.

Wikileaks is not one of them.

Re: They didn't succeed though

[Anonymous Coward]

I never said Trump was going to succeed. Trump promised a lot of things he almost certain can't deliver.

But he promised SOMETHING and that sure beats promises of things staying the same, especially as things continue to get worse. And don't try and claim they're not getting worse - cities are improving and largely voted for Hillary, but rural America is in rapid decline and they came out in massive support for Trump. Because he promised to help them - even if there's almost no chance that he really can.

Re:They didn't succeed though

[HornWumpus]

Anybody who had ignored all the evidence up to then was in the tank for Hillary and no additional evidence would change their minds.

What cost Clinton the election? Voter turnout. She was not Obama, so blacks stayed home. Trump's redneck voters were not expected to vote but did.

What drove that? Black racism and angry trailer parks. None of which were served by Hillary's campaign strategy. Blacks were taken for granted, trailer trash were called 'despicables'.

Re:They didn't succeed though

[Austerity Empowers]

What drove that? Black racism and angry trailer parks.

Or put in a less insulting way, poor rural white men were promised the jobs they felt were taken away from them by ... everyone else.

None of which were served by Hillary's campaign strategy. Blacks were taken for granted, trailer trash were called 'despicables'.

"Deplorables" is the word you are looking for. It's important, because only someone like Hillary Clinton would use that word. It conveys a strong sense of rich, out of touch elitist, describing ... all other people. It just happens that this time she meant rural whites.

This is why she lost the election. Benghazi, email-gate, whatever... the republicans have been attacking her for so long, for so many reasons that most of us had tuned out.

Re:They didn't succeed though

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody who had ignored all the evidence up to then was in the tank for Hillary and no additional evidence would change their minds.

What cost Clinton the election? Voter turnout. She was not Obama, so blacks stayed home. Trump's redneck voters were not expected to vote but did.

What drove that? Black racism and angry trailer parks. None of which were served by Hillary's campaign strategy. Blacks were taken for granted, trailer trash were called 'despicables'.

Nope.

Conclusion first because it's a long read:

Stop calling Trump voters racist. A metaphor: we have freedom of speech not because all speech is good, but because the temptation to ban speech is so great that, unless given a blanket prohibition, it would slide into universal censorship of any unpopular opinion. Likewise, I would recommend you stop calling Trump voters racist – not because none of them are, but because as soon as you give yourself that opportunity, it’s a slippery slope down to “anyone who disagrees with me on anything does so entirely out of raw seething hatred, and my entire outgroup is secret members of the KKK and so I am justified in considering them worthless human trash”. I’m not saying you’re teetering on the edge of that slope. I’m saying you’re way at the bottom, covered by dozens of feet of fallen rocks and snow. Also, I hear that accusing people of racism constantly for no reason is the best way to get them to vote for your candidate next time around. Assuming there is a next time.

It's from Slate, hardly a bastion of alt-right support:
You Are Still Crying Wolf

It does one helluva job destroying the idea that Trump won because of racism. Read it - that conclusion is supported by various bits of data - including the fact that Trump got a higher percentage of votes than Romney in all racial categories but one - whites.

I have a different perspective. Back in October 2015, I wrote that the picture of Trump as “the white power candidate” and “the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era” was overblown. I said that “the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data”, and predicted that:

If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.

...

Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.

Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don’t think we have official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in equal or lesser numbers this year than in 2012, 2008, and so on.

I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up. It’s a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him. That it came to dominate the election cycle should be considered a horrifying indictment of our political discourse, in the same way that it would be a horrifying indictment of our political discourse if the entire Republican campaign had been based around the theory that Hillary Clint

Re:They didn't succeed though

[Lisandro]

Trump isn't part of the political elite. Yes, he's rich, but he's never really spent any of his time or money in politics. He's a true outsider.

Your "true outsider" was openly Democrat until the 2010s and did spend both time and money on politics - a lot of both. Here's a beautiful example.

Honestly, you should've researched your candidate a bit better.

man, our own medicine tastes terrible

[Ionized]

The US has been mucking around influencing foreign governments for many, many decades. Kinda sucks when someone does it to us.

Re:I'd like to thank the leader of said nation-sta

[pr0t0]

Just so I'm clear about your statement, you are saying it was incumbent upon the "lying media" to hack into the computer systems of one or all candidates (fair and balanced), breaking untold number of laws set forth by the computer fraud and abuse act, and disseminate the findings of which to the viewing public?

That's an interesting point of view.

Re:That's all fine but

[93 Escort Wagon]

Did they maybe not do the same to the other side? Who cares so what?

I was and am very much against Donald Trump, but I'm not sure what hacking his organization would have accomplished - every kooky thing he seems to believe was already right out there in front of us. Unless he was secretly boiling and eating babies, I don't know what additional info about him could've swayed the election... and, even then, it might not have mattered.

He famously said "I could shoot somebody and wouldn't lose voters", and apparently he was right.

Re:Amazing Disconnect

[Fire_Wraith]

I'm against voter ID laws because what evidence I've seen is that the problem they purport to solve is vanishingly small, and in practice the effect and intent is to decrease turnout in specifically targeted groups (namely, those that vote largely for one party rather than the other).

On the other hand, I think that establishing full audit trails for elections are a good thing. We should not blindly trust that electronic systems do what we're told they do - we need ways to verify that (and that goes for so many things other than voting too). I'd be perfectly happy to have voter audit methods as well - and we can easily come up with ways to do that which don't prevent legitimate voters from casting a ballot. Have them sign an affidavit, and take their picture. If you insist on ID cards, make the voter ID itself come with a picture, and don't charge money for them. That way everyone who's registered to vote automatically has a valid ID.