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President Obama Threatens Retaliatory Actions Against Russia Over Hacks (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times:
[President Obama] said he was weighing a mix of public and covert actions against the Russians in his last 34 days in office, actions that would increase "the costs for them." Mr. Obama said he was committed to sending the Kremlin a message that "we can do stuff to you," but without setting off an escalating cyberconflict... "Some of it we will do in a way that they will know, but not everybody will," he said...
[T]he president was clearly wrestling with what he said the hacking affair and the reaction to it revealed about the state of American politics. Citing a recent poll that showed more than a third of Trump voters saying they approved of Mr. Putin...the president appealed to Americans not to allow partisan hatred and feuds to blind them to manipulation by foreign powers. "Unless that changes," Mr. Obama said, "we're going to continue to be vulnerable to foreign influence because we've lost track of what it is that we're about and what we stand for."
President Obama pulled Putin aside at a September meeting of the G20 to discuss Russian hacking, according to the article, telling Putin "to cut it out, there were going to be serious consequences if he did not."
[T]he president was clearly wrestling with what he said the hacking affair and the reaction to it revealed about the state of American politics. Citing a recent poll that showed more than a third of Trump voters saying they approved of Mr. Putin...the president appealed to Americans not to allow partisan hatred and feuds to blind them to manipulation by foreign powers. "Unless that changes," Mr. Obama said, "we're going to continue to be vulnerable to foreign influence because we've lost track of what it is that we're about and what we stand for."
President Obama pulled Putin aside at a September meeting of the G20 to discuss Russian hacking, according to the article, telling Putin "to cut it out, there were going to be serious consequences if he did not."
It hardly took that long over 9/11. And with evidence just as feeble..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Can someone explain what exactly was hacked (voting machines?) and what is the evidence that the Russians are responsible?
"Airing our party's dirty laundry crosses a red line, and there will be consequen -- nah, nevermind"
If they are not careful, Obama may be forced to do something drastic, like issue a strongly worded letter of condemnation!
There are not even the barest shreds of any proofs about russian influence or wrongdoing. However the allegations all come from proven professional liars and torturers who then steal and kill to hide their wrongdoings. All of the infamous 17 agencies lie pretty much everytime they go public with anything political.
How many russian speakers work at the CIA who can write russian comments? "Rasputin" is now considererd a proof? How many attack servers of the NSA and CIA are located in former soviet republics? Weren't stuxnet servers there too? The CIA/NSA has a lot more reason to do some hacking their own election than Russia: there simply is no reason for Russia to hack cause the conflicts they are in, they are actually winning, unlike the US no matter who wins the election. Also no mather who wins it, the war in the middle east will go on, maybe a little less bloody since the US won't send weapons to Al-Qaeda aka al-Nusra via Saudi Arabia. Russia has realistic goals, and goes rationally to achieve them. The US does not but finances and supports with weapons instead the people they are claiming to fight for the last 15 years.
So if any country wishes to meddle in any election by telling the truth about any sides corruption, I say: more power to them. Even if it is some CIA guy who publicized the campaign emails. I'd be happy if they did the same for the republicans and their campaings, but I guess that hacker there already did a lot for the american public so we can't demand more from him.
The US has meddled in other countries' elections especially their allies, since at least WW2 (Greece, Italy for example), toppled by now probably dozens of governments in clandestine operations and in bloody coups on in middle and southern america alone. So how are they to accuse anyone of doing it? And doing it with the truth instead of bullets like the US customarily does?
And how would that have been done, seeing as the presidential election is effectively 50 separate elections, with different voting technologies? As to Democrat email leaks, it is unclear to me that the Executive branch has ever had an overt role in securing political parties' data.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The only reason the emails were newsworthy at all was that the documents revealed information that the DNC and the Clinton campaign were trying to keep secret from the American voters. If the Russians were involved in the leak (and that seems like a pretty big "if" since there doesn't seem to be much evidence), they would only have been giving to the voters information that Clinton should have released on her own. In other words, these disclosures are clearly not “fake news”.
I'll say this one more time: information that the CIA has accused Russia of sharing with the American people is “real news” about newsworthy topics, and given how pathetic the "security" was on the servers it came from, it seems unbelievable that this wouldn't have made the news sooner or later.
Tell me again how they "hacked the election"?
There's no proof because Russia didn't hack the elections. Julian Assange said Russia wasn't the source of the DNC and Podesta leaks, and he's got way more credibility than a partisan politician, even if that politician is the POTUS. Russian hacking = the real #fakenews
It's not his fault, because the media is purposely confusing things. Notice how they always talk about Russia "hacking the election" even though that's not at all what happened. And then when they do talk about what Russia is actually accused of doing, they always just say "emails" to try and conflate Hillary's email server with the Wikileaks dump. It's classic disinformation and if you talk about politics with regular people, it's working: people have just kind of mentally merged Hillary's private email server with the Wikileaks email dump with Russians "hacking the vote" despite the fact that none of them are related and the third never happened.
It's a technique that the Democrats are using to distance themselves from Hillary's historic failure as a candidate, and that the Republicans are more than happy to let them get away with because refusing to acknowledge the truth is only going to lead to a GOP supermajority in 2018 and likely a GOP-controlled Constitutional Convention within the next decade.
But it's not surprising that people are confused about what "Russian hacking" is - the media and the lame duck administration are purposely trying to confuse people.
1) it doesn't matter who's the hacker, if our infrastructure is vulnerable, its vulnerable to anyone. lets worry about fixing that first.
2) fine, retaliate. why is this news? hacking happens every day. remember stuxnet? solution to hacking is better technology NOT better lawyering.
3) nice job wagging-the-dog your way out of actually dealing with the contents of hillary emails. real threat is what happened with Sanders (i'm not his supporter _at all_). it was a scandalous perversion of democracy. Putin (if it was him) did us a great service. i mean us the people, not necessarily certain people in power.
Convincing evidence that Russia intervened in the elections is a valid reason for the electoral college to vote the other way. No one thought of computer hacking when the electoral college was created of course but I would say it translates well. Come to think of it, the FBI director letter could in it self be considered an undue influence on the election.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The only way they have been accused of "intervening" so far is by sharing information with the American people is that it was all “real news” about newsworthy topics. Information that we should have a right to know about. AFAIK, they have not been accused of hacking votes or anything along those lines.
the worst foreign policy strategy every implemented by the US.
Because lying about the need to invade and occupy Iraq, destroying the one bulwark which might have existed to stop the spread of ISIS, had nothing to do with any of this, right? That was a fantastic foreign policy issue, right?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The amazing thing is Thursday I listened to Julian Assange give a live interview stating categorically that Wikileaks did not receive the emails from any state actor including Russia. It was a DNC insider angry about Clinton Foundation corruption and what happened to Bernie. Not hearing a word of this in the "media".
They won't because it's well documented that the US has interfered in elections all over the world. A quick search turns up dozens of them just since WW2.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Well, I'm not bloody confused, and I think it's a reasonable assumption that Russia wanted to do what it could to prevent Clinton from winning the election, and at least initially has got what it wants; a president who is Russia-friendly and a Secretary of State with pretty deep ties to Russia. We can debate how much influence the Russians really did have, but I'd say the Wikileaks emails did Clinton tangible harm.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Er - Afghanistan was attacked the very night the towers fell. Iraq was NEVER about 9/11.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Were you alive, then? Because it was a 14-month march to war.
Wow are you confused. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The Taliban in Afghanistan admitted to hosting and supporting Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who were responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
I know we're living in a post factual world where empirical truth doesn't exist. But the fact is that the U.S. led a coaliton of forces against the Taliban in Afghanistan beginning on October 7, 2001. Less than one month after the September 11 attacks.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
oh fuck off. We all know what the poster was referring to, the conspiracy theory that Clinton had Rich assassinated in some sort of gangland-style take down. For fuck's sake, this is exactly what fake news is, where the diseased minds that invent these conspiracy theories suddenly become accepted as being holders of the "real story".
There's no evidence that Rich leaked anything, and there's no evidence that the Clinton's had him killed. These are pure fabrications that have been repeated by the Sanders and Alt-right lunatics so much that they just assume the truth of this particular fantasy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Besides, Putin is more photogenic than Hillary.
Don't assume that everyones taste in porn is the same as yours.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Iraq was about keeping the muslim world busy the traditional way. By restarting the war between its two largest factions. Let them kick the fight out of each other for a century or two. It worked for Christianity. (100 years war, between the catholics and protestants. Only those remote to the fight, Irish/British, missed the point, they got it themselves, eventually.)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How is this our infrastructure being vulnerable? Russia didn't hack US infrastructure, at least not that I've seen (please provide reliable sources if you know otherwise) they got in to the internal e-mails of campaigns. Also "hack" seems to be a bit of a strong word for what they did. Sounds like they got in to Podesta's e-mails by phishing his username/password. I'm not really sure what you think the federal government can do to fix/prevent that. I mean they already have information out there about "don't click on shit in e-mails" and there is training out there organizations can point people to from groups like SANS.
That aside, even if it was a hack (as in exploiting vulnerabilities) it wasn't a federal government controlled system. So again, what is the fed supposed to do? Take over private e-mail systems? Put up a national firewall on the Internet?
What? Hilary was going to take your guns if she was elected?
How could you have any guns left after Obama took them all? Oh wait....
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Were you alive, then? Because it was a 14-month march to war.
Wow are you confused. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The Taliban in Afghanistan admitted to hosting and supporting Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who were responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
I know we're living in a post factual world where empirical truth doesn't exist. But the fact is that the U.S. led a coaliton of forces against the Taliban in Afghanistan beginning on October 7, 2001. Less than one month after the September 11 attacks.
Close, but not quite. Iraq was not a direct result of or a response to 9/11. 9/11 laid the groundwork for Iraq, though, focusing more resources including political will, attention, and covert focus on Iraq. More importantly, it put the American People on a war footing psychologically, in a way they had not been for decades. Without that, the ground war in Iraq would probably have been a political non-starter.
Real lawyers write in C++
Had all the nations involved in the 1991 war with Iraq helped make sure Iraq abided by their surrender agreement the 2003 war would not have happened.Instead a significant amount of those countries ran the UN Oil for Food scam and turned a blind eye every time Iraq violated the terms of their surrender. The largest coalition of nations supporting military operations was gathered for the 1991 war. It was a positive action that gave the UN a rare opportunity to show how the world could be rallied together for the common good. And then the UN reverted back to a non-entity that couldn't organize an orgy in a whore house. That sounded the death toll for the UN. It's a worthless organization that should be disbanded or at least unfunded by the US. The 2003 war occurred because Iraq violated every item of the 1991 surrender agreement. Had Japan or Germany not abided by the terms of their surrender they would have been pummeled again without question because not honoring surrender agreements will eventually lead to warring armies not offering or accepting surrender agreements which takes war to a whole new level of barbarity.
Sadaam Hussien himself helped promote the belief that he possessed WMD because he was afraid some of the surrounding countries would take advantage of Iraq's weakened state after the first war. Had Japan or Germany not abided by the terms of their surrender they would have been pummeled again without question because not honoring surrender agreements will eventually lead to warring armies to not offer or accept surrender agreements which takes war to a whole new level of barbarity.
The US made the mistake of planning on lengthy deployments in both Afghanistan and Iraq when they should have went in and killed those needing killing and blowing up any thing of value from the air. They made the mistake of taking prisoners from the battlefield and storing them in Cuba. There were better ways of handing enemy combatants. The Vienna conventions allowed for their battlefield executions. They engaged in war with no insignia or affiliation with a nation states military forces. The US just needs to strap some parachutes (or not) on the remaining prisoners and air drop them where they were original captured.
Wars can be won by airpower alone. The 1991 Iraq war was won from the air and ground troops committed only after the Iraq's were stumbling around in the desert looking for someone to surrender to. Russia's recent carpet bombing of the city of Allepo is another fine example of winning a conflict by bombing everything into ruble and then bombing the ruble until it bounces. I believe everyone should support Russia in performing the same type of operations on every city in the region housing any more than 5 ISIS members. Russia is perfect for these type of action because nobody complains. If the US was to do this there would be so much complaining and hand wringing that the ones having hysterics would push to get Assad a permanent seat of the UN Security council and give ISIS next to the Palestinians in the UN General assembly.