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How Russia Recruited Elite Hackers For Its Cyberwar (nypost.com)
Lasrick quotes a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternate source): For more than three years, rather than rely on military officers working out of isolated bunkers, Russian government recruiters have scouted a wide range of programmers, placing prominent ads on social media sites, offering jobs to college students and professional coders, and even speaking openly about looking in Russia's criminal underworld for potential talent. From the New York Post: "Russia's Defense Ministry bought advertising on Vkontakta, the country's most popular social media site, to lure those who were more talented with a keyboard than an AK-47 rifle. 'If you graduated from college, if you are a technical specialist, if you are ready to use your knowledge, we give you an opportunity,' the ad promised, according to the Times. The ad went on to assure recruits that they would be part of units called science squadrons based at military installations where they would live in 'comfortable accommodation' and showed an apartment outfitted with a washing machine, the Times reported. The Defense Ministry even dangled the chance to dodge Russia's mandatory draft by allowing university students to join a science squadron instead and then questioned them about their proficiency with programming languages, the report said."
Actually, it was done twice by 2 US presidents - Clinton and Obama. Both did what they could to try and get Netanyahu beaten in the Israeli elections - w/ Clinton sending Carville to manage Labour's campaign and actually pulling it off - getting Ehud Barak elected
While I don't believe that the WikiLeaks was the straw that broke the camel's back and tilted this election Trump's way, in the event that it actually did, it couldn't have happened to a more deserving candidate
But PR does not care about truth or falsehood, it will use anything. The last large analysis of a campaign that I know of is
from the Iraq war. You can find the report here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...
Note the extent of the organisation, how many people and resources are involved. It's yuge. And the variation in types of stories. There can be speculation, fear mongering(which does not require lying, you just worry about possibilities), claims, plain false stories. It's a great analysis.
These people haven't been sitting on their asses since then.
In this case there's a campaign to ruin the relation with Russia and make it very hard for Trump to mend that(only russian stooges want better relations with russia).And to take away the focus from the content of the leaks, which were uh about what again?
With fake news there is little or no build up. It's just rumors made up of thin air. That's amateurish and low budget.
Real campaigns work on many fronts at once. Once you have official sources and favored journalists channelling anonymous sources you're instantly playing on another level.
In this case the trumped up charges are that the Russians made sure Trump was elected by hacking Podesta and DNC computers and passing them to wikileaks.
With a good campaign every reasonable person should start to doubt and think there must be really something to it.
Wikileaks say (reluctantly) that they got their data from the inside, not through hacking and not through the russians.
Suppose there's a hack. The reaction to is a choice. You can choose to minimize it. You can choose to respond in kind. Usually secret agencies would fight this out quietly. You can choose to take the opportunity to escalate the tensions as much as possible. That is clear intent.