Russia Says in Talks With US To Create Cyber Security Working Group (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader shares a brief report on Reuters: Moscow and Washington are in talks to create a joint cyber security working group, RIA news agency reported on Thursday, citing Russia's special envoy on cyber security Andrey Krutskikh. Further reading: CBS News.

Comments

At least they're honest

[nine-times]

Trump says:

Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded..

To which I can only say, at least he's being honest. He wants to guard the election hacking and many other negative things. He's not saying that he wants to guard against election hacking, but he wants to guard the election hacking to prevent American law enforcement from interfering and allowing fair elections.

Seriously, though, we need to get this guy out of office. Just yesterday, he admitted that he wouldn't have appointed Sessions to Attorney General if he'd known that Sessions wasn't going to help cover up his campaign's collusion with the Russian government. Even if Putin weren't involved, Trump's involvement already means that this wouldn't should not be trusted with the security of our elections.

Re:At least they're honest

[Enigma2175]

In other news, the US has decided to outsource all henhouse guarding in the country to We Are Foxes, Inc. Proponents claim this will save the country eleventy kajillion dollars per year.

Re:At least they're honest

[Frosty Piss]

Oh please. Robert Mueller investigation into Trump is staffed with people whom have had direct campaigning with the Clintons.

In a country with for all practical purposes only two parties, you sided with one or the other, no getting around it.

But does it matter? If they find bonafide "wrong-doing", it bonafide "wrong-doing" no matter who discovers it. And, a biased Libertard Snowflake Demobrat is more likely to uncover the dirt both because they are more motivated to find something, and it has been established that Trump's supporters at the high level of Dirt Investigators are predisposed to miraculously find nothing at all.

Re:At least they're honest

[nine-times]

Oh please. Robert Mueller investigation into Trump is staffed with people whom have had direct campaigning with the Clintons.

So first, I've heard about this accusation, and then heard disputes, claiming that some people had been somewhat involved with campaigning for Clinton, while others were Republicans. I haven't investigated that myself, but it seemed worth mentioning.

And honestly, beside all of that, these people are respected independent investigators. And even if they were biased against Trump, it's not entirely a conflict of interest for an investigator to be biased against the people they're investigating. If a police officer is investigating you for murder, it's not really a defense to say, "I must be innocent because the police officer doesn't like me." If a police officer thinks that you're a murderer, you could expect that he wouldn't like you. It'd be far more of a conflict of interest for the investigator to be a political ally.

If you had some evidence that Mueller is trying to frame Trump or misrepresent the facts, that'd be one thing. As far as I've heard, no one reputable has raised any doubt about Mueller's ethics.

And beside all that, they've already been caught. No need for a fishing expedition. No need to frame anyone. The Trump campaign colluded with Russia. First the defense was, "we didn't collude," then it was, "we colluded a little, but there wasn't anything illegal," and now it's turned into, "it may have been a little illegal, but those laws don't count." We know there were meetings with people representing the Russian government to coordinate efforts to influence the election, which coincided with Russia hacking Democrats, hacking election systems, and pushing an advanced propaganda campaign. There were multiple meetings and communications between many people in the Trump campaign and the Russians, they tried to hide it, they lied about it under oath, and now they're caught.

There's still work for investigators to do. It's not enough to know it. They need hard proof of violation of specific laws. They want to know exactly what was done, how, and by whom. That'll take a while. But we already know they did it.

Re:At least they're honest

[nine-times]

Trump didn't collude with Russia. If he did, there would already be articles of impeachment and Pence would be the acting POTUS. Period.

First, the investigation isn't done. You don't really want to start a trial before you've gathered all the evidence you think you need. Second, impeachment is a political process, not a law enforcement process, and so it's entirely dependent on the majority of Congress deciding they want to bring charges. I think we've already seen that the Republicans want to cover this up.

As for the accusations, they're true. http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/12/... [cnn.com]

Umm... let's look at this article. First sentence:

Three members of the legal team known to have been hired so far by special counsel Robert Mueller to handle the Russia investigation have given political donations almost exclusively to Democrats

So *three* members. Three out of five. Three of them have given political donations "almost exclusively" to Democrats. From the use of the word "almost", we can conclude that they didn't give money exclusively to Democrats. It says later in the article that one of the three donated to Jason Chaffetz and George Allen, both Republicans.

And that's just political donations, not active campaigning. It's not terribly uncommon for people to donate some money to a political party. So what do you want? You want to disqualify anyone who ever donated money to a Democratic campaign from working on the investigation? That'd be absurd.

As for Robert Mueller himself has close ties to Comey. While is in of itself isn't a problem per se, it's highly biased.

You mean biased toward ethics and fair enforcement of the law? I'll take that bias. And if Mueller is so terrible, why was he being considered for the head of the FBI? Why was he appointed by the Deputy Attorney General. Why is it that of all the major Republican figures, only Trump has anything bad to say about Mueller?

I mean, exercise a little judgement. Think for yourself, at least a little bit.

Re:At least they're honest

[DigiShaman]

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. -C. S. Lewis

Yeah, I'd rather have sleazeballs in office than someone ideological do-gooder whom thinks they know what's better for me, and proceeds to act on it to the detriment of my actual wellbeing.

Re:At least they're honest

[DigiShaman]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:At least they're honest

[nine-times]

I know you don't get it. Most people don't. And no, you're not a smart as you think you are.

Geeze. What, are you 15 years old?

The fact is the GOP Establishment (Washington DC) is in alignment with Democrats with mutual (but differing in other areas) interests. In effect, it's Trump vs. the World at the political and geo-political level.

And Trump is such a rebel against the Republican Establishment that he's just been turning to the Republican party and saying, "Let's do whatever you want. Give me bills, and I'll sign them. I don't really care what they do." He's so against globalism that he recently moved to expand a program to bring in unskilled immigrant labor.

The truth is, you've been played. Worse, the guy who played you is only barely trying to hide it. It's like you're watching a magician who says, "Hey, watch me 'saw my assistant in half'. Right? I mean, obviously you can't saw a person in half, but I'm going to do it. That's the trick!" And then you see his assistant climb out of the box's false bottom, but you're still sitting there in awe, saying, "This guy is brilliant! I can't even figure out how he did it!"

This wasn't an election about values. It was an election about justice. It was rural vs urban. And, it's being played out all over the world. It's how the Brexit happened. It's how the world is pivoting away from Globalism due to the stratification of wealth it has caused, eviscerating the middle-class in the process.

Well, no, it was an election about values. One of the chief values was "fuck Democrats". Also, "I want to get mine, even if the rest of the world goes down the tubes." And also, "we need to get rid of all these Mexicans and Muslims, and put these black people in jail."

And really, it wasn't about urban vs. rural. It was about cosmopolitanism vs nationalism far more than that. It was about pro-authoritarian xenophobic nationalists wanting to give a poke in the eye to "city fags" because "they think they're smarter than me!" There are a lot of apologists who want to make it about, "Oh, these poor coal miners. The coastal elite are in a bubble, out of touch with the poor coal miners." Nope. You had some people who were sold a pack of obvious lies, and some people who were straight up bigots, but it was never about the struggling rural areas or the evisceration of the middle class. Trump isn't doing anything to help those people.

The rest... it's paranoid nonsense. Try a news source other than InfoWars.

Re:At least they're honest

[nine-times]

GOP is locked in a civil war of its own between Trump being the titular head (though they despise him for that being the POTUS and all), and blue blooded establishment types.

I think that's a misunderstanding of what's going on. There isn't one big unified "establishment" that doesn't like Trump. There are bunch of factions within the Republican party. Most of them don't like Trump. Like... loads and loads of people on all sides of things don't like Trump. It's not because he's disturbing their comfortable status quo, it's because he's a dangerous moron. He's a narcissist and a con man, but he doesn't even understand how things work well enough to fool anyone except people who are even bigger morons.

But he seems to have reached a deal with the Republican leadership that amounts to this: Republicans will support Trump publicly and try to protect him from his scandals, and Trump will do whatever they say. If Republicans can pass a healthcare bill, he'll sign it, even if it violates all of his campaign promises. Meanwhile, Republicans will try to defend his lining his own pockets and abusing power. It's been an uneasy detente, but Trump is specifically *not* upsetting the comfortable status quo for "the Establishment". He's hurting poor people and minorities, and not the rich and powerful.

However, even that's starting to break down. Republicans haven't been able to get much done, so while Trump will sign anything that gets put on his desk, that's not very valuable if they can't get a bill to his desk. Meanwhile, his scandals have gone from, "Trump is profiting off of the presidency in ways that are unethical and probably illegal," to "Trump conspired with the Russians to fix the election," so he's becoming harder and harder to defend.

Of course he tries to make it sound like people are out to get him. It's just like the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that was out to get Bill Clinton. You know the saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you"? Well, just because people are out to get you doesn't mean you aren't guilty. Trump may have plenty of political enemies, but even the facts that he's willing to concede show a pretty clear pattern of coordinating with Russia, and undermining our national security in order to serve Putin's interests.

What? Why?

[EndlessNameless]

The US and Russia have adversarial interests quite frequently. You can list every country in eastern Europe and the Middle East, and most of them have been a source of contention between the US and Russia in the last 20 years.

Given that frequency of conflict, why on earth would the US share sensitive technical information? What is Russia offering that Israel, Germany, and the UK aren't?

The US has a few arrangements already, and those include nations which are both technologically astute and far more friendly than Russia.

I don't care what Trump says; he knows jack about cyber security. What do the real experts think the US will gain? I.e., private sector and NSA/CIA security analysts.

Re: What? Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump doesn't want to listen to the experts because then he would essentially be 'admitting' that they are correct about what Russia did to our election (I'm not talking about collusion, just the Russian meddling/attack).
That admission would hurt his fragile ego and in his mind would put the legitimacy of his presidency in question.
He is literally making decisions that make him look 'good', at least in his mind.

I'm still completely lost on how he is hanging on to the support of his 'base'. I mean I get the whole "Its us against the establishment/deep state/fake news" garbage that he plays on, but how the hell can 35%-40% of this country NOT see his actions and words as selfish, childish, and completely idiotic?!

Re:What? Why?

[fafalone]

What does anything you said have to do with Trump or Trump's objectives? Trump doesn't care about historical conflicts, doesn't care about those other countries, wants to work with Russia specifically, doesn't care about their technological astuteness, and absolutely 100% does not care what people like experts and scientists think in cybersecurity or any other subject. He's flooded the swamp with sycophants, and the Republicans won't oppose anything he does no matter how horrible because it would compromise The Party, and it's Party First, their own interests second, and the best interests of America or the people exist only as a soundbite they talk about to advance #1 and 2.

Re:What? Why?

[dslmodem]

There is a country called China. That is my guess.

Re: What? Why?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Maybe if we stopped antagonizing the shit out of Russia they would stop acting like this. Just a suggestion.

Do you really think a second rate nation like Russia, with a huge indefensible border and ringed by hostile NATO bases, would be starting shit if they weren't backed into a corner? Discard your outdated Cold War propaganda and look at the situation with fresh eyes. America hasn't treated Russia kindly for the past quarter century.

Re: What? Why?

[stabiesoft]

TPP was dead before he was sworn in. Now I'd agree his campaign rhetoric may have helped it die, but it died before he could kill it. I'd also agree there is something financial that is going to be found. Maybe Russia has been propping up his real estate. I disagree he knows what he is doing. You do not tell the cop "Don't look in the trunk, there are no drugs there", just like you don't tell mueller, "Don't look into my finances".

Re:What? Why?

[Ol Olsoc]

What is Russia offering that Israel, Germany, and the UK aren't?

The dirt and espionage on Americans. Which as has already been admitted and is proven in an email trail, is what this administration believes is something anyone would want to participate in.

AKA backdoor/channel to Russia

[evolutionary]

Apparently this group is to work outside the CIA with fewer people to answer (if anyone besides Trump). Trump's son was already talking about a backdoor channel. Now it seems Trump wants to roll out the red carpet. Makes Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy look like lightweight in comparison.