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Facebook Will Share Copies of Political Ads Purchased by Russian Sources With the US Congress (recode.net)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook will turn over copies of political ads purchased by Russian sources to congressional lawmakers, who are investigating the country's potential interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Initially, Facebook had only released those ads -- 3,000 of them, valued at about $100,000 -- to Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who is spearheading the government's probe into Russia's actions. Facebook had withheld those details from House and Senate leaders, citing privacy concerns. But the move drew sharp rebukes from the likes of Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has charged in recent days that Facebook may not have done enough to scan its systems for potential Russian influence and to ensure that such foreign purchases -- otherwise illegal under U.S. law -- don't happen again. "After an extensive legal and policy review, today we are announcing that we will also share these ads with congressional investigators," wrote Colin Stretch, the company's general counsel. "We believe it is vitally important that government authorities have the information they need to deliver to the public a full assessment of what happened in the 2016 election."
Is the most trustworthy person. I am sure he would never do anything underhanded.
Didn't the Obama administration do something similar to the Israelis?
How come I never heard any kind of investigation? And by the way, it was to the legitimate government of a sovereign state. An ally of ours if I may add.
Are you condemning FB for behavior that exists only in your speculation?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Mostly because the accusations against Hillary turned out to be bullshit as the investigation showed.
Which ones? The ones where the FBI plainly spelled out the illegal things she did and directly told you that anyone else would have faced legal jeopardy for the same acts? The ones where all of her staff had to be offered immunity deals before they would even talk about it? The ones where the simply broke federal law at numerous levels and looked you in the eye and lied about (and still does to this day), but assures us that her husband's private meeting with the chief law enforcement officer who would be tasked with indicting her, and who then had to recuse herself, didn't have any impact at all? Gotcha.
You're confusing "got away with it" with "didn't do it."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
So the Facebook report states that $100,000 worth of ads were bought over a 2 year period from accounts suspected to have been operated from Russia. Also these ads were:
- without specific geographic targeting (only 25% we so targeted)
- without targeting specific candidates
- vaguely meant to spread division in the society (what does that even mean?)
Somehow this got blown into "Russia was subverting democracy in the US". It's OK for Sheldon Adelson, Koch brothers and such to throw millions in on their PACs and hold auditions for GOP candidates, that's just free speech, no subversion of democracy there. But here we have the flimsiest of evidences that somebody (could have been from anywhere, even US) paid somebody from Russia $100,000 to do some vague anti-LGBT, racist, anti-immigration campaign not specifically targeted at any candidate or Americans, suddenly this requires a massive investigation. Has everybody lost their minds?
Hillary and her supporters spent an estimated $1.2 Billion, roughly twice what Trump spent. And she lost. And she blames the Ruskies for her loss. Seriously?
Yeah, and the football team gained way more yards and still lost, we should change the way the game is scored.
Yeah, and the baseball team had way more runners on base and still lost, we should change the way the game is scored.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Not true...
Putting classified onto an unauthorized system or taking it to an unauthorized location and storing it in an unauthorized way IS a crime. Unauthorized disclosure is just the result of unauthorized handling of classified. It's NOT treason, but mishandling classified information is indeed a crime.
Don't fall for Hillary's narrative. It's not true... Don't fall for those who claim she committed treason either, because that's not true. But there *could* be a crime here.
Go back and listen to Comey's statement when he was letting Clinton off the hook before the election. Where I don't agree with is conclusion (that no prosecutor would charge and try this case) it is CLEAR that she was extremely careless with classified information, which by the statute is criminal. Comey just let here skate...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The FBI said, "We don't think we can prosecute her because we don't think we can show that she broke the law as the law is written."
What Comey actually said:
"Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."
That's something VERY different.
There's some truth to that. They both had the highest negatives in history... it was definitely all about who was "less bad".
And you just lost whatever sense you were making before. Trump an establishment puppet? Are you kidding me? The establishment in both parties absolutely hates him. On the Republican side we had 17 candidates to pick from in the primary, and ALL of the Republican establishment candidates lost big. In the end, it came down to Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, who were by far the most establishment-hated candidates that I've ever seen run in a primary.
If you want to rephrase your charge of "tightly controlled establishment puppets" to refer only to the Democrats, then I'll give you that, because after the DNC email hacks we found out that they did, in fact, rig the primary contest to make sure Hilary won and Bernie lost (though the fact that he got as far as he did, even in the face of their treachery, shows they don't have as much control as they thought). But yeah, end result on the Democrat side was that their establishment got the candidate they wanted, and when taken to court about it, they argued that as a party they have no legal requirement to select their candidates in any particular way, and that it would be perfectly legal for them to go back to using old boys clubs in the back room with cigars to pick the candidate. A tacit admission that they can rig the process as much as they want. But only one party rigged it, not both.
And now you are back to making sense again. We all know that's why she lost, and the funny thing is, I'm pretty sure that's the only reason you won't find in her new book, "What Happened."
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.