Slashdot Mirror
US Charges Russian Social Media Trolls Over Election Tampering (cnet.com)
The US Justice Department has filed charges against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian groups for interfering with the 2016 presidential election. From a report: In an indictment [PDF] released on Friday, the Justice Department called out the Internet Research Agency, a notorious group behind the Russian propaganda effort across social media. Employees for the agency created troll accounts and used bots to prop up arguments and sow political chaos during the 2016 presidential campaign. Facebook, Twitter and Google have struggled to deal with fake news, trolling campaigns and bots on their platforms, facing the scorn of Capitol Hill over their mishandlings. The indictment lists 13 Russian nationals tied to the effort.
You can be butthurt all you want that your so-called 'law and order' and 'conservative family values' candidate never really existed, but at least have enough honesty with yourself that he never was those things, and that you got fooled into voting for him -- because that's the fact of the matter, investigation or no investigation. He keeps trying desperately to distract FBI attention away from himself, just like a guilty person would, and he's now confirmed for cheating on his wife at least twice, one of those times with a skeezy porn actress, and just after his wife gave birth to his son. He's an awful human being who is not in the least qualified for the job, was elected under false pretenses, and should be removed. IDGAF if you're going to continue to publicly defend the son of a bitch or not, at least be honest with yourself: You fucked up, you got conned, and you backed the wrong horse, all the way down to the finish. TRY to do better next time, or at least don't bother voting. Once we get his ass out of the whitehouse we need someone in there who can fix all the damage he's done, not another clueless narcissistic 5-year-old.
In this indictment, yes. The events detailed here did not include willing participation by Trump's campaign. Unfortunately for Trump, there are some crimes that don't require knowledge to be committed... For example, being negligent in one's duty to investigate a financial source can be a crime.
As has been the case for a while, the bigger concern is Trump's behavior after the investigation started. If he's shown to have been actively working to obstruct the investigation, that could be what gets him.
Cynic that I am, that's really what I expect is the case... Trump tried to run an honest campaign, but he's so easily manipulated and so quick to overreact that he ends up causing his own downfall, without any direct foreign involvement.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
This should have gotten a -1 Misinformed. It's illegal in the US for foreign actors to provide campaign contributions, collude with a campaign, and a host of other activities. This was passed in response to Chinese support for Bill Clinton, I believe. Individual Russians trolling on FB wouldn't be a crime but when they start purchasing paid advertisements and coordinating with the campaigns, it's a serious crime. Maybe it shouldn't be, but it is. The reason that this is a hot button item is, of course, that the Democrats tend to put forth foreign policy much more friendly to the rest of the world. So normally this interference would happen on a Democrat's behalf. The Republicans are now walking a tightrope. Ignore the Trump campaign's behavior and risk having the rest of the world support his opponent more openly. Don't ignore it and get caught red handed.
Could you cite the actual statutes, please?
The actual indictment is linked in the Slashdot summary. They explain exactly what they believe happened and why it's illegal, including citing applicable statues.
Unless the donation is to a "charity", owned and run by a candidate, right?
You better be careful trying to play that card, considering Trump continues to operate his "charities" despite having been forbidden to operate in New York due to investigations.
Oh right, soon after Trump was elected he fired the Attorney General who was investigating him, so I guess that makes it okay since he's not under investigation anymore!
=Smidge=
It's also possible that dumb people don't want to admit they were dumb enough to fall for the foreign propaganda of a leader that wants to drastically weaken their country, make them poorer, and damage democracy.
It takes a special kind of idiot to fall for that, unfortunately that's about 48% of the American electorate, so don't assume it's just shills - there's plenty of dumb fuck Americans who wont accept they acted against their and their country's own interests off the back of foreign propaganda too.
The person who leaked to Buzzfeed is not known; a ruling last year determined that Buzzfeed does not have to reveal the source. However, by the time that Buzzfeed published it, it was already widely circulating in the federal government, so the most likely source was a government official.
You're confusing the release of the dossier with the release of the fact that Steele was assisting the FBI.
We don't get to see the full Democratic response to Trump transition team member Devin Nunes because the White House blocked it, but from the summary: "The GOP memo also claims that a Yahoo News article was used to corroborate Steele, but this is not at all why the article was referenced."
Nunes, it should be added, never even read the FISA application.
Oh give it a bloody rest. The guy compiled intelligence memos - something he's been doing for his entire career, MI-6 and after. Nothing about them or him was kept secret from the FISA court, and nothing about any aspect of his work was even remotely against the law; it's rather baffling what on Earth you think was. On the other hand, what is being investigated is serious violations of federal law. Covering a wide range of topics, some of which have already gotten guilty pleas.
The FISA warranty was given to surveil a guy who had been boasting about being a Kremlin representative. The fact that you find this to be some sort of grave miscarriage of justice is even more baffling.
...we could simply say "OK thanks Russia. You want to play 'media domination game"?"
The US is already the most staggeringly dominant culture ever seen on earth, without really deliberately trying (not unlikely that's partly why).
If we were a country with any sense of itself, any sense of unity of purpose, and not a fractious bunch of self-hating bitches, with Hollywood's expertise we could without batting an eye SWAMP Russian media, internet, and airwaves with a chaos of propaganda, infowar, fake news, with production values so sophisticated there would be NO WAY any Russian national could tell if that video was real or not, or that email was real or not, or that video of Vladimir Putin having a quiet, gay moment with a young Russian male model followed by an overwhelming wave of irrefutable evidence of that young male model being found murdered brutally and only the faintest traces of official security service involvement.
They spent what, a few $hundred thousand influencing social media? We could drop a few $hundred MILLION and drive their society into outright civil war.
There is no media culture as dominant or efficacious as the American culture in 2018. None.
But we are our own worst enemy, and Russia can do this sort of thing knowing that Americans will cheerfully attack EACH OTHER over it long before they have the cojones to set aside their partisan bitching in favor of their own country's well being.
-Styopa
I've regretted that sentence since writing it, so I'll take this opportunity to rephrase:
The Trump campaign (and administration afterward) has since countered that there's nothing to see, no undue outside influence, and no willing participation from his campaign. He's also advocated shutting the whole investigation down, to the extent of firing people involved in the investigation.
I agree that Trump's campaign is probably correct in that they didn't knowingly seek to break any laws during the campaign. I think that after his inauguration, though, Trump's meddling probably is obstruction, though I'm not sure there's enough evidence for an indictment against him. I expect there's also a lot of negligence involved, some criminal, but most of those accusations will go away to gain cooperation during the investigation.
I'd argue that ultimately, the charges and accusations don't matter nearly as much as just letting the investigation run its course. Our justice system, including the FBI, is founded on the belief that the written law is more important than any person or organization. Since the written law says that the FBI will investigate such matters, that's what they must do, regardless of the outcome. To do otherwise is literally un-American.
However, Trump has built his campaign and administration around an image of disrupting norms and ignoring processes he didn't like. Even if he is correct about the facts of Russian collusion (or absence thereof), he's still butting heads with the written law of the land, and it will fall to the other two branches of government to decide whether they'll allow it or not.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.