The funnier thing is that the preponderance of evidence suggests that the stories about Russia may - gasp - be true! No need to reach for your tinfoil hat here, friend!
What evidence are you referring to. As far as I know none has been made public. There have been a lot of accusations and a few rumors but (gasp) zero evidence of hacking or any other troubling links w/ Russia.
I've posted this previously, but it was well received then, so...
Those who (reasonably!) question the lack of actual evidence presented by the US intelligence community over the US hacks would do well to read the 2014 FireEye paper on APT28 (the group involved). It's pretty compelling, even if it doesn't address the specific allegations around the election(s). The TL;DR is that there is significant circumstantial evidence that this group is government backed, and also evidence against it being a false flag operation.
Note that the date of the report should provide some protection against allegations it is politically motivated.
That looks interesting. However I think evidence would be something actually linking the hacks with that group. The group was accused, but no evidence was presented linking it, just speculation.
I don't think there is any serious doubt that ATP28 was the group that did the hack (Bad assumption on my part in this case - most of the time people have accepted that but have doubts about it being a state actor).
I think CrowdStrike was the first firm to attribute it to them[1]. Note that APT28 is also known as "Fancy Bear", so you may see some reports attributing it with that name.
Nothing forcing you to believe it of course, but in the world of cyber attribution this is pretty decent evidence.
That crowdstrike article reads like an advertisement I'd prefer something more authoritative before flirting with war with a nuclear power. I think the real question is, why is a Russian military unit so hapless they can be caught by a firm like this? Doesn't that sort of undermine the claim that they are a major threat and instead make the DNC look like helpless idiots tricked by Russian teenagers?
I understand it will reveal the method of entry, but a smart criminal won't leave his drivers license at the scene of the crime as the "Russians" have seemingly done here.
Well the "method of entry" is what was used to identify them, and they had to leave it there so they could re-access the system.
There isn't much unusual about this - a similar thing happened with the Shadow Brokers/Equation Group (NSA) hack for example[1] (although in that case some of the control tools were taken instead of just the payload). It would be exceptionally unusual for nothing to be found.
Thanks for the link. I've been trying to do a good faith evaluation of the evidence myself about APT28/29 being involved in the DNC hacks and the link between them and GRU/FSB. I'd actually come across this before and it raised a question for me. I don't know if you'd be in a position to answer?
Basically, how do we know APT28 is one group? It seems like it's defined by the use of certain malware, but is it possible that the malware is "out there" and several different groups are all using it, with different motives? For example, in the PDF your link points to:
> APT28 has targeted a variety of organizations that fall outside of the three themes we highlighted above. However, we are not profiling all of APT28’s targets with the same detail because they are not particularly indicative of a specific sponsor’s interests. They do indicate parallel areas of interest to many governments and do not run counter to Russian state interests. Other probable APT28 targets that we have
identified:
> • Norwegian Army (Forsvaret) • Government of Mexico • Chilean Military • Pakistani Navy • U.S. Defense Contractors • European Embassy in Iraq • Special Operations Forces Exhibition (SOFEX) in Jordan • Defense Attaches in East Asia • Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) • Al-Wayi News Site
I started thinking about this because all the evidence pointing to APT28 being involved in the DNC hacks is because the DNC hacks showed evidence of using the malware attributed to APT28. But if APT28 is defined by the use of the malware, it's sort of true by definition. But that doesn't mean there's a single, coherent group behind it, necessarily.
There are plenty of troubling links with Russia There are at least 5 individuals (Manafort, Cohen, Sater, Page, Flynn, Tillerson, Stone) whom were directly working with the Russian government and have received effusive praise from them. Combined with a very narrow focus on removing sanctions (without any talk about the violations of sovereignty of Crimea/Ukraine) and a nearly tireless praising of Putin and the Russian government, there are plenty of troubling links.
Tillerson worked with them as part of his business, so not sure how this is troubling. Flynn was asked to attend a banquet or something along those lines by RT. Some of the others did some consulting work of some sort.
When you are a retired high level military/government person, consulting opportunities such as those abound. The same is true of those who chose to consult for the Ukrainian side, the Georgian side, etc.
It seems like a pretty big leap to say that just because someone did some consulting work for a government that they are somehow ethically compromised. Many US firms do business with Russia, the Saudi government, etc. etc. Where do we draw the line and deem these people somehow unfit to serve in government?
There has not been a principled approach to this, seemingly only finger pointing and other name calling that is reminiscent of the cold war era.
If there were any actual evidence of wrongdoing, it would be a completely different story. Surely with the mass surveillance system many phone calls, emails and other associations/links have been monitored, yet we are not seeing leaks of any troubling details, only vague finger pointing.
It would be a very serious thing if there were some sort of plot, but so far there does not seem to be one.
I read these news articles with a critical eye, and "only vague finger pointing" is a good description of the content of every single one I've read, letting the reader's mind fill in the blanks to match their partisan agenda.
Worked for Trump to get elected, turnabout is fair play?
How is any of this evidence that the trump administration is working with Russia?
The connections alone don't mean a whole lot and the rest you have is just words. If trump was truly in the can for Russia, why wouldn't he just say bad things about putin to score more political points and distract people from his true motives?
Are we to believe that Putin would not allow trump to trash him in order to further his tangible goals?
It's easy to construct hypothetical goals where slagging Putin would interfere.
For example, say Putin would like the US to get into bed with Syria and Russia to make it more difficult for the US to speak out or otherwise act against later Russian aggression towards neighbors.
Of course that is nothing more than a nice made up story, but why shouldn't the American people support finding out what is going on?
>Are we to believe that Putin would not allow trump to trash him in order to further his tangible goals?
From what I've heard, Putin is now thinking twice on whether he even wants to be associated with the Trump administration. He may have believed that men like Manafort or Bannon would keep Trump under control, only to find that his new "allies" in the White House are a chaotic mess.
Wait, what is the bannon connection to Russia? That's new to me.
Also, we would be led to believe that putin spent all this time and effort getting his boy in and now is just going to give up on him within a month?
I would ask for a source on that but considering it's nigh impossible for the west to get reliable intel (That dossier was quite something) out of Russia I'm not sure how much it would matter.
>Also, we would be led to believe that putin spent all this time and effort getting his boy in and now is just going to give up on him within a month?
From my understanding of Russian strategy, they generally don't invest too deeply in any given potential regime. They invest lightly all across the political extremes in Western countries, and then see what crops up. If they like it, they invest more heavily.
The rumour is that Bannon believes he can convince Putin to back the USA in a confrontation with Iran. Bannon sees Iran as a bigger threat and is trying to engineer a conflict. (I have no idea whether that's correct, just passing on an unsubstantiated rumor.)
The broader version that seems to be fairly accepted is that there is a thought of realigning the US with Russia against "radical Islam" (Trump's term) in Syria and elsewhere. It is unclear how much of this is Bannon's idea and how much is Trump's, and unclear how much is aimed at Iran.
It would be surprising to me if Russia went along with US action against their ally Iran, but other combinations are certainly possible. Hell, that is too - who knows!
Here's a quote:
Trump and Putin spoke for one hour and vowed to join forces to fight terrorism in Syria and elsewhere, according to the White House and the Kremlin, signaling a potential shift in U.S.-Russian relations that have been marked by high tension.
Trump has made statements about wishing to align with Russia against radical Islam, so how can this be part of a conspiracy?
Trump said a lot of that stuff during the campaign because he likely hadn't realized the extent of the proxy wars between the US and Russia since the wall came down.
One of the main reasons the US invaded Iraq was to do so before Russia took control of the region, due to its importance to the oil supply. Russia had good relations with Saddam's regime and with Iran. When Saddam was overthrown, many of the oil industry spoils that had been going to Russian firms were redistributed to US (or coalition) firms.
Russia is currently helping to stoke discord in Syria and aligning with Iran mainly to force an over-stretched US to react. For pennies on the dollar Putin can keep the US in a middle-east quagmire, so why not do this indefinitely?
Trump may not have realized the strategic purpose that US escalation in Syria was intended to achieve, he may have believed the PR that we were involved for humanitarian reasons, etc. But he seems to have concluded that it was a money pit waiting to happen with little humanitarian upside (which is a correct conclusion, and the conclusion Russia had hoped the US would draw). HRC was determined to signal the opposite so that Russia might stop spending its pennies there.
For those who don't realize this, the decades-long Iran/Iraq war was a proxy war fought between the US and the Soviet Union with both sides having the goal of creating a dominant footprint in the middle east to keep the other side at bay and guarantee the relative stability of oil extraction. This same goal also causes the US to act to prevent any sort of large scale democratic movements in the middle-east; Al Qaida began as that exact sort of pan-Arab movement.
So if Trump is proposing a negotiated deal with Putin involving Syria and Iran, that means he's willing to consider dividing the spoils in a way that may harm US coalition allies (France, Germany, etc.) who also have firms that are heavily invested in post-Saddam Iraq and some of which would likely be displaced by a new US/Russia agreement.
Similarly, allies of the US in Europe that fear an emboldened Russia also stand to lose if Russia gains better access to cheap petroleum. Russia, on the other hand, is poised to take a big leap forward in economic output and also reputation laundering. A successful negotiation with Trump could wipe away the penalties/sanctions that Russia has faced due to Putin's brutal approach to certain domestic issues.
So Russia's goal has been a larger presence in the middle east, a laundered reputation, and possibly more (everyone fears it will attempt to re-annex more former Soviet territory).
The thing that I think HRC and Obama misunderstood is that Russia is very likely to get this whether the US wishes it to happen or not. The US (and allies) are not in a position to undertake preemptive strikes, and so all they can do is vilify Putin and create a massive PR campaign and pressure allies into sanctions, etc. Meanwhile, the US can use clandestine operations to help goad Putin into various crackdowns or overreaches that will force him to act more like a dictator and increase the chances he will be unseated due to domestic dissent.
Why didn't Obama intervene in the Caucuses or the Ukraine? Because the US does not have the will to enter into conflicts like those, and certainly does not have the will to risk nuclear conflict.
Posturing by McCain about both annexations was nothing more than a bluff, as was HRC's sudden tough talk toward the end of the campaign. The hope was that somehow Putin would fall for this bluff and that rabid anti-Russian public opinion in the US would scare Putin into thinking the US might react with force.
Seriously, this isn't going to happen no matter who is president. The question is how long it takes and how many lives are lost in proxy wars before Russia occupies a position of greater dominance in Europe. The Soviet Union was too big and plagued by infrastructure problems, but Russia itself is well placed geopolitically and has historically been a seat of wealth, culture, and regional ambitions.
What is in the best interest of the US with respect to the negotiations (hard or soft) that take place with Russia over the next decade? I'm not sure. But Obama (and Trump also) saw that there was a certain inevitability to it and that it was not worth spilling too much blood over. In spite of this, Obama carried on proxy wars in Iraq and Syria which killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused untold suffering.
Trump has claimed that he may not wish to continue the proxy wars. We should all be relieved. Rather than debating rumors about Russian meddling, etc., we should figure out what is actually in US best interest over the medium to long term and negotiate accordingly. Bluffing isn't going to work. Both Russia and the US are willing to let lots of people die in proxy wars, but neither is willing to engage in direct conflict, so we will either inflict another decade of tragedy upon the victims of our proxy wars, or we will find a less violent equilibrium.
I'd point only two _major_ errors. There are too many minor errors though.
> decades-long Iran/Iraq war was a proxy war fought between the US and the Soviet Union with both sides having the goal of creating a dominant footprint in the middle east
No. Last Soviet attempt to gain a foothold in Middle East was a failed relationship with Egypt. Hint: War of Attrition followed by Yom Kippur War.
There was no major influx of military advisers or green men during Iran-Iraq war.
> The Soviet Union was too big and plagued by infrastructure problems, but Russia itself is well placed geopolitically and has historically been a seat of wealth, culture, and regional ambitions.
I have a bad news for you - Russia is about the same size as USSR and it's still plagued with infrastructure problems. And as for the culture - everybody can see the decline in post-Soviet cultural scene, especially in Russia.
I don't think it contains factual errors. If you could please elaborate on what you think the errors are I'd appreciate it (so I can learn more about specific aspects).
I certainly don't think this is any conspiracy - it's pretty much Trumps stated position.
But I don't think you should view all Middle East policy as a proxy US/Russia conflict. There is a lot more going on there, and many more independent actors.
> There is a lot more going on there, and many more independent actors.
Quite true. I was only trying to make the point that the US/Russia conflict has had a significant impact on the middle east and strongly shaped US enthusiasm for invading Iraq when it had the chance. But there were certainly other reasons, though I don't think any of them were humanitarian.
This feels like hysterical paranoid fear mongering to me. I see you in your room with pictures of Russia and Putin and Tillerson and Trump pinned to the wall and string linking them this way and that.
Like, concretely, what's your hypothesis? I don't actually see you trying to say anything, but rather just sort of cast doubt and aspersions without thinking through what it means.
Tillerson was the CEO of ExxonMobil. Of course the guy in charge of one of the world's largest oil and gas companies is going to interact amicably with the guy in charge of one of the world's largest oil and gas producing countries. And of course, given his experience and perspective, sanctions cause a lot of problems in business. What exactly are you trying to say about him here? That he's a Russian spy?
Flynn is a retired 3 star general. He recently resigned for lying to Pence, sure, but no one is really making the argument that he did anything fundamentally wrong. He broke protocol by letting another country know that these new sanctions may be reversed in a matter of weeks by the upcoming administration that he's a part of. I've yet to see a lawyer make an argument that that's really against the spirit of the Logan Act, but I'd love to hear that perspective if you've seen one. But again, what are you trying to say about him here? That a 3 star general is a Russian spy?
> Combined with a very narrow focus on removing sanctions (without any talk about the violations of sovereignty of Crimea/Ukraine)
Sure, I understand your political viewpoint here, but it's just that. People are free to differ on what they think of Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the U.S. response to it.
> plenty of troubling links
Again, troubling HOW? Give me a hypothesis here. I honestly don't understand a coherent world view beneath your fear. Yes, the incoming administration is more pro-Russia than Clinton would have been. And yes, the annexation of Crimea is not automatically a deal breaker to working with them. But so what? Are you actually implying that this is all a coup and that Russia is pulling the strings of the U.S. government right now? That they've compromised a boorish, stupid billionaire, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, generals in the military, and so forth?
A Back-Channel Plan for Ukraine and Russia, Courtesy of Trump Associates
A week before Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security adviser, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia.
Mr. Flynn is gone, having been caught lying about his own discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. But the proposal, a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia, remains, along with those pushing it: Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, who delivered the document; Felix H. Sater, a business associate who helped Mr. Trump scout deals in Russia; and a Ukrainian lawmaker trying to rise in a political opposition movement shaped in part by Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
At a time when Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia, and the people connected to him, are under heightened scrutiny — with investigations by American intelligence agencies, the F.B.I. and Congress — some of his associates remain willing and eager to wade into Russia-related efforts behind the scenes.
Mr. Trump has confounded Democrats and Republicans alike with his repeated praise for the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, and his desire to forge an American-Russian alliance. While there is nothing illegal about such unofficial efforts, a proposal that seems to tip toward Russian interests may set off alarms. ...
I think we should view a strategy like the one Flynn advocated only as an alternative to the current approach of proxy wars. It may or may not make sense.
My understanding of the US/Russia dynamic is described here:
A hallmark of propaganda campaigns is to create endless noise to obscuring the signal, including with false equivalencies and endless questions ('how do we really know vaccines are safe'?)
> It may or may not make sense.
The same could be said about jumping off a tall building.
I attempted to frame Flynn's perspective as one of the available strategies toward Russia. I am not making a moral judgment about any of the strategies, though I do point out in the linked comment that here is a significant humanitarian cost to proxy wars.
> I am not making a moral judgment about any of the strategies
That's part of my point; it's similar to saying 'I make no moral judgment about the strategy of jumping off a tall building.' It implies it would be reasonable to consider the option.
OK, so then which of the following is true? It's important to separate a (justifiable or not) ad hominem attack from a stance on the strategic options available to the US.
a) Flynn acts completely in his own, corrupt interest
b) Considering a strategy of engaging with Russia, reducing sanctions, etc., is unreasonable.
There is ample evidence of Russian hacking directed at the DNC to produce material to leak. True, there was no hacking of the vote counting process itself, but the leaks did significantly affect the results.
And then the whole story with Flynn talking to the Russian ambassador about sanctions. Which, it can be reasonably assumed, is why Russia did the whole hacking thing in the first place.
No, Russia did the whole hacking thing so that Americans would question the legitimacy of their election. It's kind of something Russia does to nearly every European country also.
What makes it special in the American case is the way in which Hillary Clinton lost the election. She lost big enough to unambiguously have lost (unlike Gore in Bush v. Gore), but did not lose with a large enough margin to produce an easily identifiable single reason for losing. Thus, every single explanation for the loss seems somewhat valid.
So, like anybody who is faced with choosing between "this my own fault" and "someone else screwed me", Democrats are choosing option B. What makes it hilariously ironic is that being angry the election was "stolen by Russia" is exactly what Russia wants. So if they care about not playing into Russia's hands, they would have to stop complaining about "Russia hacking the election." But they can't do that because they're not ready or able to say "we lost this election because what we're offering isn't sufficiently appealing to more than half the country for reasons X,Y,Z" (whatever those are).
I'm not sure I agree with your premise that Russia was only involved to undermine the legitimacy of the election. Do you think Russia didn't care which candidate won? That they don't prefer Trump (who has links with and has made overtures to Russia during the campaign) over Clinton (who has taken a tough stance on Russia)?
It is ridiculous to suggest that people should stop demanding that the Russia connection be investigated because it would be playing into Russia's hand. If anything, not investigating will keep the questions swirling, undermining the legitimacy of Trump's presidency.
> I'm not sure I agree with your premise that Russia was only involved to undermine the legitimacy of the election. Do you think Russia didn't care which candidate won? That they don't prefer Trump (who has links with and has made overtures to Russia during the campaign) over Clinton (who has taken a tough stance on Russia)?
I'm sure that Putin in particular may have favored Trump over Clinton because he is alleged to have a personal vendetta against Clinton, but I don't think it matters that much in Russia's decision to mess around in our politics.
Hillary was also only "tough on Russia" in contrast to a self-contradictory isolationist like Trump (who may flip his stance if he's persuaded by the people he has chosen to surround himself with besides Flynn). It's not like she was going to challenge Russian geopolitical shinanigans more aggressively than the previous administration.
> It is ridiculous to suggest that people should stop demanding that the Russia connection be investigated
There's a difference between wanting questions about Trump's connection to Russia investigated and using said questions and possible answers to them which are only tenuously supported by evidence as the centerpiece of a "Resistance" strategy. The first option is perfectly fine. The second option is playing straight into Russia's hands, and has the additional negative effect of desensitizing people to actual misdeeds of the Trump administration when they're finally revealed.
> I'm not sure I agree with your premise that Russia was only involved to undermine the legitimacy of the election
I think that explanation is overly simplistic but also more accurate than the simple "Putin wanted Trump" argument.
I think Russia wanted the US leadership to be weak itself and to create cracks within the broad western alliance, and to have the US, where possible, go beyond merely being an ineffective opponent to being an active supporter of Russian interests. To that end, all of the following had value:
1. Casting doubt and uncertainty on the election, no matter who won,
2. Getting Trump elected, given positions Trump had already taken in line with some Russian interests (whether or not Russia actually has particular influence with Trump, though there is certainly reason to believe that.)
3. Casting further doubt on whoever is elected after the election,
4. Creating internal strife after the election (see, e.g., the Russian connections with the "Calexit" movement.)
>> If anything, not investigating will keep the questions swirling, undermining the legitimacy of Trump's presidency.
The only ones undermining the legitimacy of his presidency are the people claiming Russian interference without evidence. One problem at this point is that people on either side will question the result of any investigation, which would further erode confidence in the government. It's a no win situation, so we need to just stop beating the dead horse.
Evidence has been proffered to the extent that it can. The CIA can't name its sources without erasing what little access it appears to have. The CrowdStrike report is freely available on the internet.
Prominent Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee in have viewed the evidence and agree with the findings of this report, asserting that the Russian government ordered the campaign to interfere with the election.
President Trump can be legitimate and the Russian government interfered with the election. The "if you're not with me, you're against me" attitude is blinding and counterproductive. The right thing to do is to proceed with investigation and also proceed with the business of government, which is what is happening now. (If you say that Democrats are hypocritically obstructionist in Congress in 2017 I will agree, but it is orthogonal to Russia or any investigation of it).
> One problem at this point is that people on either side will question the result of any investigation, which would further erode confidence in the government. It's a no win situation, so we need to just stop beating the dead horse.
At this point, people on either side will question facts, which will further erode confidence in fact checking. It's a no-win situation, so we need to just stop beating the dead horse [and accept "alt-facts"].
Trump himself has made claims of massive fraud during the election.
I mean, I'm being a little sarcastic, he claims that 100% of the fraud was against him, but there are more things making this administration look ridiculous than people concern trolling about Russia.
If the administration loses the ability to govern effectively, it has lost legitimacy regardless of the legitimacy of the elections.
One possible outcome of Clinton winning would have been a fracturing of the Democratic party into the Sanders wing and the Clinton camp. An unpopular president with a fractured party would have been fine for opponents of the US.
Which Democrats publicly stated that the election was stolen? And do they represent the party or its opinion writ large? Sec. Clinton notably asserted that the election was legitimate.
Note that many prominent Republicans also agree that Russian interference in the U.S. campaign is unacceptable while asserting that the election results stand.
Just off the top of my head, John Lewis has stated explicitly that he feels that Donald Trump is "illegitimate" and has cited Russian associations as the reason.
Several others have made the claim that "Russia hacked the election" which I think is meant to imply that Russia stole the election for Trump without actually saying it. At the very least it's extremely misleading.
I think both readings of the motivation of the Russian hacks are reasonable and both may well be true.
I think it is terrible that the Democratic party isn't facing up to the problems in their own party that led to that outcome. They have list the House, the Senate and the Presidency. Something is wrong and it isn't just Russian hacking.
> There is ample evidence of Russian hacking directed at the DNC to produce material to leak.
Considering the Media started with 15 intel agencies all saying this was the case and ended only being 3 agencies in the final report with 1 in particular (The NSA) only claiming "moderate confidence" (60%).
The NSA would seem like they would be the best placed to know who did it, yet they gave it just above a coin toss in probability? I believe the intel agencies were more confident about WMD's in Iraq than this "ample evidence".
All three agencies assessed with high confidence the attribution of the campaign to Russia. The medium confidence assertion was about whether Russia intended to actually get President Trump elected, of which evidence is not clear or strong.
Please read the actual report rather than the distilled version you got from your choice of media.
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an
influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US
presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine
public faith in the US democratic process,
denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability
and potential presidency. We further assess
Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear
reference for President-elect Trump. We have high
confidence in these judgments.
- We also assess Putin and the Russian Government
aspired to help President-elect Trump’s
election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary
Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.
All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI
have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate
confidence.
> three agencies assessed with high confidence the attribution of the campaign to Russia. The medium confidence assertion was about whether Russia intended to actually get President Trump elected, of which evidence is not clear or strong
That document was intended to be persuasive, not comprehensive. It blurred together a lot of different things, attributed them all to the same plot by Putin, and used paragraph after paragraph of filler material to "support" the various claims.
Of all the claims making up the "argument" in the document, none of the ones that could possibly be verified by data were verified by data. We were told such data exists, but not shown any evidence of it.
I was deeply embarrassed that our government would release such an amateurish document, and even more embarrassed that the document would be cited as evidence by people who should know better.
You're changing the goalposts. My response was correcting a factual error in the parent poster's statement.
This report isn't meant to provide evidence. It's a summary of a report submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee (chaired by a Republican) that has been scrubbed of secret information, release of which would cut off or kill sources. The fact you think it's amateurish reflects your unfamiliarity with what these documents mean (Which is just fine! We can't all be experts on these things).
If you do not trust the Senate Intelligence Committee or the Intelligence Community chiefs, that is just fine also. This document is a report: nothing more, nothing less. Critical thinking and questioning authority is good.
The report contained a lot of information in it that suggested it was thrown together by a person unfamiliar with ITSec who was copying and pasting filler material until the report was long enough (had enough pages) to seem substantial, much like the folders full of blank sheets of paper Trump used as a prop for one of his speeches.
> reflects your unfamiliarity with what these documents mean
That's exactly the point. They mean nothing because they assert nothing factual, simply an opinion whose reasoning is left up to the imagination of the reader under the pretense of secrecy.
> Senate Intelligence Committee (chaired by a Republican)
Fearmongering about Russia has crossed party lines, and is concentrated in some of the more powerful members of congress who are on that committee...
Watch a few minutes of Marco Rubio's questioning of Tillerson about Russia, it's as if he's asking a religious litmus test question, not asking about a rational thought process. I found it deeply embarrassing to watch.
> If you do not trust the Senate Intelligence Committee or the Intelligence Community chiefs
Trust should not be part of the equation when we are talking about going to war. It should be abundantly obvious that war is necessary, and we should not have to take anyone's word for anything.
If the report had been upfront about its lack of evidence-based analysis, then it would have been less than a page long. The fact is, intelligence agencies do not worry about all of their analysis being evidence-based, they use heuristics and other models of understanding behavior to formulate their assessment. I'm not arguing that this method is not appropriate to that specific domain.
However, the report was presented as containing the actual evidence that convinced members of the committee that there was Russian involvement.
Most of us are old enough to remember how not long ago an administration presented flawed evidence about Iraq and how that cost the US trillions of dollars and left nearly a million people dead. It was one of the biggest human atrocities in the modern world, and it happened because too many of us trusted the heuristic and hand-waving approach that intelligence agencies use.
That approach is fine when there is a need to make a last-minute decision and no better methods exist, but they should not be used for promoting/propagandizing wars that have not yet started.
If it were not for the rabid partisanship (not just democrat/republican, there are a lot of vehement anti-Russia partisans in both parties) the report would have been laughed at by the press and no president or intelligence committee would dare release such garbage. Unfortunately, like during the buildup to the Iraq war, such discretion and scrutiny is missing from the equation.
It astonishes me how riled some people are by this supposed "influence campaign" by Russia, but nobody cares about the "influence campaign" by corporations for Hillary Clinton to win the election ?
The joint statement is at [1]. It starts: The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.
The USIC[2] is The United States Intelligence Community (IC)[1] is a federation of 16 separate United States government agencies that work separately and together to conduct intelligence activities considered necessary for the conduct of foreign relations and national security of the United States...The IC is headed by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who reports to the President of the United States.
The full report is [3]. That is also from the DNI (see above), which represents those 16 agencies.
The key judgements from that are:
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US
presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process,
denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess
Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We
have high confidence in these judgments.
and
We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s
election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her
unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence
in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
So it is 16, not 15. But the media reports I saw said 16 anyway. It's true that the NSA had moderate confidence in one of the judgements, but all agencies had high confidence in the "Russia interfered" judgement.
It is also inaccurate to say "moderate" means 60%. That would correspond to a likelihood of a forecast of "Probable", but confidence is a different scale.
Moderate Confidence actually means: "credibly sourced and plausible information, but not of sufficient quality or corroboration to warrant a higher level of confidence."
There is apparently a protocol for actual intelligence service findings, and this document did not follow that protocol.
It was thus simply created to serve a political/PR purpose. The sloppiness of its construction, its reliance upon boilerplate content lifted from other places, and its confident conclusion unsupported by data are all big differences from the professional style that is typically used in intelligence document
Most of the people who believe that Russia was involved in the hacking or election meddling seem happy to believe it without evidence.
As McCain spouted, cyber attack could reasonably be viewed as an act of war. This is generally the view of the most passionate anti-Russia fearmongers involved in this debate.
I'm simply demanding actual evidence, the way I should have when I stupidly believed George W. Bush and Colin Powell that there was a direct trail leading to Iraq having WMDs.
Consider that during the buildup to the Iraq war, the UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, was tarred and feathered by those who wanted to go to war in Iraq. This was a career bureaucrat who saw that the inspection regime was being twisted to make the case for a war that he felt was unwarranted based on the years he'd spent on the ground in Iraq, actually inspecting Iraq's facilities.
Not only was he harassed and mocked, his career was ruined because he dared state what turned out to be very obvious once Saddam was unseated -- that Iraq had absolutely no WMD capability.
We are seeing the same thing with Russia. Simply by expressing skepticism people are being called names like "useful idiot" and all sorts of other politically motivated slurs.
War is just politics that turns violent. What we're seeing in the US is a pretty significant propaganda campaign to foment hatred toward Russia. It's quite obvious that if there were any evidence AT ALL this would be a big deal, but after months of repetition and hand waving by those wishing to foment hatred, after leaks by the intel community, etc., there is still zero evidence.
This doesn't mean that those who claim all that stuff are wrong, it just means that they are making a faith-based decision, which is a kind of decision that I do not think the American people should make when wars and lives are on the line.
The comment I linked before presents what I believe to be the strategic background between US and Russia that is relevant to this conflict.
I think I've presented some reasonable evidence elsewhere - you said so yourself.
It's possible to believe that US policy on Russia (Esp regarding NATO expansion) is unnecessarily aggressive, that US Intel agencies aren't especially competent, that the CIA was completely wrong on Iraq and yet still believe in Russian interference in the US election.
The thing that convinced me was seeing the campaign on social media. Its pretty easy to find clear pro-Russian bot nets on Twitter that used to be super interested in Turkey and then suddenly became pro-Trump.
The same thing is happening for the French and German elections. Have a look yourself.
I ask the above question seriously, and I think your point about botnets brings up some interesting issues:
- Why must all of the actions attributed to Russia be part of a larger "campaign"
- Which of the actions could have also been conducted by smaller than nation-state entities? For each, what would you estimate the budget of the operation to be?
- For each of the actions, how easy would it be for some actor to do it and intentionally leave a trail that points to Russia? What level of sophistication would be needed to do this? What auditing mechanisms exist that US intelligence might have already used to rule out any such activity?
Based on the above, how much confidence do you have about each of the actions in the campaign being attributable to a Putin-initiated directive vs other possible explanations?
Also, what strategic considerations do you think Putin made before ordering the action concerning the possibility of being caught (as you'd seemingly argue he has been)? What tit-for-tat response would HRC have done if she'd won the US election, and what tit-for-tat response do you see Trump likely to do?
In addition, supposing the campaign was ordered by Putin, what does it reveal about Russia's ability to meddle in US civil society in a consequential way? He's seemingly been very successful in nearly doing away with years of work to marginalize Russia and punish it for its aggressive behavior, which must be an outcome he is quite pleased by.
Since it is unlikely he thought this outcome would occur, why was it worth doing the campaign in the first place, when it clearly incited HRC and McCain (the expected thought leaders on Russia before election day) to react so strongly?
It would be one thing if the expected outcome were Trump winning, but I think it's very, very hard to argue that Putin could have expected this and would have planned a risky strategy with it in mind. On the contrary he must have expected the opposite outcome when he initiated the campaign, and was likely expecting to be dealing with no Trump victory, merely a heated backlash and sanctions from a US regime he wantonly provoked.
If you manage to notice this comment I'm curious about your thoughts.
In response to what you wrote in another thread about these questions: I think they are more propaganda, intentionally or not. They're a continuation of endless, open, 'possible', unfounded allegations, questions, and speculation. There is not even an attempt to establish any credible basis for them; they contribute no knowledge to the discussion; all they do is eat time and attention, and slow and distract people.
It's like a person at a meeting, where people are trying to accomplish something substantive, who just raises endless speculative objections.
> They're a continuation of endless, open, 'possible', unfounded allegations, questions, and speculation.
I'm not entirely sure what this means. My intention was to better understand your mental model, which appears a bit sloppy, or at least more concerned with its conclusion than with its integrity as a rational process.
I guess what I'd say (constructively) is that if it is too much work to articulate your argument as a tree of probabilistic scenarios to each player and strategic moves which themselves have probabilistic outcomes, then I think that might be a clue that your might not actually believe your own argument.
One example I'd offer about how I think we can understand ourselves better by using probabilistic reasoning is this:
We routinely make important decisions based on imperfect understanding of our own motives or preferences. This is why the technique of flipping a coin to make difficult A vs B decisions is so powerful. The decision was difficult precisely because we expect to be equally happy with either outcome. Thus letting the coin toss result make the decision preserves our utility maximization (to the best of our knowledge). At times, if it lands on heads, we may feel regret, which can indicate that we actually preferred the other outcome. The practice is very illustrative of how opaque our own uncertainty can be to us.
So we should assume when considering the decision-making of those who we can't ask directly for details, that there was nearly always a fair bit of uncertainty behind every decision. The more external evidence there is that the person is deeply rational (as world leaders nearly always are) the more confident we can be that the decision was not guided by a deluded sense of outcome probability.
Thus, for actions that involve many steps taking place blind (without an eye on the outcome) we must assume either that the actor is indifferent to the outcome, or that there is some benefit to outcomes other than the most desired one, and that the potential costs are well understood.
We don't need to know everything about the actor's decisions or expected probabilities to reason about his actions, since we can learn a great deal by outlining the things we feel confident about and determining whether the other pieces of our theory seem to fit. This was the intention behind the questions I posed, to help us both scrutinize your view more thoroughly, since if you are right I'd very much like to agree with you.
> Consider that during the buildup to the Iraq war, the UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, was tarred and feathered by those who wanted to go to war in Iraq. This was a career bureaucrat who saw that the inspection regime was being twisted to make the case for a war that he felt was unwarranted based on the years he'd spent on the ground in Iraq, actually inspecting Iraq's facilities.
Not only was he harassed and mocked, his career was ruined because he dared state what turned out to be very obvious once Saddam was unseated -- that Iraq had absolutely no WMD capability.
Sorry, that just didn't happen.
Blix accused Iraq of stalling the inspections, which was decided as a sign of noncompliance by some US officials.
Blix's career wasn't ruined and he wasn't "harrased or mocked".
The article I link below is one example of the substantial smear campaign waged against Hans Blix during the buildup to the Iraq war. There were many, many other examples of this, led by neoconservatives in the US and Britain:
I have no interest in promoting Trump or Russian propaganda. I have serious disdain for Trump (and for humanitarian abuses committed by Putin (and by the US)), the only thing I would characterize as wise that he's done is to question some of the more dishonest foreign policy ideas the US has been running with for quite some time.
Nowhere in the criticism of the idea that the US might improve relations with Russia is there any assertion of what US national interest actually is, merely a smear campaign against Putin (much like the one against Saddam, etc.)
To me that is what defines propaganda -- ad hominem smears, moralizing, indignation that someone would have a view different than your own. These are actually a characteristic of some of the arguments you've put forth.
> What is this evidence? I have yet to hear about it.
They have evidence! They have the best evidence! A lot of smart people say so!
Seriously though, the "security community" seems to have solved the attribution problem by simply applying PR tactics to point to someone they suspect but have no proof against. It works because most people are not familiar with the problem domain.
Well other than the fact that we have both the phishing email used to compromise podesta, the link shortener account it was sent from, samples of malware and ioc's - other than the evidence we have, sure, we don't have any evidence.
So the location of the server used to generate phishing emails counts as evidence of its origin? Were there IOCs that link non-circumstantially to a state sponsored effort?
This is what George W. Bush said about Iraqi WMDs. The narrative was that there was a lot of evidence provided by intelligence agencies supporting the idea that Saddam had WMDs, but it was top secret and could not be shared with the public.
The truth was that in spite of claims of evidence, there was ZERO evidence of WMDs, and all of the claims turned out to be lies or significant embellishments.
Most fundamentally, they were major failures of SIGINT and showed us how clueless and crude our so-called intelligence operations were.
This wouldn't really matter, except that it cost us Trillions of dollars and close to a million people have died as a result. It's an atrocity on par with some of the greatest human atrocities in history, and it was possible largely because people adopted the view that you articulate in the parent post... that "they have evidence, but they are wisely keeping it secret".
If there were any actual evidence we certainly would have heard about it, either via a leak or via the publication of some kind of smoking gun.
Ah, more false equivalencies; more noise and FUD. All information that isn't public is the same! All situations involving it are the same! Truth and lies are the same and there is no way to tell the difference ... except that they are not and there is.
And you are in a privileged position to discern these? As citizens, our role is not to trust our leaders, it is to be harshly skeptical of them and demand that they present evidence for endeavors that are costly (in terms of lives or dollars).
I dispute your claim that I make equivalences, and I would say that in this case there is far more likely to actually be evidence of wrongdoing (if any occurred). In the case of Saddam, we had very little HUMINT or SIGINT presence in Iraq with which to scrutinize Bush's claims, so intel analysts arguably erred on the side of caution.
In this case, we have unprecedented intel leaks (and surveillance capabilities), yet mysteriously no actual evidence, which, if it exists, would seemingly implicate Trump and members of his team in very clear treason.
What patriot would withhold these critical details? Our mental model of the leaker's motivations cannot both maintain that there is smoking gun evidence of significant wrongdoing AND that the leaker was concerned, but content to just stoke a rumor rather than reveal the biggest treason in the history of the modern world.
At this point, the story has so many tentacles that providing evidence about even one thing would do wonders to root it in reality. Yet we're seeing the opposite. More vague, evidence-free, sensational leaks, more promotion of rumor to truth by propagandists, etc.
> And you are in a privileged position to discern these?
Yes, as privileged as everyone else. We can and must make judgments - open-mindedness is important, but to withhold judgment indefinitely is foolishness and reckless endangerment of our responsibilities. That includes judging against absurd and evil ideas and not allowing them unlimited leeway to delay or distract us (again, that would be aiding in their propaganda strategy) from acting against them. And while my judgment isn't perfect, I'm pretty confident in this one.
Fair response. I agree that we all must make judgments. I might be overly biased by my post-hoc analysis of the reasoning behind the Iraq war fiasco and my notion that the broader, geopolitical themes provide most of the inertia for US/Russian dynamics.
In light of your comment I'm curious how you assess the campaign that we've been discussing in this thread. I posed the question in a different sub-thread but I'd be very interested to read your response to it as well:
To date the public only knows with certainty that the Podesta and DNC documents that leaked are authentic. We know the contents of those documents are deeply disturbing. We know that instead of talking about that disturbing content, the media only wishes to report on how this authentic content came to light. The deflection and bias is staggering.
