God, that headline ("The Hackers Russia-Proofing Germany’s Elections"). Has it been ever conclusively proven that Russia hacked any election? Or is it just repeating unwarranted accusations in a form as if they were already facts?
The fact that Reality Leigh Winner is being charged with leaking classified information on the Russian government's phishing-attack on computers at an American voting machine company confirms that leak was valid. Then last week a DHS official said the Russian government was targeting voting systems in 21 states. And these two things happened just this month. The evidence has been mounting for over a year now.
At this point even Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump concede Russia attacked America, they're only trying to muddy attribution as to who ordered it and why.
The only people who don't believe it at this point usually have some motivation beyond honest inquiry.
It is still too early to tell, and nobody should be jumping to conclusions at this stage in the investigation.
Either you have faith in the law-enforcement machine, or you don't. Let them finish their investigation, publish a report, and then make your own conclusions.
(You know, kind of how it all went down with 9/11: same deal. No jumping to conclusions, kids ..)
> Either you have faith in the law-enforcement machine
Law enforcement has said Russia interfered [1]. The ODNI conducted an investigation and published its report [2]. Whether it flipped the outcome is difficult to determine, and in my view a wholly-separate issue.
Nobody should be jumping to conclusions at the point the Senate intel committee has said they're sure during committee hearings and NSA/FBI/CIA have issued a joint report?
What do you consider a reasonable standard if the intel community saying their findings isn't it?
No. You might be thinking of three people who resigned from CNN after an article retraction related to news of a POTUS ally having connections to a Russian investment firm which is under investigation (That investigation is separate from the election interference one).
Thats a video released by O'Keefe and Project Veritas who are confirmed frauds. They've altered context of statements in videos before, and lost out in court when confronted about it.
They're simply not credible. Besides, that guy doesn't produce in the same department as the journalists working on the Russia story. He's a supervising producer for CNN Health.
To me it seems disingenuous to call that "election hacking".
"Election hacking" conjures images of manipulating voting machines, but what Russia did based on that link you provided was simply find unsavory things the DNC has done in order to bring negative PR to the party.
I think it would be more appropriate to say that Russian influence socially engineered the 2016 election rather than outright hacked the election.
One other thing to consider: US elections are by definition secure from a wholesale hacking on account of the election being run on a patchwork of systems that differ from state to state (and sometimes county to county or even precinct to precinct). However, this same design and subsequent long list of vulnerabilities found in election machines and their software means that it would be possible to tip crucial precincts and districts in surgical, spear-phishing style attacks that may not attract all that much attention.
Isn't there some question over whether Russia supplied illegally obtained data, such as emails or voter registration details (or metadata generated from said data), to the Trump campaign? That's more than social engineering. It's potentially hacking and collusion.
EDIT: Wow, quick to downvote. I thought we were in favor of waiting until the investigation concludes to say decisively whether or not collusion happened.
