Sure, if you were to ask me whether I took claims about the DNC hack seriously when it was first discussed, I'd have said...
Oh wait. I did say something about it--I just didn't think it would work. I also kind of thought more people would find the connections between several of Trump's advisors with Russia to be troubling. Somehow that story never really developed that way I hoped it would. I mean, wouldn't it just seem apparent that Putin and friends would put a thumb on the scale for a President whose intention seemed to be dismantling what the US has achieved in the last eight years both at home and abroad? Wouldn't he want a political newcomer who didn't understand the system he was trying to wrest control of and thought that the problems the US faced boiled down to...bad "branding"?
So the WP story that there's consensus in the intelligence community that this is what actually happened doesn't really throw me. Nor am I shocked (!) at Senator Harry Reid's letter to FBI Director Comey that straight-up says that Comey had information that he didn't disclose. I mean, Mercy! You can't expect an FBI Director to drop possibly campaign-damaging info like that before an election! It's not like this was about something important, like, I don't know, Hillary Clinton's emails...
My eyebrows do raise a little when Donald Trump flat-out denies that it happened. Surely, a data breach by a foreign intelligence should be at least a concern to an incoming president? Because maybe (this time) next time it could be the RNC getting hacked? And who knows how that information might be used? Embarrassment? Leverage?
Of course it ought to be looked into.
2 comments:
I'm somewhat puzzled by the obsession among people I thought were leftish about Russia's supposed "interference" with our election. The evidence that has been released so far suggests that two Russian intelligence agencies hacked the DNC's and maybe the RNC's. No evidence has been shown yet, and probably doesn't exist, about who then passed the emails along to the Romanian Guccifer 2.0. It's not even known that it was the Russians who downloaded the emails. Then Guccifer sent them to Wikileaks. The thing is, it's not very important who hacked the emails and made them public, the question is are the contents of the published emails true, and no one has denied that they are. So however the gossip became public, it's quite embarrassing to senior members of the rich and powerful Democratic Party. If Russia did it, so what? Russia is a relatively weak country that happens to possess nuclear weapons and may or may not still possess means of delivering them to the continental U.S. I think it would be prudent to act as if they do have a means of delivery, but apparently our government officials in the State Department prefer not to. Also a number of generals who have not been in combat themselves for many years. They have a small navy, and I've heard that although they are much superior to the F-35, which cannot fly within 25 miles of a rain storm and carries a rather small payload, they are much inferior to our F-16s. Why are people acting as if they are some sort of threat to us? Same with the "terrorists" that our CIA trained in Afghanistan who have since turned on their former paymasters Why do we treat them as a terrifying, existential threat. How are they going to come kill us in our beds? Buy tickets on El Al? Sure, they have the potential to kill some people. Every day about 100 Americans are killed by guns. You think members of ISIL (or ISIS or IS or Daesh) can do a lot better than that?
The earliest reports from about June of this year regarding the hacks were from private digital security and the DNC itself. The Guccifer hack on Clinton doesn't seem to have happened--Comey said so. The point isn't whether Russia is militarily weak or weak in terms of defensive investment--this is basically an asymmetrical strategy of disinformation that preys on the US's basically open media (old/new/social) and the relative gullibility of many of our citizens. At issue isn't a threat against soft targets as a rando lone wolf bomber might even be able to achieve-- rather, and ironically, the least effort of a few hundred low-paid keyboardists can commandeer what we would have thought was bedrock--they got at our values. A free press doesn't matter when you can't tell fake news from straight. Facts stop mattering when people just up and deny them.
We will have, because maybe a handful of million people just were too demoralized to apply critical thinking or too lulled by false equivalence to get up the basic concern or too persuaded that they had no moral choice that "appealed" to them that they just bailed on an election that seriously mattered. The ACA goes away, and people lose their lives. The economic system favors the wealthy, and the working class gets shafted. Bad foreign policy moves by people without the requisite experience lead to wars of choice, intelligence failures, increased susceptibility to terrorism and instability. A crackdown on freedom of the press and silencing of dissidents results in distributed anxiety across the body politic. Lives aren't just lost, but the freedom and potential of many are truncated.
I don't fear nuclear war--I live in a major city and work in another one--I will just be vaporized. It might not hurt for long enough for my mind to consciously even know what happened. I fear living in a totalitarian dystopia where my humanity and that of those around me count for less and less. Where I am conscious for every bloody second.
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