Dear lord a dozen countries could use this style of "evidence" to support the notion that the BBC(British Broadcasting) is deeply involved in nefarious election influencing. I believe in freedom of speech including Russia's ability to talk and influence. All the evidence not directly related to hacking is just completely inappropriate. This "proof" doesn't help their case against Russia. They should be focusing a narrow remit on the like's of Gucifier and Wikileaks. What a mess.
As a kid growing up through the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, I can tell you BBC played a crucial role. We use to gather an listen to Farsi BBC broadcast in short-wave radio. That experience has made me to be distrustful of any major media outlet.
I remember it. They used to announce demonstration schedules. And the line from the Foreign Office was "BBC is independent". What a crock of shit. And the New York Times was calling the Ayatollah Khomeini a "saint". (Let that sink in.)
RT is clearly a propaganda organ and Russians are old hands at propaganda. That much is clear. But the germinal issue, the elephant in the room, is that corporate media in our nation serves such a thin gruel of "news" that outfits like RT or (earlier) Al-Jazeera gain a foothold and establish "credibility" simply by publishing what our media refuses to cover. Didn't they get the memo that we have thing called the internet these days and other sources are a click away?
The biggest nugget in this report, imo, is that NSA is not so hot about this assessment. Which reminds me, did the former CIA employee cum whistle blower dish out CIA's dirty secrets as well or did he just dump on the NSA?
To save effort on fact-checking the claim that 'New York Times was calling the Ayatollah Khomeini a "saint"': I believe the source of this claim is that the New York Times ran an article on February 8, 1979 with the headline "Young Praises Islam as ‘Vibrant’ And Calls the Ayatollah ‘a Saint’". You can read it here:
Based on my understanding, an accurate claim would be the following: "The New York Times reported that Andrew Young, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, predicted that Ayatollah Khomeini would eventually be hailed as a saint."
Well then, the issue is to establish good journalistic sources, which publish the important stories, while remaining independent of propaganda motivations, including corporate ones.
I don't have the answer to that question. The obvious answer is that democratic societies need to take education very seriously and provide the necessary cognitive tools for the populace, but that is not a short term remedy.
This should be it's own topic. Can you run an "Ask HN"?
My thought would be an information system that is jointly published in by all nation states - like a broadcast Wikipedia. The idea is that out of the chaos in the reporting the facts that every nation agrees on will get through clearly, whereas the opinions, unfounded accusations and the rest will bury themselves in a quagmire of costly effort.
Yeah that's gonna run about as effectively as the UN, which is to say barely at all. I do have a scheme I'm developing for this problem but I'm not sure how practical it is.
I remain skeptical that merely flagging individual content as 'probable disminformation' will the address issue.
Propaganda is, at its core, a form of psychological manipulation. It doesn't necessarily have to involve overt lies. Omission of facts, tone, phrasing and choice of words, etc. are all effective tools.
There are patterns to propaganda. /That/ is their achilles heel.
Absolutely; UK Govt still funds the BBC directly. I do believe it's substantially independent and certainly not direct Govt propaganda, but there's no denying that it pushes a very UK-centric view.
Hacking, internet based propaganda, and disinformation are all elements of asymmetric warfare, and Russia has used all these, in a spectrum from hacking infrastructure in Ukraine, to spreading disinformation and supporting a racist, fascist right in Europe and the US.
This does not diminish the case against Russia. They have helped turn a political fringe into a force in the US, France, UK, Poland and elsewhere. Unless you truly believe open society and liberalism is wrong, Russia is throwing a wrench in the works, and deserves to be punished for doing so.
Is there a point to your relativism? I can hold that Russia is partly to blame, and should be punished for enabling a minority of Americans to elect a highly damaging president, AND I can hold that the US is heavy-handed in, for example, managing "democracy" in Turkey and that leads to problems.
If an external country convinced 60% of a population to vote against its establishment (and for the sake of argument, their (the voters) own self interest), it is immune from punishment because it convinced a minority?
We now want to punish countries that say different things than Americans agree with? Speaking Pro-Trumps and Anti-Clinton statements is VERY different than false propaganda.
Should the US be punished? One could conclude that the coup in Turkey failed because many Turks thought so. Similarly, Russia should not get away with pumping up our racists.
Internet based propaganda and disinformation are protected by freedom of the press, and should remain protected. It is up to the reader to parse and verify truth. No one says the "flat earth society" or the "moon hoax" people should be punished. While I disagree with what many people say online and have different views, the freedom to publish anything, including propaganda and disinformation is sacred and should be protected.
I doubt very much that "freedom of the press" as guaranteed by the First Amendment in the United States applies to the right of foreign nations to engage in propaganda.
I also doubt that any country in has ever accepted foreign propaganda, Manchurian candidates who subvert their electoral processes (speaking generally, not about any particular candidate) and mass manipulation of its populace (the fact the the US has engaged in this sort of activity does not make it right either).
I agree, up to a point - where the disinformation represents a concerted attempt to suppress factual information or delegitimize truthful sources, and the degree of political instability creates an existential threat, for example, or where the publication of information will result in injury with no discernible public benefit, as in the dissemination of child porn.
In any case, freedom of the press is already very robust in the US, unlike some other countries.
This report presents conclusions, not evidence. There are quite a few commenters in this thread decrying the "absence of evidence," but that is simply the burden of proof fallacy.
I've performed my own analysis of election memes and I independently confirmed a staggering amount of Trump-related traffic with significantly above-average upvotes across several major media platforms.
I wrote this 2 weeks before the election and even then, I was already looking closely at bot/sock puppet activity. I didn't connect everything at the time, but I now view the shockingly pro-Trump traffic in an even-more-skeptical light.
For some, there will never be enough evidence to prove social media were subverted for the purpose of influencing the election. For my purposes, however, I appreciate the PDF linked in this thread because it is actually relevant to my social media research. I am happy to cite the intelligence report as context for the social media findings I reported on.
I do not consider the book to be "closed" on this matter, but I do condemn all the commenters in this thread who are attempting to shut down the conversation by claiming there's not enough "evidence."
In closing, I quote from the report:
> This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment; its conclusions are identical to those in the highly classified assessment but this version does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the influence campaign.
You've been using HN primarily for political purposes. That's an abuse of this site, and we ban accounts that do it. Indeed, we've already banned a couple of your other accounts for this. Using multiple accounts to get around HN moderation is also an abuse of this site. Please stop.
> Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign.
Continuing:
> A journalist who is a leading expert on the Internet Research Agency claimed that some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015
I will use those two quotes to provide context for my research.
The report seems to present lots of conclusions to controversial issues (like the hacking) but it provides zero evidence for these conclusions.
The little that's backed up by evidence in there is Russia's public propaganda efforts, like Russia Today, which aren't really anything new (though certainly interesting).
What's controversial is the hacking and I haven't seen anything that attributes the hacks to Russia beyond reasonable doubt. If the evidence was taken to a US court and put before a judge and jury, I don't believe a prosecutor could get a conviction.
I understand that the US wouldn't want to give up its intelligence sources but I also don't think that the people of the US should let the government make foreign policy decisions based on hidden evidence. That's how Iraq happened.
> This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment; its conclusions are identical to those in the highly classified assessment but this version does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the influence campaign.
The authors addressed your complaint on the final page of the report. Stop confusing this matter by introducing a "burden of proof" fallacy.
> The authors addressed your complaint on the final page of the report.
They responded to it yes but they haven't resolved the issue I raised, which is that I'm not going to trust their conclusions without seeing verifiable evidence that would be accepted by a court and that I don't think anyone else should accept their claims either.
> Stop confusing this matter by introducing a "burden of proof" fallacy.
According to [0]: "You said that the burden of proof lies not with the person making the claim, but with someone else to disprove."
I'm saying that the burden of proof lies with the party making the claim. How is that fallacious?
I agree with your sentiment but is it not possible for the authors to reveal this evidence because that would undermine their intelligence capabilities?
It does seem likely that that's the case however a good reason to withhold the evidence doesn't increase the likelihood that I will/should trust the report.
There's no good solution to this, it's unfortunate that they proved themselves untrustworthy in the past.
Yes there is, and it is already in place. There has been bipartisan oversight of intelligence from Congress for decades. A subset of the people's representatives with the necessary security clearances make sure that there are no Deep State shenanigans. Yes, it failed in the run up to the Iraq invasion, but it worked for decades before, during the Cold War.
- Partisanship in Congress has resulted in a government so dysfunctional that it's been shut down. We can't trust people who can't even keep the government running to watch over services so accustomed to keeping everyone in the dark.
- The committee may have been effective during the cold war but in recent times, the NSA was engaged in mass surveillance for while this committee was in place and it took an internal whistleblower for it to come to light.
- The head of the NSA lied to Congress. The oversight committee can't oversee if they can't get the truth.
You might be able to argue that this is a solution but you most definitely cannot argue that it's a good solution when it's recently been proven to be ineffective.
The intelligence oversight committees have subpoena powers. They can get at anyone in any of the executive agencies who might be willing to testify and contradict their leadership. The committees also have the power to extract documents from the executive branch. The CIA torture investigation, as fraught as that was, was done by an intelligence oversight committee. CIA even created an airgapped network just for the oversight committee staffers to read CIA documents.
and i think that's the point. they had trust, and they totally abused that to the point where anything they say that's unverifiable is questionable. this is why these organisations shouldn't lie to their own countries' people; because it will be close to impossible to regain that trust without verifiable sources and transparency that they just can't give
OK, you don't trust it but they're not going to burn their sources and methods in a public report. Do you seriously expect them to voluntarily expose their assets when it could be a death sentence for their human sources? A future executive might make that decision and live with the consequences, but members of the intelligence community aren't going to voluntarily wreck their networks.
Isn't that how most foreign policy works? The WoMD fiasco was a problem for sure, but the solution to that is to elect officials we can trust. When the White House says the CIA has come to them with evidence that must be acted on, the White House can't turn to the populous and ask if there is enough evidence to act. They need to have the autonomy to act as they see fit.
It's how foreign policy has worked in the past but I think it's demonstrated that it's not how foreign policy should work in the future.
> the solution to that is to elect officials we can trust.
That seems incredibly unlikely to happen. US elections seem to be mostly decided by who has the most political capital and media support rather than trustworthiness or merit.
> When the White House says the CIA has come to them with evidence that must be acted on, the White House can't turn to the populous and ask if there is enough evidence to act. They need to have the autonomy to act as they see fit.
I'd agree that this is the case but I don't think that the agencies themselves can be trusted anymore. The head of the NSA told a blatant lie in front of Congress and worse, got away with it. There's no accountability anymore so I don't think trust is wise.
I think the US as a country can only function when the people trust the government, the government respects the people and the people within the government trust and respect each other. None of these things are currently the case and I suspect things are only going to get worse. What that will cause I have no idea.
The irony of Hillary losing because of some kind of interference by Putin is that he's only in a position to do so because her husband and other Americans interfered in the Russian presidential election 20 years earlier in support of Putin's mentor, against a Communist Party that was virtually certain to win (and by some accounts did). Nobody seems to be losing any sleep over that one though.
> In July 2015, Russian
intelligence gained access to Democratic National
Committee (DNC) networks and maintained that
access until at least June 2016.
Usually in situations like that it either goes to a special court or the judge reviews it alone and then instructs the jury to take certain facts for granted. This might sound odd but it's actually very common - if both sides in a case agree about certain facts then they are 'stipulated' and become binding matters of fact that are not subject to challenge or review later.
Iraq war happened because US wanted oil and this so called bad evidence was nothing more than a trick to still looks good.
As In "I wouldnt have done this if I knew".
No-no - they would still have done it no matter what.
First, there's no doubt that RT is Russian propaganda. That's not news, and I'm unsure why it's in this kind of report. Paid russian internet trolls is an old accusation too. I think it's probably true but I don't see any concrete evidence in this report.
The real question here centers on the emails: did some Russian intelligence agency leak the DNC emails to wikileaks? The report asserts that this occurred, but again offers no concrete evidence. Instead it focuses on establishing motive.
We do have concrete evidence (published by crowdstrike) that Russian intel hacked the DNC. But we don't have concrete evidence linking the leaked emails to that hack.
I'm trying to remain objective here. I don't think it's unlikely that Russian intelligence was the source of the emails. I just don't see anything new here to conclusively prove that assertion.
Maybe I'm being too picky about what constitutes concrete evidence.
At some point you need to trust the government to make the right decisions. Or to at least not lie about these things. If Facebook was hacked and lost data, would we expect Facebook to release a detailed report showing the evidence of hacking? I understand the desire to see evidence, but we have to trust our elected officials to make the right decisions and our intelligence agencies be honest about what they've discovered. If we demand consensus by the American anytime an issue like this comes up, nothing will ever happen.
And yet what you're "doing" is letting your anti-establishment tendencies do Putin's work for him.
This is starting to look a lot like some relationship drama, where the mother-in-law constantly sabotages the marriage with tiny annoyances and seeding doubt. "Did you leave the milk carton outside the fridge?". "No, but didn't your husband have coffee earlier?".
> Why do I "need" to trust the government to make the right decisions?
This might be the fundamental question. What form of voluntary governance (i.e., not authoritarianism) does not require trust by the governed in the government?
Respectfully, I don't think I'm committing any of those fallacies.
-The idea that some information is classified and some isn't is silly. There's just information that you're willing to divulge and information you're unwilling to divulge. I see no reason to assume evidence that would implicate Russia must be so sensitive that the government would never divulge it.
-I'm not moving any goalposts. There's only one piece of this puzzle I'm interested in: evidence linking Russia to the leaked emails. I accept that Russia has a broad propaganda network that often attempts to undermine US interests. I don't see that as an extraordinary thing.
-See above. I accept the astonishing amount of propaganda. But the emails are the key piece here, and there's no concrete information in this report.
I don't dismiss the DNI's claims, I just don't see the extraordinary evidence generally required for extraordinary claims.
> I see no reason to assume evidence that would implicate Russia must be so sensitive that the government would never divulge it.
This is the source and methods (or what I like to call S&M) debate.
Let's say your nephew wants to come out as gay. He tells only his mother. His mother tells you. Now you write on Facebook, "I just learned my nephew is gay. He will always be my nephew and I love him and his courage." Now your nephew knows his mom (your sister) blabbed.
This could have a ton of effects on your intelligence gathering network. For example, your sister might not want to tell you anything anymore. You just lost a source. Your nephew, feeling betrayed, might cut his mother out of his life. You just burned a source.
These are situations where even revealing judgments could lose sources. In situations where there are multiple sources, it becomes somewhat more difficult for your target to identify the leak, which gives you a larger safety margin.
So the question the intelligence agencies and the administration had to answer with this report is, "Are these judgments worth burning sources? If we reveal specific pieces of evidence, which are highly traceable to the original leak, can those sources be burned?"
Clearly, they made a call that you found unsatisfactory. But I hope you understand why they made that call.
Thanks for your reply - I'm not accusing you of malice.
I would love to see more of their raw data. I research social media and I have specifically investigated 2016 US election memes, so those data are extremely interesting to me. However, the DNI PDF states:
> This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment; its conclusions are identical to those in the highly classified assessment but this version does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the influence campaign.
So, irrespective of yours or my assessment of what the raw evidence might be like, DNI already stated that they think it's too sensitive. This probably isn't going to change for 10-20 years (which is a common lifespan for classified information) so you've just got to figure out a way to analyze this situation without the specific evidence used to create this report. It doesn't mean there isn't other evidence out there. Like I said: I research social media and I have my own evidence stack. Some of it is here:
I am considering the events of the past 2 months as "moving the goalposts" - and this isn't a personal thing against you or any individual. Originally, we had statements from certain officials, but that wasn't enough. Then we had consensus among intelligence agencies, but again that's not enough. Then we had a statement from the president, but that's not enough. Now we have this report and it's still not enough.
On the straw man, the emails are not the entirety of the DNI argument, so reducing it to that creates the straw man, and dismissing the whole report on the basis of the emails is just how the straw man fallacy works, in practice. I am focused on social media, but you're focused on emails. It's okay to care more about one thing than another, but it is a logical fallacy to dismiss the rest of the report because you're not satisfied with the part you care about.
Lastly, I don't think it's extraordinary at all to claim that Russian intelligence managed hundreds of sock puppet accounts across Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Imgur, Twitter, and other platforms. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that the opposite was true. In fact, none of the claims in the report are extraordinary; it's all extremely plausible.
My (sortof expert) opinion is that I think the DNI social media conclusions are plausible.
I'm totally with you with regard to your general "moving the goalposts" criticism.
I know people who first said: "This is a CIA hitjob. The FBI and the NSA will never sign on to these accusations." Of course, now that the NSA has expressed "moderate" confidence and the CIA and FBI have expressed "high confidence" those people have mysteriously found other problems with this narrative.
I don't dismiss this report at all. It has solidified my belief in general Russian meddling (paid trolls, RT, propaganda, etc). But, in my opinion, that is old news (in fact, "Annex A" of the report is from 2012). My favorite piece of Russian propaganda is this "satellite photo" of a Ukrainian fighter firing a missile at MH17: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/11/14/1415993353768_wps_...
So, to me, the fact that Russian propaganda is constantly working to discredit the United States isn't an extraordinary thing: I take it for granted.
What seems extraordinary to me is the allegation that Russian intelligence leaked the emails through wikileaks and dcleaks. I don't think that claim is implausible and I haven't dismissed it, but I was hoping to see more evidence, that's all.
Hopefully I'll be alive in 20 years so when this stuff gets declassified I'll know if I was right or wrong!
> Lastly, I don't think it's extraordinary at all to claim that Russian intelligence managed hundreds of sock puppet accounts across Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Imgur, Twitter, and other platforms. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that the opposite was true. In fact, none of the claims in the report are extraordinary; it's all extremely plausible.
Perfectly agreed. The United States and China also have these sock puppets, as do other countries. I think this is one of the reasons why people get into a tiffy whenever I insist on working with the facts and not US propaganda and rumors. Get accused of being a shill for Greece, Turkey, Russia, China, etc all the time.
Social media is swarming with sockpuppets, and now the game has escalated more, with H.R. 5181 passing in NDAA 2017, the Center for Global Engagement will be empowered to experiment with the techniques for social media propaganda developed by DARPA's SMISC program.
Don't know if the clock is moving toward midnight, or if just reddit is going to choke on itself.
Can you share what you thought was the sum of the information about manipulation of US social media platforms? I read most of the report (stopped halfway through the irrelevant RT section), and missed social media.
> Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign.
> some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015
As the first couple of pages claim, the "real evidence" might not be shared here due to risking exposing methods, as is the usual claim. At this point, given Trump's recent statements against the intelligence community, I think they should say "fuck it" and just publish it already. Trump doesn't seem like he'll be a friend of the intelligence community unless they publish things he likes. To quote Trump, "what do you have to lose?"
Of course, they could not have it and thus just be lying.
I would say that you are - I'm interested in more than just the hack, but in how that information was drip-fed back to the public. I have no problem with RT putting out propaganda as such(it's not like we don't do so) but if there's a pattern of coordination between RT, WL and other actors then examining the control linkages is legitimate.
Of course I can only speculate on the juiciness (or not) of the details in the redacted half. The US government reflexively overclassifies things (perhaps to provide the enemy with an excess of possible targets) but I imagine some of it must be hyper-sensitive.
Given how much evidence could be classified the problem here is a lot of it is going to rely on how much you trust the National Security Complex, and given that the political party affected is the one whose base is more suspicious of the Nat Sec that isn't necessarily an easy case. I'm inclined to trust them in this case since it goes along with other evidence that we've seen, it makes sense with how Putin does things, and I don't see why they would have a reason to pick a fight with Trump right now by making something up.
Even if the "hack" were the Russians, it seems the hack broke through pathetic email security measures. The security seems basically so bad that it's likely that just about anybody could have been monitoring the emails at well below the level of sophisticated state-sponsored hackers.
We should be having a discussion about how the desires of the intelligence community to spy have undercut the improvement of general security for personal data in the US. The email infrastructure of the Democratic campaign, seems more or less like a slightly below average standard email infrastructure used by most of the US (that's another shocking issue, but a side discussion at this point too).
The main issues IMHO are a) the intelligence community spying capability did not prevent this hack - why not, and b) we should consider that spying infrastructure requests and the legal implications of them holds back development of better security. Better general security for most private email & communications for citizens and businesses in the US would have been more effective in preventing the issue than spying capability.
It's well established that they got into Podesta's email when he fell for their spear-fishing and submitted his password on a fake site.
But blaming the victim is just doing the aggressor's work. If russian agents broke into a power plant and blew it up, would you be writing about the need to fix the nation's fences.
I also disagree with your assessment that the DNC's security was "slightly below standards". They could have easily enabled two-factor authentication which would have foiled these hacking attempts – and the US agencies' agenda doesn't play into this story at all.
Oh, misunderstanding. I was arguing that they were not just slightly below standard but grossly negligent, and therefore far away from being impacted by any attempts to discourage security by the 3-letter agencies.
I have a lot of respect for GG and have been reading him for years. But he's by no means an expert on these sorts of issues at all and I don't see why his opinion on who hacked the DNC is especially relevant.
You can always tell those who have little to contribute when they fall back on the "there is no evidence" line. It's a declassified report. The sources and methods that the US intelligence community uses is never going to be made public nor does anyone reasonably expect it to be.
So instead of complaining about evidence. Assume that the Obama administration is not trying to make their last big story before leaving a lie and refute the motives etc.
Show me evidence of your claims suddenly isn't a reasonable ask in the face of an accusation? Don't complain about lack-of-evidence, just put your trust blindly in someone. This argument feels quite weak.
The problem is that we have no reason to trust politicians and the intelligence community, which have proven to be some of the most dishonest and mischievous people on the planet. This is especially true with the NSA and CIA, which have both had representatives lie under oath, commit illegal activities, and be directly involved in the overthrow of dozens of democratically elected governments.
Why should we trust their report if they aren't going to show us the evidence? Why should we trust them at all for that matter?
Not sure why people keep listening to this guy. He spouts hyperbolic nonsense.
To equate organisations like the New York Times and the Washington Post with the Fake News scandals like Pizza Gate is beyond the pale. And sure they make mistakes as all people do but they aren't intentionally doing so which is why Greenwald constantly assumes.
And not sure why you posted this now because nothing in that article refutes the claims that Russia was involved in the US election.
I think a legitimate public service was served by the release of Podesta and DNC emails. We wouldn't have known about DNC's stacking the decks against Sanders otherwise. I wonder why all the liberal outrage hardly address this point.
Yeah I can't help but think that were the Republicans "hacked" (sigh) instead of (or maybe in addition to) the Democrats, then the word we'd be hearing is "whistle blower". I look at the Podesta dump as being of value as that of what a whistle blower provides: insight that an institution is operating in a manner wholly at odds with its publicly stated purpose. It has struck me how the outrage has been focused so much on the source and not the substance.
I bet Trump supporters are happy nothing bad about Trump was leaked and no foreign news networks ran ant hit pieces on Trump. He probably would have lost if that had happen.
/s
Besides for the illegal action of actually doing the hack, I don't see how this is any different than all the news stories attacking Trump.
Yes, that's the common criticism - that "only one party was hit by leaks".
But to that I say - so what? Would Democrats have been just as outraged if it was the Republicans having their info leaked, like say Trump's tax returns?
I remember the Democrats were pretty damn gleeful about Romney's "47 percent" comment, which was recorded without his permission and then leaked to the press. Why didn't Democrats cry that "HEY! We should see Obama's secret recordings, too! It's not fair that only Romney's recordings are being leaked."
Nobody did that, and nobody would've done that if it had happened to Trump, because in reality the reaction is extremely partisan, and has nothing or very little to do with the principle of "influencing the election".
Also, the Democrats have been pissed off about Trump not releasing his tax returns because they thought that by hiding that he was essentially manipulating the public.
I completely agree with that, but now let's turn back to Clinton and admit that Clinton hiding the fact that her team, the DNC, and the media colluded to help her win, was also a manipulation of the public. Something the public should have learned about.
Which party gets the most leaks has little to do with anything, and I also see very few people blame the DNC for having such poor security in the first place.
And I don't follow much right-wing media, perhaps they did cover this a lot, but as far as "mainstream media" goes, I remember they were trying very hard not to cover what was in the emails, and instead kept trying to make the conversation about "Russians hacking the DNC and helping Trump".
So I'm not even sure if the emails influenced the election that much. And most of Sanders' supporters who were engaged in the primary were already aware of the collusion between the DNC and Clinton long before any of the leaks, because it was obvious. Why do you think there were so many protests at the DNC (which were also not covered that well in the media) that embarrassed Democrats?
Would you think the same if Trump were to be financially ruined and brought down by creditor suits if the confidential terms of his loans were revealed, and his creditors found out he was in violation of loan terms, or getting lower interest rates than his loan terms would otherwise call for. That's one way I can see intelligence services jamming up Trump.
Because they're not liberals - they are sociopaths. Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman and Julian Assange and the Real News Network are real liberals and they are outraged by the DNC and calling out this new McCarthyism for what it is.
So the extent of it is, Putin told Russia Today to bias their news in favour of Trump? I don't care for Trump (or US politics, for that matter), but this has gone so far into the realm of pettiness I cannot even believe what I am reading.
> Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.”
I think social media have been undermined for some time, although previously it was aggressive advertisers who were the culprits. "Astroturfing" is an old word by now. During the US election, this was simply taken to another level, and in a way that had a measurable impact on people's beliefs.
Also, it's a well known fact Clinton paid "trolls" to change opinions online.
Isn't that "influencing the election" as well? The U.S. needs so many new laws and changes to make its elections more fair (including media regulations during electoral campaigns), I wouldn't even know where to start.
Look up Clinton and Correct The Record or CTR. There's a lot of noise out there but you can find references where several million dollars was paid for an internet misinformation campaign.
"Correct the Record: The Clinton-supporting super PAC, Correct the Record, asserts it can coordinate directly with the Clinton campaign as long as it doesn’t run paid advertising. Clinton’s attorneys are relying on a narrow 2006 FEC regulation that declared that content posted online for free, such as blogs written by unpaid volunteers, is off limits from regulation. But Correct the Record is not a volunteer blogging operation. It is a $6 million professional opposition research, surrogate training and messaging operation staffed with paid professional employees and operating out of a high-rise Washington, D.C. office building."
>Hardly proof that CTR did not systematically downvote pro-trump and promote pro-hillary content and comments.
It is claimed by many that CTR publicly claimed their work was to pay for anonymous comments online. This impression has spread far and wide. There is no such claim or statement by the PAC -- that is clearly false.
There's a difference between a domestic operation and an operation conducted by a foreign power. The principle is what level of outside interference will the US accept.
This is the rabbit hole that so many statist authoritarians want to descend. That will be really bad for the nation. The framers had it right when they said "Congress shall make no law..."
A lot of this report is about RT - Russia Today - the English language TV channel run by the Russian government.
How is this different than "Voice of America" or the BBC for that matter; those media give a lot of space to political opposition in places like China or Russia.
Sure RT have an opinion and a bias wrt. US politics; but it is not like the people watching would be in any doubt that this channel was sponsered by Russia and had "an Russian perspective" on things.
No, it's not; if you read the Key Judgements section, the part about the "state-run propaganda machine" is the last and least of the four major areas of influence it cites.
those media give a lot of space to political opposition in places like China or Russia.
Political opposition is suppressed or effectively banned in those countries so its activities are newsworthy. RT does not report on the Russian opposition much or engage in direct criticism of the regime. It's qualitatively different from the BBC and even the VOA.
I watch RT regularly; I watched it last night while preparing and cleaning up after supper. I take their Syria and Ukraine reporting as performance art, but most of the rest seems not only reasonable but actually interesting. So much of USA corporate media reporting is so mired in cliche, nostalgia, and mythology that it is very unlikely to stimulate the mind. I've tried watching China's CCTV, but frankly it's pretty boring. Too much human-interest: it's as if everything they know about English news they learned during the Olympics.
RT or BBC publishing videos is one thing, but saturating youtube comments and state sponsored "viral" twitter content is quite another. To me the difference is in gaming the secondary signals of legitimacy.
RT hides its Russian government ties. See the section in the report about getting around the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Russia or China do not allow US or western press operations, government-funded or otherwise, as much freedom of action in their countries as the US allows RT. It simply isn't a level playing field.
page 21.
It was definitely eye opening to see the quantitative graphs showing how much Russian funded RT media's youtube views stacked up vs the major new media. RT's subscriber base was similar and it's social media footprint was much smaller but it's views were so much higher.
Were they gaming Youtube?
Did the major news media decide not to engage and invest in their youtube content?
Red Herring?
There's quite a few Russian accounts on Youtube with suspicious views counts. Like the guy who cuts things in half with his glowing knife. Lots of Russian spam and click-bait content too. Type in something about Ukraine, Russia or NATO and scroll through all the Russian 'WW3 Illuminati' garbage that comes up.
"ProKremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP, on election night in anticipation of Secretary Clinton’s victory,judging from their social media activity."
After watching HyperNormalization 2016, what the Russians probably sook to accomplish has already been, a large fraction of the population is already doubtful of the system as we have it.
My go-to is wikipedia, which isn't perfect, but when you want to answer something like "How much foreign cyber-warfare has America participated in?" and get just the raw data you can trust it to not have an agenda.
My feelings on this issue are complex. Though I had previously been vocally skeptical about attributing hacking to Russia, I'm a little more middle-of-the-road now.
It's inconsistent for a foreign government expressing opinion on American politics to be called "propaganda" while we allow corporations to spend any amount of money trying to change peoples opinions via super-pacs. The line between propaganda and political dissent is very blurry.
I suppose I'd say Russia didn't do anything "wrong," (after all Americans foreign interventions are much more heavy-handed than anything described here), but I do now think it's likely Russia did want Trump to win and that Russia would potentially use more advanced meddling techniques if it thought it could get away with it.
Our media stations are propaganda outlets as well. I get my 'news' from many different propaganda sources because I've found that it is very easy to tell when they are outright lying so I can just ignore that, but typically they say something that is close to the truth. The thing is that there is so much truth out there so each propaganda outlet will tell some portion of the truth that fits their narrative the best. If you grab all these different portions of the truth you can begin to piece it all together and have the biggest piece of the truth possible.
If you listen to interviews with any politicians or intelligence officials it's pretty obvious that they are dancing around the truth and never answering any questions. This is a partisan hit job.
And I can't tell if the DNC is supposed to be a private or government entity. If you complain that they cheated and screwed over Bernie, people respond with "well it's a private organization, they can do what they want". But now it's a matter of "election rigging" and "national security" that they've supposedly been hacked.
And if the information released was true, who cares if it was a hack? If the information is true, which it appears to be, then it was a service to our country that it was released.
Where I sit with the entire thing is that this is a stark lesson in why security is important, and how effective phishing scams are.
However, once that information is out there, and verifiable through means like DKIM, we should absolutely scrutinize its content, and every voter should follow reports closely.
If Americans can agree on anything, let it be that foreign parties must stay out of our elections. Of course Russia said untrue things. They ran active disinformation campaigns in addition to the email leaks (read the "Key Judgements" section...). Didn't help that voters were ready to eat it up during a domestic battle between warring media corporations. The chaos and confusion stirred by this election will take years if not decades to settle.
If by staying out of our elections you mean stop participating in political speech then I don't see how that is going to happen or why it should happen.
This seems not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. There is a huge difference between a propaganda outlet and an imperfectly comprehensive or objective news source.
Because you refuse to distinguish between an attack on your mind and a good-faith but imperfect attempt to share genuine information. These are two very different things, and treating one as the other damages your ability to reason about the information you get from that source. More insidiously, it is likely to lead you to treat everything as somewhere more towards the middle of the two than it actually is (e.g. "everything is propaganda, but it contains some truth I can glean and some parts I need to reject"), thus offering an "in" for the dedicated attacker while refusing some good information that could help you course-correct.
More broadly, it serves to normalize propaganda by treating a deliberate attempt to trick us as if it were the same thing as an honest but maybe imperfect attempt at sharing information.
"We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US
presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their
election processes."
Well, honestly, it's not that hard to avoid voting for Kremlin-backed candidates. Just avoid voting for authoritarian right-wing nationalists or supposedly far-left "radicals" who spurn international cooperation and cozy up to Russia, and you're set.
Looking at the charts in the report it's impressive and worrying at the same time to see that the media influence of RT is in the same league as BBC, despite nobody heard about RT just a few years ago, while BBC has existed for decades.
The report and its unredacted sources will be subject to Congressional oversight from a Republican dominated congress. So far they have been supportive of its contents.
1. "DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying."
2. "When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency."
3. "Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency."
4. "Moscow also saw the election of Presidentelect
Trump as a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). "
5. "Pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP, on election night in anticipation of Secretary Clinton’s victory, judging from their social media activity."
-- Full stop -- Do they mean Americans who are "Pro-Kremlin" like many progressives and conservatives that are anti-war? Or do they mean paid/covert bloggers? It seems to me they mean Americans? In which case how is that in the report at all?
6. "Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries."
7. "RT and Sputnik—another government-funded outlet producing pro-Kremlin radio and online content in a variety of languages for international audiences—consistently cast president-elect Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional US media outlets that they claimed were subservient to a corrupt political establishment. "
-- I actually believe this to be true. I absolutely hate Trump and think he's a despicable man and unfit for the presidency. However, I thought that the media coverage of him was absolutely brutally skewed and over-the-top clearly politically aligned. Anyway I saw this kind of reporting across international media outlets and friends and family and other news media outlets in the US said the same thing.
8. "RT America TV, a Kremlin-financed channel operated from within the United States, has substantially expanded its repertoire of programming that highlights criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties."
-- I think these speak to me because American media will not cover civil rights abuses and curtailments in a non-apologetic fashion. It seems typical to me that state-propaganda criticizes their adversaries' civil liberty abuses, as the US does to Russia and China and as Russia and China do to the US.
The whole section on RT seemed to be completely off topic and distractionary. I only got half way through it.
I did not see any assessment that Podesta's emails were hacked by Russia or shared by Russia. I was hoping to see that because people keep grouping it into the DNC hacks.
Dear lord, either Hacker News has a surprisingly large Trump-supporting crowd or it's part of the Russian social media campaign.
Keep sowing that uncertainty and doubt on a report that is backed by classified information. Do you want them to reveal the names and locations of all our spies and detail our sigint methods? The end of the report says what "High Confidence" means.
But HN has a liberal bias if anything; however I do believe that most people are a bit disappointed with this report. Maybe having hoped that it would clearly provide evidence that the big email collections WikiLeaks had from the democrats were provided by Russian state actors.
Instead we get half a report on RT which anyone could have written.
I didn't want to say this or bring this up, but I've noticed from a while that when you click on some of the accounts, you'll note a number of them are less than two years old, and have no description. Some are even less than half a year old, yet have >1000 points, and no shares, just that from comment upvotes.
I have a throwaway as the anonymous accounts on HN seem to be called that I use for example, not for trolling of course because I care about this community, but I hardly ever use it and it has probably less than 50 points due to that. How can a 150 day account accrue 10 points per day?
Just because "argument from authority" was put on some internet list of biases doesn't mean it can not, at times, serve as a useful heuristic.
There's also a difference between "argument from authority" and "argument from a position of known knowledge". Example: radio ad says "Buy milk! We need milk". Will you give it the same credence as your spouse saying the same thing?
"the government" is made up of a shit ton of people. I don't think there's some grand conspiracy involving the intelligence agencies, the Obama administration, and even Republican Senators to make all this up.
You're being intellectually dishonest. You have no way of knowing about correct reports that the intelligence community provides the military on a constant basis.
Intellectually dishonest? You're the one who started this comment chain with the false dichotomy that anyone asking for concrete evidence is either a Russian shill or Trump supporter.
Right, the other 90% of the world saw how ridiculous the election was with all its focus on email scandals and fake news, then can read Trump's Tweets and see how even further disconnected from reality the US government is about to be.
FBI concluded with high confidence that north korea was behind sony hacks. Anyone who doesn't trust these clowns is not automatically a 'trump supporter'.
Are you suggesting that if one assessment is inaccurate then we can never trust them again? It's undoubtedly not even the same sources or investigators as this report.
>Russia conducted an "influence campaign" at least from the time that the race was only between Clinton and Trump, yet we only find out about it after the upset?
Other than the time the US government pointed the finger at Russia a month before the election?[1] It came up numerous times in the debates. Newsweek had an article about Russia's motives a few days before the election[2].
This is not something that is brand new, why are you acting like it is?
So by definition "full supporting information, including specific intelligence on key elements of the influence campaign" doesn't support the conclusions.[1]
That was the Bush administration that messed with the evidence there and wildly overstated their case. If you think that Obama is doing something similar here then present some evidence.
It's them that have the burden of proof, now as then. It's very difficult to prove that evidence that hasn't been offered is false.
edit: When it came to WMD, most people who were paying attention believed based on the evidence and the inspectors that there wasn't any; but I assumed that the administration had more evidence for the endless detail and droning on than a single angry defector looking for German citizenship. I was wrong.
