> It's McCarthyism (not to mention fantastical) to declare that Russia buying a couple of Facebook ads and operating some online trolls was the reason why the election was swung.
That's just people looking for an easy answer to a complex question. It happens everywhere. Trump may or may not have won without the assistance of Russia. But that doesn't mean Russia didn't assist.
It's not McCarthyism to say that the IRA was attempting to fuel public divisions given the types of ads they were placing and events they were scheduling.
And it's not McCarthyism to say that a Russian APT hacked the DNC server and leaked those emails selectively in an attempt to sway the election towards one candidate. The evidence of this is much greater than "IP addresses in logs".
> As for the supposed hack of US power plants - that was classic McCarthyism. The evidence was made up and the target was Russia.
Frankly I don't know enough about that, you could be right there. Bad attribution happens everywhere though, it happens with China and Iran too, so "McCarthyism" doesn't seem like a useful label here.
How about Stuxnet? As far as I've seen there wasn't a ton of evidence to confirm the US was involved in that but Russia and Iran seemed happy with that explanation. The world of cyber warfare is new and we're all paranoid right now but that also doesn't mean it's all the same and it's all wrong.
For the DNC hack, the US was monitoring that activity the whole time. They warned the DNC before it even happened that those servers were being probed (the fact that the DNC failed to act is unfortunate but beside the point here) and there are multiple points of evidence linking it back to Russian-based hackers. They were pretty sloppy about registering for VPN accounts and renting servers for exfiltration.
One thing that amazes me about all of this is that people condemn US intelligence for intercepting data and mass collection but then they seem unable to believe that the agencies possessing those tools and access to internet companies would have evidence of events like this.
>That's just people looking for an easy answer to a complex question.
It was the DNC looking for a reason why losing to Trump wasn't their fault allying with neocons (e.g. Kristol) looking for reasons to kick off cold war part 2 after what happened in ukraine.
>And it's not McCarthyism to say that a Russian APT hacked the DNC server
Evidence was and still is sparse. The fact that it's "generally accepted" among the media and intelligentsia is no reason to assume it's actually true. They're the same suckers who bought the WMD lie.
>Frankly I don't know enough about that, you could be right there. Bad attribution happens everywhere
The interesting thing about that story is that it demonstrated what they wanted to be true. They obviously wanted the Russians to be behind it and quickly discovered that this time it awkwardly was easy to disprove their hypothesis.
>They were pretty sloppy about registering for VPN accounts and renting servers for exfiltration.
Bear in mind that being sloppy and deliberately leaving a misleading trail look the same and deliberately leading a misleading trail is standard opsec.
>but then they seem unable to believe that the agencies possessing those tools and access to internet companies would have evidence of events like this.
That's not the slightest bit amazing. The intelligence agencies are geared towards dragnet surveillance, not hack attribution. Just because they have access to all Snapchat nudes doesn't mean that they can attribute hack attacks.
What's amazing is that the agencies that lied consistently in the past and who always release secret evidence when it's supports their agenda can just say "yeah, so this happened trust us we have logs of a couple IPs" and technical people who know full well how easy it is to spoof an IP believe them.
> The fact that it's "generally accepted" among the media and intelligentsia is no reason to assume it's actually true. They're the same suckers who bought the WMD lie.
For what it's worth, the intel community wasn't behind the false claims of WMD in Iraq and the news basically was just being given false information from the Bush admin. The CIA was investigating it and writing reports showing that they didn't believe there was evidence of WMD. It was a small circle of Bush admin conservatives who were lying to the media about those reports. That's actually the core of the whole Valerie Plame affair [1].
That's not what's happening here. Multiple independently-managed intelligence agencies are agreeing that there's evidence Russian-based hackers infiltrated the DNC servers. A few foreign intelligence agencies have added evidence to these claims as well (Dutch intelligence, for instance [2]).
> Bear in mind that being sloppy and deliberately leaving a misleading trail look the same and deliberately leading a misleading trail is standard opsec.
Couldn't this same logic be applied to everything attributed to US intelligence? Maybe someone else fabricated the CIA Vault7 leaks, because surely the CIA is too smart to get caught. Must be opsec. And maybe Iran's nuclear program failed on its own and they blamed Stuxnet on the US and Israel? At some point this takes a turn towards conspiracy-based thinking though...
You're willing to go out of your way to believe in mass delusion or conspiracy within the media and intel communities to avoid believing that maybe Russia did hack the DNC. If the evidence is a lie then multiple independent groups are conspiring to perpetuate that lie. How big is this network of conspirators?
Or maybe Russia did hack the DNC and Assange is the only one lying about their source?
>Couldn't this same logic be applied to everything attributed to US intelligence? Maybe someone else fabricated the CIA Vault7 leaks, because surely the CIA is too smart to get caught.
No, because documentation is easier to corroborate and harder to deny (and indeed the CIA doesn't deny vault7 is theirs).
A string of IP addresses and a narrative, on the other hand... yeah that's rather more circumstantial.
If tomorrow there is a leak of Russian documents corroborating the American story that arent obviously fabricated then I'll take that as clear evidence that it was true.
>You're willing to go out of your way to believe in mass delusion or conspiracy within the media and intel communities to avoid believing that maybe Russia did hack the DNC.
I don't think that clear attribution of hacks is ever really possible and whichever narrative takes hold will generally be believed in perpetuity.
I think the intelligence agencies aren't above a little self delusion, no, and I also think the fact that it's unlikely evidence will emerge to corroborate or disprove the hypothesis (hack evidence disappears very quickly) makes self delusion, where it does exist, a little easier.
The "Russians hacked the power plant" story demonstrates what kind of blow back happens when they do drink their own kool aid (zero) and serves as a clear examppe that they are perfectly capable of self delusion when it comes to the topic of Russian hacking.
>Or maybe Russia did hack the DNC and Assange is the only one lying about their source?
Anything is possible. However, it's worth noting that the "assange is a Russian spy" story is similarly convenient to the "Russians hacked our power plants" and it similarly rests on extraordinarily weak evidence.
The spirit of McCarthy lives and it's way more pissed about the collateral murder video getting out than it is about the murdered journalist in the video. Obviously.
> If tomorrow there is a leak of Russian documents corroborating the American story that arent obviously fabricated then I'll take that as clear evidence that it was true.
You mean like what Dutch intelligence is corroborating?
That's just people looking for an easy answer to a complex question. It happens everywhere. Trump may or may not have won without the assistance of Russia. But that doesn't mean Russia didn't assist.
It's not McCarthyism to say that the IRA was attempting to fuel public divisions given the types of ads they were placing and events they were scheduling.
And it's not McCarthyism to say that a Russian APT hacked the DNC server and leaked those emails selectively in an attempt to sway the election towards one candidate. The evidence of this is much greater than "IP addresses in logs".
> As for the supposed hack of US power plants - that was classic McCarthyism. The evidence was made up and the target was Russia.
Frankly I don't know enough about that, you could be right there. Bad attribution happens everywhere though, it happens with China and Iran too, so "McCarthyism" doesn't seem like a useful label here.
How about Stuxnet? As far as I've seen there wasn't a ton of evidence to confirm the US was involved in that but Russia and Iran seemed happy with that explanation. The world of cyber warfare is new and we're all paranoid right now but that also doesn't mean it's all the same and it's all wrong.
For the DNC hack, the US was monitoring that activity the whole time. They warned the DNC before it even happened that those servers were being probed (the fact that the DNC failed to act is unfortunate but beside the point here) and there are multiple points of evidence linking it back to Russian-based hackers. They were pretty sloppy about registering for VPN accounts and renting servers for exfiltration.
One thing that amazes me about all of this is that people condemn US intelligence for intercepting data and mass collection but then they seem unable to believe that the agencies possessing those tools and access to internet companies would have evidence of events like this.