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Official Russian Election Interference Thread

I don't want to steal the thunder of the owner of the inevitable pour tag....
 
Read a little bit of this thread. I'm a little bit confused as to why people are along the lines of "well Dems never thought Russia was a big issue until now!".

I'm sorry, has there ever been a situation where Russia hacked into our internal servers and, at best, wanted to create turmoil during our election, or, at worst, directly influenced the outcome of a Presidential election? That's a pretty big event to cause somebody who has never been concerned before to say "uhhh maybe we should look into this and be concerned."
 
It seems this whole thing could be validated if they would release some form of proof that the RNC servers were hacked. The claim is that Russia hacked both parties and deliberately chose to only use the info gleaned from Dem sources to affect the election. Pubs are saying their servers were never hacked, thus the claim that Russia had all the info to selectively choose from is bunk.

Seems the only fact that hasnt been verified yet is the GOP servers being hacked. Whomever is the point for this for the IC should focus on clearly laying out that case for us.

Why does it matter whether the Russians selectively hacked the DNC and not the RNC or hacked both and only released the DNC?
 
Why does it matter whether the Russians selectively hacked the DNC and not the RNC or hacked both and only released the DNC?

It's relevant as to whether or not they were directly trying to influence the election.
 
Why does it matter whether the Russians selectively hacked the DNC and not the RNC or hacked both and only released the DNC?

Playing Devils Advocate here...

Because the claim that the Russians selectively released only the bad stuff on Hillary and not abything from the Pub side is predicated on the claim that they had access to information from both sides. If they didnt actually hack the Russian server, then it changes that calculus.

At the same time a case could be made that NOT hacking the Republican server would be a de facto backing of Trump over Hillary, but thats not what is being claimed.
 
McConnell supports an investigation. He has access to classified info. Care to reevaluate BSF?
 
It can't be the complete opposite situation because the CIA has become politicized under Obama.

Bolton thinks it could be a false flag and his rationale is very compelling. You basically have the same situation with the current revelations about DNC/RNC servers and Hillary's servers. One was deemed not direct Russian involvement, just hackers with possible Russian connections. The intel people said a direct attack by the government would not be detectable. Here you have a hacker with Russian connections..and lots of finger prints....and now it's 180° the other way??? One or the other, and either scenario would have cratered Hillary.

But if the Russians are trying to destabilize the west, what would they now do? Push the idea they were hacking to get Trump elected.

Bolton is an extremist neocon. He's batshit crazy.
 
I can't keep up with what the federal government is biased towards.

First, Comey and FBI are biased towards Clinton because of the e-mails.
Then they are biased in favor of Trump because of the e-mails (new information).
Initially nobody cared about Russia because of the information out there.
Now the CIA is partisan because they have information that tells us we should perhaps look into hacking of an election.

Hell, maybe they are just doing their job (albeit extremely poorly), and don't from a macro level give a damn about Democrats and Republicans. So many tin-foil hat folks out there thinking the government is out to get them.
 
It's relevant as to whether or not they were directly trying to influence the election.

How is one different than the other in this respect?

If the idea is the RNC was working with the Russians at all, then it's likely they weren't hacked.
 
The Weinergate Comy problem is that it was ten days before the election and he didn't have a shred of evidence. It was totally unprecedented and 100% partisan.
 
How is one different than the other in this respect?

If the idea is the RNC was working with the Russians at all, then it's likely they weren't hacked.

Maybe I'm just not well versed on this, but is anybody claiming that the RNC was working with the Russians?

I thought it was just that the Russians wanted to get Trump elected, so they were doing so on their own volition. Does anybody actually think Manafort or Lewandowski were in cahoots with the Kremlin/hacker?
 
tl;dr version is either BSF got duped by the Russians and can't handle the truth or he's actually more Anti-American than we all thought

For most of the cybersecurity and US intelligence community, the Russian government’s ties to this year’s electoral hacks are no longer up for debate. Security firms Crowdstrike, Mandiant and Fidelis all analyzed evidence of the DNC hack and agreed it was the work of two Russian intelligence agency hacking teams, using some of the same tools and techniques as earlier breaches by those groups. Despite the pseudonymous claims of a supposedly Romanian hacker taking solo credit, the files he or she leaked contained Russian-language formatting error messages. And in October, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence jointly issued a statement pinning the hacks on the Kremlin, writing that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

In fact, some in the cybersecurity community argue that the Russian government’s involvement is so clear that a commission would be a waste of time and money. Former NSA staffer Dave Aitel, the founder of security firm Immunity, points to NSA Director Michael Rogers’ recent statement that “there shouldn’t be any doubts in anybody’s mind” that the DNC and DCCC hacks were “a conscious effort by a nation state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.” A commission, he argues, can’t offer much more certainty than that. “If you don’t trust the director of the NSA, you have a much worse problem,” says Aitel. “I don’t know anyone serious in the intelligence community who’s confused about it.”

And yet, for some, doubts linger. That starts with Trump, who has publicly ignored the statements of intelligence agencies even after receiving classified intelligence briefings. He recently told Time Magazine that the electoral hacking “could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

Trump’s not alone, though. Jeffrey Carr, a cybersecurity analyst and author of Inside Cyber Warfare, point out that DHS and ODNI attribution to Russia wasn’t backed up with public evidence He compares the agencies’ brief statements about Russia’s involvement to the more detailed claims intelligence agencies released when North Korea hacked Sony Entertainment in late 2014. Those North Korea accusations included a speech in which President Obama named Kim Jong-Un’s government as the source of the hack, and a press conference by FBI director James Comey in which he laid some of evidence of the country’s involvement. “In this case I don’t see anything like that,” Carr says.

https://www.wired.com/2016/12/russian-election-hacking-investigation/

Broadly speaking, the investigations will need to confirm three things. Firstly: Russia’s role in hacking networks of the DNC, the DCCC, Clinton campaign staffers, and others and its role in releasing their private emails. Second: its role in targeting election infrastructure and related systems. Thirdly: Russia’s role in spreading fake news and propaganda calculated to influence the American people.

Fortunately, much of the investigative work regarding the first two areas has already been done. In October, the Department of Homeland Security and Director of National Intelligence released a remarkably detailed joint statement stating that the intelligence community “is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” The statement also reported “scanning and probing of [state] election-related systems” originating in Russia, but noted that there was insufficient evidence at the time to conclude that activity was actually directed by the Russian government. And media reports have extensively documented the Russian campaign. (See, for example. Thomas Rid’s comprehensive account in Esquire.)

And since the election, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has confirmed his confidence in the intelligence community assessment of Russia’s interference during the election. In testimony before Congress, Clapper said “We gave considerable thought to diming out Russia”, and emphasized that the intelligence community had waited “until we felt we had sufficient basis for it—and we did—both from a forensic and as well as other sources of intelligence that led us to that statement.” In other words, the IC thought long and hard before making its assessment and now possesses multiple forms of proof.

It also appears that some significant evidence exists which has not yet been made public. Both during and after the election, Democrats on the congressional intelligence committees have called on President Obama to declassify evidence related to Russian election interference, in hopes of taking the case to the public. Last week, the Democratic members of the SSCI sent a terse public letter to the White House stating: “We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian government and the US election that should be declassified and released to the public. We are conveying specifics through classified channels.” While the letter was signed by Democrats, the significance should not be written off as mere partisanship. The Guardian reports “this is the first declassification request by eight senators in at least twelve years.”

https://www.lawfareblog.com/russia-may-be-done-us-election-we-arent-done-them
 
If you want an even more comprehensive account, here's an excerpt from the Thomas Rid story in Esquire.

Ultimately, more than two thousand confidential files from the DNC found their way to the public. Throughout the campaign, Guccifer maintained that he was the only person behind the hacking and leaking. "This is my personal project and I'm proud of it," he—or they—wrote in late June. But several sloppy mistakes soon revealed who was really behind the operation. The unraveling happened more quickly than anybody could have anticipated.

As soon as Guccifer's files hit the open Internet, an army of investigators—including old-school hackers, former spooks, security consultants, and journalists—descended on the hastily leaked data. Informal, self-organized groups of sleuths discussed their discoveries over encrypted messaging apps such as Signal. Many of the self-appointed analysts had never met in person, and sometimes they didn't know one another's real names, but they were united in their curiosity and outrage. The result was an unprecedented open-source counterintelligence operation: Never in history was intelligence analysis done so fast, so publicly, and by so many.

Matt Tait, a former GCHQ operator who tweets from the handle @pwnallthethings, was particularly prolific. Hours after the first Guccifer 2.0 dump, on the evening of June 15, Tait found something curious. One of the first leaked files had been modified on a computer using Russian-language settings by a user named "Feliks Dzerzhinsky." Dzerzhinsky was the founder of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police—a figure whose mythic renown was signaled by a fifteen-ton bronze statue that once stood in front of KGB headquarters. Tait tweeted an image of the document's metadata settings, which, he suggested, revealed a failure of operational security.

A second mistake had to do with the computer that had been used to control the hacking operation. Researchers found that the malicious software, or malware, used to break into the DNC was controlled by a machine that had been involved in a 2015 hack of the German parliament. German intelligence later traced the Bundestag breach to the Russian GRU, aka Fancy Bear.

There were other errors, too, including a Russian smile emoji—")))"—and emails to journalists that explicitly associated Guccifer 2.0 with DC Leaks, as the cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect pointed out. But the hackers' gravest mistake involved the emails they'd used to initiate their attack. As part of a so-called spear-phishing campaign, Fancy Bear had emailed thousands of targets around the world. The emails were designed to trick their victims into clicking a link that would install malware or send them to a fake but familiar-looking login site to harvest their passwords. The malicious links were hidden behind short URLs of the sort often used on Twitter.

To manage so many short URLs, Fancy Bear had created an automated system that used a popular link-shortening service called Bitly. The spear-phishing emails worked well—one in seven victims revealed their passwords—but the hackers forgot to set two of their Bitly accounts to "private." As a result, a cybersecurity company called SecureWorks was able to glean information about Fancy Bear's targets. Between October 2015 and May 2016, the hacking group used nine thousand links to attack about four thousand Gmail accounts, including targets in Ukraine, the Baltics, the United States, China, and Iran. Fancy Bear tried to gain access to defense ministries, embassies, and military attachés. The largest group of targets, some 40 percent, were current and former military personnel. Among the group's recent breaches were the German parliament, the Italian military, the Saudi foreign ministry, the email accounts of Philip Breedlove, Colin Powell, and John Podesta—Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman—and, of course, the DNC.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49791/russian-dnc-emails-hacked/
 
According to a CIA expert, if they say "High Confidence", it means they have a direct source and probably a person involved giving them intel.
 
Maybe I'm just not well versed on this, but is anybody claiming that the RNC was working with the Russians?

I thought it was just that the Russians wanted to get Trump elected, so they were doing so on their own volition. Does anybody actually think Manafort or Lewandowski were in cahoots with the Kremlin/hacker?

Trump has only increased his involvement with people with Russian ties. He's publicly opposing even investigating the possibility of Russian involvement in the hacks. I think it's possible there was some partnership.
 
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Has it occurred to anyone here that the real long term conflict now appears to be with China, and therefore having better relations with Russia, who also have their potential problems with China, is one way to strengthen our position with China.
 
Has it occurred to anyone here that the real long term conflict now appears to be with China, and therefore having better relations with Russia, who also have their potential problems with China, is one way to strengthen our position with China.

We were always at war with Eastasia.
 
Has it occurred to anyone here that the real long term conflict now appears to be with China, and therefore having better relations with Russia, who also have their potential problems with China, is one way to strengthen our position with China.

Sure, but at the very least we should insist that:

1. Putin isn't running the show
2. Putin isn't actively interfering with the US Election in order to install an administration that is at best Russia-friendly and at worst beholden to Russia.

Certainly no one would argue that being politically expedient friends with Russia means we shouldn't investigate Russian interference with our democracy.
 
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