US Officially Blames Russia

Here's the interview Hannity did with Assange in the Embassy, just published. Must be the ultimate nightmare for conformist stand-for-nothing pseudo-skeptics to see these two team up. I must admit even I think that's a bit on the bizarre end. Anyway, worth watching, especially the first half or so which is to the point on-topic for this thread.

 
...aaand Glenn Greenwald takes another swing at the Washington Pest and its ilk: WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived

Glenn Greenwald said:
[...] Indeed, in my 10-plus years of writing about politics on an endless number of polarizing issues – including the Snowden reporting – nothing remotely compares to the smear campaign that has been launched as a result of the work I’ve done questioning and challenging claims about Russian hacking and the threat posed by that country generally. This is being engineered not by random and fringe accounts but by the most prominent Democratic pundits with the largest media followings.

I’ve been transformed, overnight, into an early adherent of alt-right ideology, an avid fan of Breitbart, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, and – needless to say – a Kremlin operative. That’s literally the explicit script they’re now using, often with outright fabrications of what I say (see here for one particularly glaring example).

They, of course, know all of this is false. A primary focus of the last 10 years of my journalism has been a defense of the civil liberties of Muslims. I wrote an entire book on the racism and inequality inherent in the U.S. justice system. My legal career involved numerous representations of victims of racial discrimination. I was one of the first journalists to condemn the misleadingly “neutral” approach to reporting on Trump and to call for more explicit condemnations of his extremism and lies. I was one of the few to defend Jorge Ramos from widespread media attacks when he challenged Trump’s immigration extremism. Along with many others, I tried to warn Democrats that nominating a candidate as unpopular as Hillary Clinton risked a Trump victory. And as someone who is very publicly in a same-sex, inter-racial marriage – with someone just elected to public office as a socialist – I make for a very unlikely alt-right leader, to put that mildly.

The malice of this campaign is exceeded only by its blatant stupidity. Even having to dignify it with a defense is depressing, though once it becomes this widespread, one has little choice.

But this is the climate Democrats have successfully cultivated – where anyone dissenting or even expressing skepticism about their deeply self-serving Russia narrative is the target of coordinated and potent smears; where, as the Nation’s James Carden documented yesterday, skepticism is literally equated with treason. And the converse is equally true: those who disseminate claims and stories that bolster this narrative – no matter how divorced from reason and evidence it is – receive an array of benefits and rewards.

That the story ends up being completely discredited matters little. The damage is done, and the benefits received. Fake News in the narrow sense of that term is certainly something worth worrying about. But whatever one wants to call this type of behavior from the Post, it is a much greater menace given how far the reach is of the institutions that engage in it.
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[tons of links in snippet to find at link, whole long article worth reading]
 
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Sorry to the RT apologists having fun, but while I cannot say much, I will say I have had (legal) access to the full, detailed technical specs for a typical modern EU telecom, including all voice and data switching infrastructure (HW & SW). Let's just say there are many mechanisms for tracking supposedly anonymous traffic: think of the internet as sort of like a downtown urban environment with cameras you can replay at will to see what happened where and when. Whereas encryption may mask content (and not always), the routing is there to see, making senders almost as identifiable as receivers (with some diligence) by backtracking to the source ISP. (Beyond that I am guessing there are more things that can be done, but I cannot vouch for them.)

It could still be true that there is amateurism involved in the server hacking accusations, and they may have been made prematurely. So, it is still wait and see. For now, I don't think the intel is flawed, and rather than for a technical reason, I'll cite another: what it took for Comey's thoroughly Trumpist FBI to come around on the topic must have been epically convincing. As to the meme of the data release being a public service and no scandal, the other shoe that has yet to drop is if any compromising information was also found on GOP servers by the same group(s) and not released, making the entire operation transparently partisan. This may be what has some Republican Senate leaders still pushing for hearings they can control up front. Let's recall: this is the GOP of Abramoff fame and the Bureau of Indian Affairs scandal, and myriad others, including Reagan's record of 138 administration officials indicted. You know, the same, "honest" good ole boys who just tried to nix all effective oversight of their misdeeds.

As for fake news and echo chambers, political parties are in the business of power, and long ago they gave away the keys to the kingdom by allowing vast media concentration. It started with Reagan, and ended, as did proper financial oversight, during the Clinton administration. Yes, good ole Bill caved in to every major interest he could bend over for.
 
phiwum said:
Surely, this is as blatant an ad hominem as one can expect.

Mind, I'm not at all saying that Russia isn't behind the hacking. I think they are. But your post is a pretty obvious fallacy.
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The_Animus said:
Because rather than address the argument, you attacked the character of the person making it. That's what is referred to as an ad hominem fallacy.
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I said "Kim dot Com, now there is someone I can look up to"

He is after all an expert in the field of hacking and general internet skullduggery.
 
I guessed incorrectly: the Russians did not reciprocate with expulsions (as I'd predicted when the story was newer). Color me surprised, but as this has played out I can see why they chose a different course of action.
 
Darth Rotor said:
I guessed incorrectly: the Russians did not reciprocate with expulsions (as I'd predicted when the story was newer). Color me surprised, but as this has played out I can see why they chose a different course of action.
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Well yes, when they have their poodle about to occupy the White House what do a few diplomats matter?
 
President-elect Donald Trump has backed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in casting doubt on intelligence alleging Russian meddling in the US election.

Mr Assange said Russia was not the source for the site's mass leak of emails from the Democratic Party.

Mr Trump has now backed that view in a tweet. He wrote: "Assange... said Russians did not give him the info!"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38505398
 
David RP said:
I said "Kim dot Com, now there is someone I can look up to"

He is after all an expert in the field of hacking and general internet skullduggery.
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Your post came off as sarcastic, implying that you feel kim dot com is less than reputable and that is some sort of argument against the post you were responding to.

Maybe you didn't intend it that way.
 
The U.S. Government Thinks Thousands of Russian Hackers May Be Reading My Blog. They Aren’t.

I found out, after some digging, that of the 876 suspicious IP addresses that the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of National Intelligence put on the Russian cyber attacker list, at least 367 of them (roughly 42%) are either Tor exit nodes right now, or were Tor exit nodes in the last few years. I have a lot of regular readers who are Tor users, and I’m pretty sure they’re not all Russian hackers. So the quick answer to the mystery of my website apparently being attacked by nefarious IP addresses listed in the U.S. report is that the Russians, along with many thousands of others, just happened to use the Tor IP addresses that my regular readers used (and still use).
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Glenn himself had some choice words for WaPo's irresponsible behavior lately, too.

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/04...about-russia-threat-while-public-is-deceived/

I'm still in the 'plausible/likely but not proven' camp. Even for those fully convinced, here's the takeaway we can hopefully see as common ground: Fake news doesn't only mean made from whole cloth. What's that line about the best lies...?
 
Delphic Oracle said:
here's the takeaway we can hopefully see as common ground: Fake news doesn't only mean made from whole cloth. What's that line about the best lies...?
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Actually, that is exactly what fake news means. We can't have common ground when you are altering the meaning of words.
 
BobTheCoward said:
Actually, that is exactly what fake news means. We can't have common ground when you are altering the meaning of words.
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Who made you the arbiter of what "fake news" means? In my opinion, "fake news" includes the Washington Post article about Russian hacking of the electrical grid in Vermont. It is impractical to define fake news as being made up out of whole cloth anyway. Virtually nothing is made up out of whole cloth. There is always at least some grounding in common knowledge (or somewhat tailored cloth, if you will). Otherwise it would have no influence at all.
 
sunmaster14 said:
Who made you the arbiter of what "fake news" means? In my opinion, "fake news" includes the Washington Post article about Russian hacking of the electrical grid in Vermont. It is impractical to define fake news as being made up out of whole cloth anyway. Virtually nothing is made up out of whole cloth. There is always at least some grounding in common knowledge (or somewhat tailored cloth, if you will). Otherwise it would have no influence at all.
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I don't know if that one was fake news. There was a source, maybe?

Some news stories are made up of whole cloth like the Pope endorses Trump article. That was literally made up in every respect.
 
sunmaster14 said:
Who made you the arbiter of what "fake news" means? In my opinion, "fake news" includes the Washington Post article about Russian hacking of the electrical grid in Vermont. It is impractical to define fake news as being made up out of whole cloth anyway. Virtually nothing is made up out of whole cloth. There is always at least some grounding in common knowledge (or somewhat tailored cloth, if you will). Otherwise it would have no influence at all.
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How was that fake news?
 
NoahFence said:
How was that fake news?
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Sunmaster is perpetuating the right's attempt to co-opt the term "fake news" in order to deflect rational criticism about the post-factual society. In other words, don't indulge him.
 
Senate Hearings are on going as I type.

The top U.S. intelligence official told a Senate committee Thursday that he has a high level of confidence in findings that Russia was behind political hacking during the 2016 U.S. election, and called it part of a “multifaceted campaign.”
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link

I can't think of any reason for American intelligence agencies to lie about this.
 
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