This Isn't Going to Go Away

The Democratic Party is in double-down mode, and all its supporters are going along.

The Washington Post on Friday reported an genuinely alarming event: Russian hackers have penetrated the U.S. power system through an electrical grid in Vermont. The Post headline conveyed the seriousness of the threat.

[...]

The first sentence of the article directly linked this cyber-attack to alleged Russian hacking of the email accounts of the DNC and John Podesta – what is now routinely referred to as “Russian hacking of our election.”

  Glenn Greenwald

Which hasn't even been proven, and seems at this point unlikely.

This is an extremely serious allegation and threat. If true, we're in serious shit. And, if not true, we're still in serious shit, because it means our government is now willing to fuck with our own democracy in the way it fucks with the rest of the world. A real threat of this magnitude could allow our government to claim a state of emergency and lock us down even tighter. In fact, why not refuse to allow Trump (or whoever comes after Trump) to take office when the country is under such a threat? I'm afraid I don't have any confidence that the Democratic Party of today wouldn't stoop to such levels. With their total screw up running Hillary for president and losing, they have become completely unhinged.

[Vermont]’s Democratic Governor, Peter Shumlin, said:

Vermonters and all Americans should be both alarmed and outraged that one of the world’s leading thugs, Vladimir Putin, has been attempting to hack our electric grid, which we rely upon to support our quality-of-life, economy, health, and safety. This episode should highlight the urgent need for our federal government to vigorously pursue and put an end to this sort of Russian meddling.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy issued a statement warning: “This is beyond hackers having electronic joy rides – this is now about trying to access utilities to potentially manipulate the grid and shut it down in the middle of winter. That is a direct threat to Vermont and we do not take it lightly.”

Nor should you take it lightly. But you damned sure ought to have incontrovertible proof of what you're saying. And you don't.

The media reactions, as Alex Pfeiffer documents, were exactly what one would expect: hysterical, alarmist proclamations of Putin’s menacing evil.

What’s the problem here? It did not happen.

There was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid.” The truth was undramatic and banal. Burlington Electric, after receiving a Homeland Security notice sent to all U.S. utility companies about the malware code found in the DNC system, searched all their computers and found the code in a single laptop that was not connected to the electric grid.

Apparently, the Post did not even bother to contact the company before running its wildly sensationalistic claims, so they had to issue their own statement to the Burlington Free Press which debunked the Post’s central claim (emphasis in original): “We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop NOT connected to our organization’s grid systems.”

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[T]here is zero evidence that Russian hackers were responsible even for the implanting of this malware on this single laptop. [...] [A]s Jeffrey Carr has pointed out in the DNC hacking context, assuming that Russian-made malware must have been used by Russians is as irrational as finding a Russian-made Kalishnikov AKM rifle at a crime scene and assuming the killer must be Russian.

A lot of us would absolutely do that, too, though.

All the alarmist tough-guy statements issued by political officials who believed the Post’s claim were based on fiction.

Meaning we could be in deeper shit than we realize. And that's saying a lot.

The Post had to walk back it's first claims when called out on them, but the damage, dare I say, is done.

Moreover, nobody knows when this malware was put on this laptop, how, or by whom. But whatever else is true, the key claim – “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid” – has now been replaced by the claim that this all shows “risk to U.S. electrical grid.”

Then fix the bloody system. That risk didn't just arise yesterday.  Electronic security has been a big issue ever since the Snowden affair and we still have powerful people, agencies and systems in the dark ages when it comes to internet security.

[This] level of group-think, fear-mongering, coercive peer-pressure, and über-nationalism has not been seen since the halcyon days of 2002 and 2003.

[...]

Indeed, the more unhinged it is, the greater the benefits [for social media] are (see some of the most extreme examples here). That’s how otherwise rational people keep getting tricked into posting and re-tweeting and sharing extremely dubious stories that turn out to be false.

[...]

[A]ny denunciation or accusation toward Trump or Russia, no matter how divorced from reason or devoid of facts, generates instant praise, while any questioning of it prompts instant peer-group denunciation, or worse.

Perfectly mirroring what happened when the Bush administration painted Saddam Hussein as the mastermind behind 9/11. And look where that got us. Look where that has gotten the entire world. And that wasn't even a fight picked with a nation powerful enough to actually rain down a nuclear holocaust.

In this case, the effect is a constant ratcheting up of tensions between two nuclear-armed powers whose nuclear systems are still on hair-trigger alert and capable of catastrophic responses based on misunderstanding and misperception. Democrats and their media allies are rightly alarmed about the potential dangers of Trump’s bellicose posture toward China, but remarkably and recklessly indifferent to the dangers of what they themselves are doing here.

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Since it is so often distorted, permit me to once again to underscore my own view on the broader Russia issue: of course it is possible that Russia is responsible for these hacks, as this is perfectly consistent with (and far more mild than) what both Russia and the U.S. have done repeatedly for decades.

But given the stakes involved, along with the incentives for error and/or deceit, no rational person should be willing to embrace these accusations as Truth unless and until convincing evidence has been publicly presented for review, which most certainly has not yet happened.

If you're still buying the propaganda, please read scroll down in Greenwald's article to the end where he links several articles that counter all this dangerous red-baiting.  Or if you're keeping up with the insanity, you might bookmark and save the page for when you need to calm down your friends and neighbors.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.