Willing Fools

We ought to have learned from the Judith Miller episode [writing about non-existent Iraq WMD in the New York Times]. Not only do governments lie, they won't hesitate to burn news agencies. In a desperate moment, they'll use any sucker they can find to get a point across.

I have no problem believing that Vladimir Putin tried to influence the American election. He's gangster-spook-scum of the lowest order and capable of anything. And Donald Trump, too, was swine enough during the campaign to publicly hope the Russians would disclose Hillary Clinton's emails. So a lot of this is very believable.

But we've been burned before in stories like this, to disastrous effect. Which makes it surprising we're not trying harder to avoid getting fooled again.

  Matt Taibbi @ Rolling Stone

No surprise, really. Anything that will rile us up against a perceived enemy is easy fodder for Americans being robbed and cheated by banksters, politicians and corporations, with no idea how to make it stop.

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

The Russian Hacking Question - Part Whatever, Second Addendum

Because most people who read these blog posts (all of perhaps four?) probably don't read the entire articles cited, I should have put this bit in the previous post citing Jeffrey Carr's article, because it's really the key.

If the White House had unclassified evidence that tied officials in the Russian government to the DNC attack, they would have presented it by now. The fact that they didn’t means either that the evidence doesn’t exist or that it is classified.

If it’s classified, an independent commission should review it because this entire assignment of blame against the Russian government is looking more and more like a domestic political operation run by the White House that relied heavily on questionable intelligence generated by a for-profit cybersecurity firm with a vested interest in selling “attribution-as-a-service”.

  Medium

I'm not so sure an independent commission would clear it, after having seen some of the independent commission reports we've gotten in the past.  And if the Obama administration appoints it, I'm actually quite sure.

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

The Russian Hacking Question - Part Whatever, Addendum

Here's an article by Jeffrey Carr, the cybersecurity consultant mentioned in the previous post, regarding the report that supposedly proves Russian government interference in the US election, and for which the Obama administration has just raised the stakes for another cold war with Russia - and hopefully not an actual war.

The FBI/DHS Joint Analysis Report (JAR) “Grizzly Steppe” was released yesterday as part of the White House’s response to alleged Russian government interference in the 2016 election process. It adds nothing to the call for evidence that the Russian government was responsible for hacking the DNC, the DCCC, the email accounts of Democratic party officials, or for delivering the content of those hacks to Wikileaks.

It merely listed every threat group ever reported on by a commercial cybersecurity company that is suspected of being Russian-made and lumped them under the heading of Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) without providing any supporting evidence that such a connection exists.

  Medium

Continue reading.

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

The Russian Hacking Question - Part Whatever

Donald Trump’s rebuttal (“I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the D.N.C. . . . It could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds, okay?”) earned him only derision. But a closer examination of what few facts are known about the hack suggests that Trump may have been onto something.

[...]

As [Jeffrey Carr, the CEO of cybersecurity firm Taia Global], a rare skeptic regarding the official line on the hacks, explained to me, “They’re basically saying that the Russian intelligence services are completely inept. That one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing, that they have no concern about using a free Russian email account or a Russian server that has already been known to be affiliated with cybercrime. This makes them sound like the Keystone Cops. Then, in the same breath, they’ll say how sophisticated Russia’s cyberwarfare capabilities are.”

In reality, Carr continued, “It’s almost impossible to confirm attribution in cyberspace.”

[...]

“It doesn’t take much to leave a trail of bread crumbs to whichever government you want to blame for an attack,” Carr pointed out.

[...]

As for the most serious intrusion into the democratic process — the election-system hacks — the intelligence agencies took a pass. Although many of those breaches had come from “servers operated by a Russian company,” the statement read, the United States was “not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government.”

The company in question is owned by Vladimir Fomenko, a twenty-six-year-old entrepreneur based in Siberia. In a series of indignant emails, Fomenko informed me that he merely rents out space on his servers, which are scattered throughout several countries, and that hackers have on occasion used his facilities for criminal activities “without our knowledge.” Although he has “information that undoubtedly will help the investigation,” Fomenko complained that nobody from the U.S. government had contacted him. He was upset that the FBI had “found it necessary to make a loud statement through the media” when he would have happily assisted them. Furthermore, these particular “criminals” had stiffed him $290 in rental fees.

  Harpers

A good rule of thumb:  always be skeptical of your own government.

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