False news and Russian hacking
According to Fox News, the President has announced that his administration will “take action” against “Russian hacking” of the Presidential election.
The tough talk from Obama came in an interview scheduled to air on National Public Radio Friday. It followed complaints of Republican lawmakers that federal authorities refuse to brief them on investigations into Russia’s role in leaking tensof thousands of damaging emails from top Clinton campaign officials.
“I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections … we need to take action,” Obama said. “And we will — at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be.”
According to Julius Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, Russia was not the source of the emails;
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange denied Thursday that hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta were stolen and passed to his organization by Russian state actors.
“Our source is not the Russian government,” Assange told “The Sean Hannity Show.”
“So in other words, let me be clear,” Hannity asked, “Russia did not give you the Podesta documents or anything from the DNC?”
“That’s correct,” Assange responded.
The media is fond of calling the election results “hacked” even though the only thing hacked was Democrat campaign emails. There is no evidence that anyone hacked the actual vote tally, but the media likes to use the term giving us that impression. No one is denying any of the content of the emails is inaccurate – you know, the part that actually turned voters against Hillary, supposedly.
Also, today, Facebook says that they’re going to begin a war against “fake news” on their website. I wonder if their standard will include these stories about a “hacked election”.
If anyone really wants to do something about how the Democrats lost the election last month, they should change the way they are portrayed in the emails, the way that they do business.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9-5fYFjrbs&w=560&h=315%5D
Matter more….
The interesting about Julian Assange and Wikileaks is that they have not been wrong in 10 years and they have been very selective about what they have been able to study, confirm and then release to keep their record clean.
That right there says something.
Their investigators and journalists have won numerous international awards such as the
Sam Adams Award
Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal and the
Walkley Awards which are the Australian equivalent of the Pulitzers
I seem to recall when they published their ‘Collateral Murder’ expose about the US military, many conservatives decried the unfair portrayal and editorial slant they provided.
They’ve also been criticized for allegedly withholding information on Russia, but I honestly don’t know the full extent or validity of that.
I know some people who follow them closely and feel there has been a considerable shift in their operational stance in recent years. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re compromised, but I find it slightly ironic that many conservatives are siding squarely with Wikileaks and against the considerable evidence that multiple private investigative firms have found linking Russia to the hacks.
Now, it’s possible that Russia hacked things, and simultaneously an insider fed up with the DNC leaked things, and Occam’s Razor would generally have you disbelieve such coincidences, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Still, it’s pretty hard to outright ignore the amount of evidence pointing towards Russia. There’s not absolute proof available to the public, but it’d take a huge amount of work to create a false flag operation of this scale.
I posted the links to three firms’ analysis the other day, but I’ll post them again if you’re interested.
Lars, do you recall back in 2011-12 when Hillary Clinton was loudly calling for US intercession in the Russian federal elections to assure that Vladimir Putin didn’t steal a victory?
Gee, ya think maybe that might have provided ol’ Vlad with some payback ideas? Why is no one in the media bringing that inconvenient little truth into the current discussion, hmm?
Again, I’m not Lars. And the question isn’t, “Does Putin want to hit back at Clinton and/or influence US policy for Russia’s benefit?” (because I’m inclined to think that’s a pretty obvious one to answer), but rather, “Did Russia hack the DNC?”.
Poetrooper, LC writes in a coherent, well-defined manner.
The Piuperdink does not. LC is not the Piuperdink.
Some things you can fake, but who would want to fake that?
Poetrooper, LC is not Lars. (smile)
“I’m quite happy to hear sensible opposition; I’m not completely convinced either, but it’s hard to dismiss this outright.”
That’s proof right there that it ain’t Lars.
Daily Caller just posted an item about Hillary admitting Putin holds a grudge against her for interfering in Russian elections.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/16/hillary-clinton-putin-hacked-democratic-groups-because-he-has-a-grudge-against-me/
Damn! If that ain’t the butthurt little snot on the playground at recess spouting off!!
Let’s also not forget that B. Hussein 0bama & Company tried to stop Benjamin Netanyahu from getting reelected with our tax dollars.
I don’t mean to sharpshoot you here, LC, but what is the “considerable evidence” that you’re referring to? If it’s merely the many reports of agencies or persons supposedly “in the know,” then it’s not evidence to me. I don’t claim to be an expert in cyber security, but I’ll wager I know a lot more about it than the reporters regurgitating this crap – at least enough to know when a “source” is bull****ing me.
Here’s a few links I posted the other day – these are leading firms in the cybersecurity business, and they investigated the hacking of the DNC. If one was reasonably sure the trail lead to Russia I’d be skeptical, but all three do.
This does not mean there is a smoking gun – there almost never is in hacking. And there are debatable issues, such as Wikileaks claiming their guy (Murray) got a ‘hand-off’ of the files, presumably from a known person who isn’t a Russian agent, but to outright dismiss the likelihood of a Russian hack after three independent firms and various intelligence agencies reach the same conclusion requires, I’d think, substantial evidence against as well.
Anyway, enough pontificating – here’s three links to read. Bear in mind that in addition to this info, presumably the IC has information they can’t share that further sheds a light on things:
https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/
https://www.threatconnect.com/blog/guccifer-2-all-roads-lead-russia/
https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat-group-4127-targets-hillary-clinton-presidential-campaign
I’m quite happy to hear sensible opposition; I’m not completely convinced either, but it’s hard to dismiss this outright.
Thank you for the links. I’m interested in seeing what they have.
I don’t think anybody dismisses the possibility of a Russian hack. But, a hack is not the same thing as a leak.
Think of it in terms of the British during WWII, when their Operation Ultra broke the German Enigma code. They certainly did not tip their hand, for the same reasons the Russians would not do so, now.
Perhaps I’ve read various other commentary wrong, but it seemed to me a lot of people were dismissing the likelihood of the DNC being hacked. Now, it’s also possible that a leak happened around the same time, and Wikileaks did get their material from a leak — but I honestly don’t know how to evaluate the probability of those two things occurring around the same time. Occam doesn’t smile kindly upon such things.
As for the Enigma, I think it’s slightly different – it would be as if the Germans suspected something had gone awry, hired multiple independent firms to investigate, and various piles of evidence pointed towards the British. If the Russians had hacked the DNC and nobody was any wiser, and thus no investigations were done, I think that would be similar. Often times that’s what hackers do, but this time they did seem to tip their hand. (Come to think of it, though, I don’t know what tipped the DNC off, and that’s worth looking into.)
I get annoyed hearing people whine about how this is why Clinton lost, too – it ignores all the countless other missteps in her campaign.
That said, there is arguably some truth to the idea that the releases cost her the election. And it’s also irrelevant. Which view you choose depends on your perspective.
The argument that Clinton lost because of the hacks is simple – the releases of DNC emails had a negative effect on her numbers, representing a small drop in people voting for her, and in an election won by a very small margin in a few key states, it’s entirely possible that without these leaks she’d have won.
The argument that this is irrelevant is that countless other things that Clinton did that have zero connection to the Russians are what lead to this being an election determined by small fluctuations rather than a considerable landslide. Calling a good number of Americans the ‘basket of deplorables’ was, I think, far more of an effect than releasing emails showing the DNC is a corrupt bunch of fools.
As for the hacking, the DNC wasn’t the only one hit – the same group apparently hit the GOP, but only released the DNC emails in bulk. A small handful of GOP emails have also been released.
My guess is that if Hillary won the election, the Russian “hacking” story would be ignored despite any so-called evidence.
I… don’t know. I mean, I can see it being less of a story because the key players -the media, and a decent chunk of the IC- are pretty shocked and appalled at the notion of a Trump Presidency. At the same time, though, it’s a pretty serious allegation and, in my opinion, should be a bipartisan thing.
If I channel some cynicism for a moment, the difference is that in this scenario (hacks help Trump), the result is the media goes berserk. In the opposite scenario (Russia hacks, helps Clinton), the media wouldn’t be as interested -and maybe would take the position some here seem to take of, “Oh, bullshit – where’s the proof?”, but Congressional Republicans would hold 47 different hearings about it over the next two years.
I just think some things, like understanding the threats we face to democratic elections, deserve to be placed above parties and politics.
“At the same time, though, it’s a pretty serious allegation and, in my opinion, should be a bipartisan thing.”
“deserve to be placed above parties and politics.”
Agree 100%, but we both know that will never happen.
I recall a recent quote by Hillary Clinton were she mocked Trump’s “rigged election” comments during the campaign.
HRC: “Some people are sore losers, and you know, we’ve just gotta keep going”
I have to note, based on your concern about election integrity, that ballot box stuffing and non-eligible voters is also a direct threat to the integrity of elections, but trying to stop such things is usually dismissed as “racist” or “suppressing the vote”.
No one seems to be arguing that requiring IDs tends to suppress minorities from buying firearms for self defense, or going to court to sue asshole slumlords. But “magic!” It stops legitimate voters, somehow….
There are numerous new reports that Detroit had 37% of precincts report wildly inflated vote tallies, compared to voters who signed in at those precincts. That is ballot-box stuffing. That disenfranchised every legitimate voter in those precincts. Chicago is legendary for such nonsense. Other big cities, ditto. But since they vote “correctly”, nothing is done.
Enough of that crap, enough blatant re-handed cheating, and people will stop trusting the system. And when that happens it will neither be an improvement, nor peaceful. We are dangerously close to such a moment, now that people are openly trying to subvert the Electoral College for Hillary.
So if the integrity of the system is threatened by yet another foreign power wanting to “influence”, why not put at least that much effort into the much greater threat of vote-cheating that is well documented?
I think the Detroit issue is interesting – most of the discussion I saw focused on the 37% of precincts that had more votes than voters,… but there were also 22% that had fewer votes than voters. Now, I’m not calling this a wash because there were 52 precincts with 5+ more votes than they should’ve had, and only 8 were 5+ less votes than they should’ve had. So then the next question is, how could this happen? Fraud, obviously, is one explanation, and quite possibly a part of it. Another is simply that people are more likely to scan the ballot a second time if there is some issue with the machine than just walk away. And, since votes are under in some places, there are obviously instances where machines are having problems. But there’s also instances where there aren’t problems, but people think there are, and scan again. I tend to think there’s going to be a positive bias to the votes being higher than voters in that case. So the overall trend isn’t too worrying to me, but I’d sure like to see the numbers on those 52 ‘high positive error’ precincts, because you can be damn sure I’d be looking for fraud there. The point, though, is that not all of these instances are fraud. I don’t have any numbers on how many voters were in each precinct that was over, but of the 248 that had more votes than they should, 77 were 1 above the expected number. And another 62 were 2 over. Now, I think I read somewhere that the national average precinct size (so this may not apply well to Detroit) is roughly 800 people – so 2 votes out of 800 is 0.25% of the precinct. What’s more likely? That one or two people sent a ballot through twice accidentally, or that someone risked all sorts of legal problems to … add one or two votes? I mean, it’s still possible that those are fraud, but it seems more like noise to me. Now, the 5+ votes? That’s where things get… Read more »
Not sure what ballot scanners are like in your AO. Here, they count ballots ingested, not rejected. I asked. Mine didn’t index the voter count until the whole thing was in the box. It did not index the count when I put it in wrong “accidentally” the first try.
I get that people do not -want- to believe in voter fraud, but it is getting increasingly obvious that it would be trivial to prevent,and one party is going all-in to prevent that check.
Is it suppressive and racist to ID a person cashing a check? Opening a bank account? Renting a home? Library card request? Enlisting? Buying beer, tobacco, or alcohol?
But is -is-, strangely, a problem when voting. And how does that work? This is based on the preposterous notion that poll workers wont notice that one is “of color” unless they look at one’s ID, ignoring … the face of the voter?
It just defies reason.
I see the most serious problem is that there were 100’s of thousands of illegal aliens registered to vote, especially in Mexifornia and every other state that gives them driver’s licenses and has motor-voter registration. And don’t tell me it never happens because of the criminal penalties. I watched a video of a retired ICE internal enforcement officer who said he regularly used the voter rolls to catch illegals, and when he asked them if they voted, most admitted they did. Also, I saw King Putt telling an illegal who was a “journalist” she needn’t worry about illegals voting because no one would be looking into it and implied it was their inherent right to vote in our elections. Plus, True the Vote has a matrix showing that the average penalty for fraudulent voting crimes is $200-$500 fine and/or a year of probation.
I would be willing to bet serious money that there were also several 100,000 fraudulent absentee ballots for the Hilldabeast, mostly for the departed. But we’ll never know because there will be no investigations of these crimes. What I do know is there is a reason one political party and their progtard fellow travelers vehemently oppose voter laws that require proof of identity and proof of citizenship to register and to vote.
That would likely be a good guess ex-OS2. After all, they knew about the ‘hacking’ well before the election but didn’t say anything because they thought Hillary was going to win. Now, in the harsh light of reality, they are pumping out as many excuses as they can to try to account for why they lost. This one is attractive to them because they think it will delegitimize the Trump Administration, so the Dems and the Lame Stream Media (but I repeat myself) as pushing it.
I think it’s quite possible the Russians did penetrate the DNC’s and Podesta’s email. But I doubt they were the first to do so. Apparently the Dems were so incompetent that Podesta’s account was penetrated by a simple phishing attack. And Hillary’s server wasn’t even protected. To believe the Russians wouldn’t have penetrated her server is beyond belief.
That said, I believe WikiLeaks when they say they didn’t get it from the Russians. More likely, it was a disgruntled Dem who leaked it to WikiLeaks as has been widely speculated.
“More likely, it was a disgruntled Dem who leaked it to WikiLeaks as has been widely speculated.”
I imagine years from now, a disgruntled 2016 Bernie supporter admits to it.
Well, there will be likely 10,000 “admitted” culprits, just like the 10,000 who shot OBL. There were probably 10,000 “survivors of Thermopylae” in Greek bars in that era.
Facebook said they are planning to use Snopes to decide what is and is not fake news. Snopes, for crying out loud.
Single point of failure. Yeah, that’ll work.
I wonder what they’ll do about fake news like blaming an attack on foreign soil on a video and arresting the poor bastard that made the video?
Or the fake news stories about anchors claiming war zone experience, or politicians facing sniper fire, stuff like that? Does anyone think that’s the news that’s going to be addressed with this effort?
Facebook is worried about fake news? 90% of Facebook is fucking idiots posting pointless memes and pictures of their meals to other fucking idiots who press “Like” to indicate they actually care what someone they haven’t seen in 30 years had for dinner….
What a colossal waste of time, social media they might as well call it stupid shit for idiots with nothing better to do with their lives than sit in front of screen and pretend to have friends.
I have my concerns about this, too, because I constantly see liberals say anything that doesn’t go their way is ‘fake news’, and conservatives doing the same.
Now, things like ‘pizzagate’, which stretch credibility without significant evidence, that I might consider ‘fake news’, but I still wish the solution wasn’t (digital) censorship, but rather people being more innately skeptical.
What was fake news was the pre-election insistence by the media that Clinton was so far ahead of Trump that his supporters might as well stay home on election day. Those bastards tried to suppress the Republican vote with fake news. THAT is interfering with an election on a far greater scale than the release of any emails. Those emails only further convinced Trump supporters that Hillary was a dishonest bitch and conversely convinced her supporters she was being unfairly targeted.
I sincerely doubt many minds were changed on either side. How many accounts have you read in the media of voters revealing their vote was changed by the information in those emails? Yeah, me neither.
Also, what WASN’T fake news was the contents of the leaked emails. How many Dems do you hear saying that the emails were all lies? The simple truth is that the content of the emails was damaging and embarrassing for the very reason that it provided a truthful inside look at how crooked and unprincipled the Democrat leadership actually is.
I heard Donna Brazile try to imply the e-mails were lies and I laughed at how utterly incompetent she is.
And I’m not disagreeing with you that the DNC is a corrupt bunch of idiots and the e-mails showed that. There’s zero question about that. If the Democrats are going to bounce back from this (and I think they will, unless they’re incredibly stupid), they should clean house.
They’ve been headed down this path for a long time and they lack the one trait that could turn them around: common sense.
Liberals are so cocksure confident that they’re smarter than we are that they have lost their ability to listen and learn so that they continue to make the same dumb mistakes without learning anything in the process.
Much of their recent behavior would seem to indicate that they ARE, in fact, incredibly stupid.
Didn’t Donna Brazile try to say that her emails were edited and changed by the Russians, the same Russians the DNC said never hacked their email?
Yeah. It’s hard to keep your stories straight when everybody is lying to try to cover up their own stupidity.
I’m disinclined to label Clinton’s ‘lead’ as fake news simply because it was what the polling showed. The polling, as we now know, was wrong.
And I’m not so sure the media was trying to influence Trump voters to stay home and thus suppress the vote. I mean, if that was their plan, it was a pretty dumb one. On the conservative side, it might result in some suppression, but for a good swath of Trump voters who distrust and dislike the ‘liberal media’ and their ‘lies’, they’d probably be more motivated to vote. And for more liberal people, the danger is greater – a Clinton landslide just means people who would support her don’t have to vote, or could vote their conscience for a third party.
All in all, I think the ‘Clinton lead’ did more to depress her own voting than Trump’s.
I didn’t say their attempt to suppress the conservative vote was effective. Nor did I say it was smart. On the contrary, like so many things the Left does, it blew up in their faces a la Wiley Coyote.
Neither side has a monopoly on the truth, or on hypocrisy to be certain.
I’ve said it before, neither candidate in this election thrilled me. The Republicans can make a massive mistake if they believe their win was a huge endorsement of Trump as opposed to a huge rejection of the status quo. The Democrats can also make a massive mistake in thinking that they ran a great candidate but were defeated by outside influences. The Democrats ran the worst female party member they had because the party bosses decided it was how it was going to be…then that worst candidate of all decided she was going to be a status quo candidate and stay the course during what is always a change election year. Biggest dumb move ever….and she still almost won…had they run any of the better female options and ran a campaign of changing the status quo to better the reality of economic recovery for the middle and lower income brackets I think they win…but yeah it wasn’t fake news…
I don’t care for Assange and don’t trust him, either. That being said, I don’t see what he’d stand to gain from lying about this.
I get that. Pretty much sums up my feelings about it. I don’t like the way Assange operates, but the guy seems to be pretty credible in his releases.
People that rely on facebook for their news and information deserve neither truth nor accuracy in what they find.
But then again, you can’t put things on the internet that aren’t true…
…and I’m a French model.
Bonjour.
Parley vouse Francie?
As for our badass metrosexual preezy, do you suppose he’ll draw a scary red line for Vlad?
The line will more than likely be blue, Putin will cross-check Barack Hussein Obama and no penalty will be called by the UN.
What action did the Administration take against the Chinese who hacked OPM and got all my SF86 information? Along with that of a few million others.
What action did the Administration take against the Assad regime in Syria when they crossed the “red line” and used chemical weapons?
Didn’t Aesop have a fable about a young boy yelling wolf?
Whats the difference between a fairy tale and a war story?
A fairy tale starts out Once upon a time… And a war story starts out This is no shit…
This all bullshit of the absolute variety. Politicians who can’t hide behind their lies are worried. That’s about the whole of it. As I’ve said and as Jonn said, our elections were overall just fine, except for some cheating by the usual suspect party. No votes were changed by Ivan. He wasn’t in the system. Wide Load lost and, with it, were lost the hopes and dreams of oBaMa and his minions to continue to transform America. Hey, Mr. President, now is a really good time to fuck off and play golf daily for the next few weeks.
Speaking of “hacks”, I am sure he will golf on vacation.
Word is that Podesta fell for a phishing scam.
“According to a New York Times report on Tuesday, it turns out that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, fell for a simple “phishing” email that instructed him to proceed to click on a button to change his Google Mail password. It was a phony email and fake website, so clicking the button actually gave the hackers access to his email.”
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/12/16/critics-say-russian-hacking-story-driven-hidden-agendas-unsupportable-claims/
And that’s not getting hacked, it’s pure stupidity on Podesta’s part.
But…but…Podesta did suck a cock at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
The difference between the dumbocraps and the GOPers is the level of arrogance on the “D” side of the fence.
Lots of it over there, piled hip deep. Add to that a whole bunch of social media dweebs who save their passwords on their eToys because they are mentally the laziest bunch of twits ever born, and you have an open door to IT crooks who not only want your bank account info, they also want your little secrets.
But that’s just my opinion.
Calling a phishing scam “hacking” is like calling a thief who takes the contents of your safe a safe-cracker when you knowingly gave him the combination.
There must be a point to Obama’s pronouncements, but I fail to see it. Seems like it would be much easier to just continue to ignore the issue. It’s only a few weeks. Maybe it is an attempt to stir the pot hoping to make Trump’s life a little more difficult? I dunno.
He wants to be relevant and be a leader in the Demonrat campaign of his progtard FSA to delegitimize Trump and his administration. Jan. 20th should be real interesting.
Wasn’t he being touted as a future Supreme Court Justice?
Yeah, that’ll work. Talk about ‘fake news’ – calling Obama a ‘constitutional scholar’ was an on-going joke foisted on us by the Lame Stream Media. You can’t use a teleprompter to write opinions.
The lazy bastard would never take that job, even if it was offered to him. That job requires thought, analysis, an inquiring mind, and writing legal opinions. Remember, 0 was an editor of the Harvard Law Journal, but never wrote anything published in it. Also, you have to justify by complex legal argument why you reached a decision, using existing case law and statutes.
I would still like to hear from anyone who says that Barack Obama taught me Con Law at Law School. Anyone,–Buehler?
We have reached the point where the only “legitimate” election goes Democrat. Heads, they win, tails, someone cheated.
They know the tide has turned against the regressive pseudo-feudalism of Leftist politics. Their desperation will increase every time something like 2016 happens. Some of them come right out and say “people voted against their own interests” or “we clearly failed to communicate our message.” In other words, the folks who voted other-than HRC are ignorant fools, or “deplorables”, which will go down in history as one of the ten dumbest things to say about voters you are trying to court.
It hasn’t helped that the Republican Party seems hard wired to be the losing party. They finally get a widely popular candidate to run, and then do everything in their power to sabotage him. (And even if you cannot stand Trump, he is widely popular in a significant swath of the population.)
And now, nitwits on both sides of the political divide are trying to wreck the system that has largely kept the transitions peaceful. They fail to se that the last time the system lost the trust of the nation, we wound up with the four bloodiest years in our history, with more casualties than each and every other war we fought, combined.
That is what these fools may bring about. Again. Only this time, the whole nation will be a battlefront. And despite the prideful chest-thumping of each side, the balance of forces is quite close, which means even greater bloodshed and longer stalemate.
Cooler heads need to prevail. For the sake of our Nation.
Addendum:
Sun Tzu advised sowing discord in the enemy camp. Now who might be encouraging the political saboteurs, hmm? The “faithless elector front” may prove to be the ultimate externally-driven “hack” of our system.
I wonder where the money is originating…..
Soros, anyone?