Given the seriousness of Russians hacking political parties, possibly hacking voter rolls and corrupting our election system, the very first question to the President, Spicer or anyone who’s in a position to answer, should be what specific steps is the administration taking to monitor and prevent election interference from Russia, other state actors or other groups in our outside of the US.
If you put a quarter in a slot machine and it kicked out 100 bucks would you give that slot another chance? Hell yes…it pays off. The Russians had enormous success in the scam. But it helps to have others on your team though. While Putin was working the infield Comey was working the outfield on the same Anti Clinton team. They won. As in THEY won.
How can Comey hold that smug self content above it all face in light of what he did? Time after time he’s said he acted to protect the image of the FBI. He was willing to take down the front runner in a presidential election in order to keep “good optics” on his damn organization. I think he’s full of shit. His explanations are about as believable those Trumps spews to save his sorry ass. No matter what the “optics” were or anything else for that matter Comey was going to do his thing. He was going to ding Clinton one way or the other. Enough of him.
Now that they’ve seen what they can do they’ll surely ramp it up for any future elections. Especially if the Republicans do absolutely nothing to safe guard our election procedures in hopes that they DO meddle again.
To me, an IT security amateur, it would seem that someone like the NSA or comparable group could advise any group that uses voter data or somehow lead the way.
Does anyone of our TPM groupies here have any insights?
Cyber security often gets treated as an IT problem, when in fact a robust handling will be as much (or more) a matter of business processes as it is IT. The FBI’s “detect and defuse” approach is a good one.
ETA: I’m in process of starting a cloud-security business, and this is what I plan to emphasize. Everyone’s focused on preventing hacks. That’s good, but it’s not a full solution – nor (and this is iconoclastic) should that effort be allowed to suck up so much time and energy that the even more important efforts of detecting hacks and minimizing the impacts of being hacked are neglected. These three are all needed, but the emphasis on prevention is far too high.
LOL. Before I replied to your post, I visited the NSA site to see what their mission statement said and found a case in point. Their own website links to a related (NSA-operated) domain with improper https credentialing: https://www.iad.gov/iad
Even the NSA can’t get security right.
One shouldn’t forget that the most likely long term goal of the Kremlin is to break up the United States, by continuously inflaming partisan rancour.
The “Deep State” narrative is essential to that. It undermines the legitimacy of the federal authority, and it has already embedded itself deeply into the convictions of Libertarians and Alt-Right.
Fired FBI Director James Comey on Thursday said that Russia “will be back” to interfere in future U.S. elections.
Fine with the Repubs as long as their candidate gets elected.
Here’s the thing, it doesn’t matter if Trump is a treasonous puppet installed by Russian meddling in our elections. The means justify the ends for republicans, even though there was a time when republicans would have been outraged by any Russian tampering in anything having to do with our nation. The truth is Trump could dismember and eat a live baby in front of them and his orcs would look the other way. That is the mindset we are dealing with and I don’t know how we can get passed that.
You may have noticed the news reporting about how Russian hacking and planted fake news is involved with the Qatari affair.
We are in that new world that has been predicted for some time. Cyberwar is now an established every day event. Russia has implemented cyberwar was its principal tool of managing world affairs, and uses it every day, everywhere. It is not going to stop. To say “they will be back” the next time the U.S. holds elections is understating the situation – they are here now, every day. They never went away. Russia’s hacking war against the world is on-going.
I was lucky to be at an international affairs forum in late 1988 where the recently departed Zbigniew Brezezinski was the featured speaker. He spoke of rising tensions within the Soviet bloc and among the republics of the Soviet Union itself that would ultimately lead to its breakup, and at the time I thought he was a dreamer (not our usual impression of Zbig) — but just a year or two later, it was happening. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the breakup of the USSR was a long-term strategic objective of certain American geopolitical thinkers at the time, and that they did their best to stoke internal tensions and bring it about. Nor would it surprise me if people like Putin working in counterintelligence were aware of all this, and held that resentement close to their chests all these years, seeking opportunities for revenge by using those same tactics against the US. Attempting to break up the US through partisan rancor seems like a foolish reverie from our point of view, but Putin has seen that it works and to a guy like him it’s just payback.
We know how trumpp answers questions he has no answer to or no plans to develop answers and/or solutions. “We’re working on it.” It worked during the campaign, may as well drag it out again.
I respectfully disagree. They haven’t left yet.
By sheer coincidence my daughter, with her minor in Russian history, had two professors, fluent in Russian, read Russian newspapers daily during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
She told us how stunned they were at the speed at which this was happening. They would come to class each day clearly in a state of excitement and mild shock. They knew,of course, that at least two experts had forecast the collapse of Soviet Russia, but there it was in stunning technicolor.
There’s a lesson there in how fast the "unthinkable " can happen. Trump, easily a potential dictator, was unthinkable. And Hitler was elected, not the product of a coup.
Of course wedge issue politics became a blood sport starting with Nixon and his Southern Strategy, got refined with Saint Ronnie’s campaign and is SOP with the GOP ever since.