RE: Trump Administration
Lad, I'm guessing that you probably think of me as somebody "on the right," and I've been saying from the beginning that of course there was hacking. The Russians hack us, the Chinese hack us, any country with a pulse hacks us--and we hack all of them. It's how the espionage game is played. Donald Trump has nothing to do with whether or not they hacked us.
I find particularly laughable this notion advanced by some that Trump invited them to hack us in a campaign speech, and that was the very night they hacked the DNC, like they did it on command from Trump. One, you don't do conspiracies out in the open like that, that's not how they work. Two, IIRC what Trump was asking them to do, jokingly, is to hack Hillary's server and find the missing emails, while what they actually hacked was the DNC. That is, if it was actually the Russians that hacked her (more on that below). Three, you don't start up a hacking operation and immediately pick that kind of fruit on demand. For them to hack the DNC, they had been working on it for a while, long predating Donald Trump's candidacy. If they in fact broke through that night, that would have been more coincidence than anything else.
I understand part of the reason why they want to create this myth that "the Russians" started hacking us only because of Donald Trump. Because if they've been hacking us for years, then OMG that means they probably did hack Hillary's server and who knows, they very well might have Hillary's missing e-mails. And obviously that's not a rumor that they want to let get started. That leads to a huge takeaway for me. The Clinton crowd has always had a cavalier attitude toward information security--from Sandy Berger stuffing classified documents into his socks (and clothes, as Tanq has pointed out) to Hillary's server, to the DNC and Podesta. They apparently ignored warnings of hacking attempts. IMO that goes directly to fitness to serve. Do we want someone who is going to be that careless with, say, the nuclear launch codes?
Another thing has ben this contention that Russia somehow wanted Trump to win. What I think Russia wanted is to sow maximum division and discord. When one candidate is 80-90% certain of winning, you do that by pushing information--true or not--that is harmful to that candidate. Only the other guy won. But the last two years have certainly achieved the Russian goal of division and discord.
I see no indication that Trump is Putin's puppet. Rolling back the sanctions can be justified on many grounds, not the least of which are that when western Europe depends so heavily on Russia for oil and gas, it's hard to have effective sanctions, and the imposition of them looked a lot like Obama's petulant child reaction to Hillary's loss. Sending USN ships into the Black Sea is not the act of a puppet, although it may have little effect, nor is encouraging western Europe to find other sources of energy to break their Russian dependence, which could have substantial effect..
Finally, you have somehow suggested that anyone who offers alternative explanations for how the information got to Wikileaks is somehow suggesting that "the Russkis" did not hack and were not hacking. Those are two different questions. There are several reasons to question how the information was actually obtained. One, the strongest evidence I've seen that it was actually "the Russkis" is the intelligence estimates by the Obama administration intel bosses. Having worked as at least a part-time intel officer for years, I know that intel estimates are best guesses, because you don't have the ways of gathering evidence that are available in criminal cases--no subpoenas, no search warrants, no depositions, no sworn statements, no criminal investigations. They can be wrong, and badly so, if even one detail gets screwed up. Remember Saddam's WMDs? And that's not to say that somebody's thumb was on the scale, that's just the inherent nature of intel that it can be so wrong. Nazis thought D-Day was going to be Calais, not Normandy. Intel might be enough to indict in some cases, but would never be enough to convince me to convict. I will be very interested in seeing what evidence Mueller and his team have been able to come up with on this point. Two, we do have a murder under very suspicious circumstances, and that's not the first time someone close to Clinton has croaked under questionable circumstances. Three, there is the download speed issue that you reference. Four, WikiLeaks themselves have stated that they didn't get the data from "the Russkis." WikiLeaks has some not inconsiderable hacking capability of their own. Five, there is the rather curious fact that the servers involved were never turned over to law enforcement. What law enforcement got was a copy prepared by what was essentially an in-house data consultant. Objectivity can reasonably be questioned. Yes, it is possible to prepare a totally faithful and reliable copy--or not. My guess is that everybody and their brother, including "the Russkis," probably hacked the DNC at some point. They probably did not want to expose to the world that they leaked like a sieve. Off what we know so far, the leak could have come from anywhere. I will be very interested to see how much Mueller's team can corroborate this point.
(This post was last modified: 04-02-2019 03:56 AM by Owl 69/70/75.)
|