(02-23-2018 05:43 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  

(02-23-2018 04:50 PM)mrbig Wrote:  For me, the object of the Russia probe is to figure out what happened and prevent Russia (or any other country) from interfering in the same way again.

Hasn't it been generally agreed (the multi-agency report said so) that Russia has been trying to influence our elections since the cold war? We do the same. Maybe not the same way, but we do it. I don't buy that there weren't dems and reps trying to hack the other side as well.

Also hasn't it been generally agreed that no votes were changed?

So the only interference is traditional espionage where people pretend to be one thing with one agenda and are actually something else with another... something WE do as much as any country... OR an email hack.

While certainly internet security is an issue, Clinton and the DNC WERE warned.
Plus it seems to me the best way to make an email hack ineffective is to not put any troubling information into an email.

I just don't see how you can stop people with different agendas from seeking to push their agendas and stop the others... whether it be neighbors or towns or countries or parties. It's almost impossible with countries because of jurisdiction and rules of law.

Has it? I haven't seen anything in the news that has pointed to Russia taking such overt measures as sending their agents to the US and actively engaging with our general populous or working from abroad overtly at the scale they did in the 2016 election. Politifact called out three specific times that Russia tried to influence elections between 1960 and 1976, and there is no evidence of them trying between 1976 and 2016 (http://www.politifact.com/north-carolina...ied-int/).

But let's just say that Russia has been doing this type of work at a similar scale for all of the past elections - they were obviously much more successful this time around and spreading propaganda and misinformation. Trump and Trump Jr. both retweeted fake news stories being pushed by @TEN_GOP, which was revealed to be a Russian account. So the investigation has been fruitful in helping us understand how Russia used social media to push out propaganda that reached millions of people, and I wonder if, without the investigation, we ever find out about these accounts.