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Government Security United States China Democrats Privacy Republicans Politics

US Investigating Potential Covert Russian Plan To Disrupt November Elections (washingtonpost.com) 531

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are probing what they see as a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions, intelligence and congressional officials said. The aim is to understand the scope and intent of the Russian campaign, which incorporates cyber-tools to hack systems used in the political process, enhancing Russia's ability to spread disinformation. The effort to better understand Russia's covert influence operations is being coordinated by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence. The Kremlin's intent may not be to sway the election in one direction or another, officials said, but to cause chaos and provide propaganda fodder to attack U.S. democracy-building policies around the world, particularly in the countries of the former Soviet Union. U.S. intelligence officials described the covert influence campaign here as "ambitious" and said it is also designed to counter U.S. leadership and influence in international affairs. One congressional official, who has been briefed recently on the matter, said "Russian 'active measures' or covert influence or manipulation efforts, whether it's in Eastern Europe or in the United States" are worrisome. It "seems to be a global campaign," the aide said. As a result, the issue has "moved up as a priority" for the intelligence agencies, which include the FBI and Department of Homeland Security as well as the CIA and the National Security Agency. Their comments came just before President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin talked privately about cyberspying and other matters on the sidelines of the Group of 20 talks in China.
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US Investigating Potential Covert Russian Plan To Disrupt November Elections

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  • by mrsquid0 ( 1335303 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @08:25PM (#52831753) Homepage

    They are just doing what Trump asked them to.

    “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm still amazed that so many people think he thinks Russian can hack a server that no longer exists, rather than simply revealing what Hillary left open to all the world with her illicit email server.

  • One congressional official, who has been briefed recently on the matter, said

    I first read this as "bribed". Not sure if that says more about me or my perception of members of the U.S. Congress.

    • by msauve ( 701917 )
      LOL. It's not like the US needs help in gaming their own system. One only needs to look at all the rules which give preference to a 2 party system to see that to be true. The Rs and Ds are more alike than different - they have a shared focus on growing government power and only differ on what to do with that power.
  • Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @08:33PM (#52831779)
    Unless somehow Russia manipulated who the final candidates wound up being "sowing public distrust in the upcoming election" is like bringing sand to the beach.
    • Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

      by glitch! ( 57276 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @08:46PM (#52831837)
      Agreed. From the summary:

      ... are probing what they see as a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election...
      ...
      ...enhancing Russia's ability to spread disinformation.

      No. Wrong. To sow distrust in the election is to spread information. The system is corrupt, and giving information showing the corruption is a social good. And anyone stupid enough to believe in the current system is still free to continue voting for corruption and evil. Those stupid people are still free to voice their stupid opinions. I wish they wouldn't, but they have that right.

    • Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @10:33PM (#52832301) Homepage

      There are more than two candidates. If Americans vote for one they hate anyway, they deserve what they get.

    • by Xenographic ( 557057 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @11:50PM (#52832569) Journal

      The Washington Post has a bit of bias in this, so take it with a grain of salt. When will the Washington Post start investigating themselves for holding illicit fundraisers with the DNC? Or is it Russia's fault they did this? Those damned Russians, how dare they expose our corruption!

      Source: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699 [wikileaks.org]

      Re: WaPo Party

        From:kaplanj@dnc.org
        To: RangappaA@dnc.org
        Date: 2015-09-22 13:29
        Subject: Re: WaPo Party

        Great - we were never going to list since the lawyers told us we cannot do it.

        We are waiting

        Jordan Kaplan
        National Finance Director
        Democratic National Committee
        (202) 488-5002 (o) | (312) 339-0224 (c)
        kaplanj@dnc.org

        > On Sep 22, 2015, at 11:25 AM, Rangappa, Anu wrote:
        >
        > They aren't going to give us a price per ticket and do not want their party to be listed in any package we are selling to donors. If we let them know we have donors in town who will be at the debate, we can add them to the list for the party.

    • Please don't let logic and facts stand in the way of good rhetoric, emotions and knee-jerk reactions.
  • by atrimtab ( 247656 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @08:40PM (#52831811)
    Russia would have no negative information if the US system was run honestly and transparently. It is not and I thank *ALL* disclosures that wake up the US citizenry. The info source does not matter.

    .

    The current 2 party duopoly is a corrupt manipulative mess as the US presidential candidate choices.

    .

    Both Hillary and Trump are AWFUL candidates. So a huge number of voters are stuck voting against who they think is worse. There is NO positive choice.

    • Can we now have a discussion about alternatives to "first past the post" voting? How about proportional representation, where the number of seats is directly proportional to the number (percent) of votes you get?
    • by Sarten-X ( 1102295 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @10:24PM (#52832257) Homepage

      I'm not going to debate most of your opinions, but...

      The info source does not matter.

      No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

      The source absolutely matters, especially considering the recent fad of leaking classified documents under the guise of "whistleblowing". Due to the classified nature of the information, there usually can be no official explanation beyond what is leaked. This means that the leaker has absolute editorial control over what can be discussed, and by exercising that control can manupilate public perception. Since nobody else can offer a rebuttal, the deception can last for decades.

      Consider the well-known ethics thought experiment [wikipedia.org] of a runaway railroad trolley heading towards five people tied to the track. You stand at a switch with the ability to divert the trolley to a different track, but there is one person standing on that path.

      Depending on the circumstances involved, a wide variety of ethical outcomes may be selected. Sometimes it's considered more ethical to do nothing, and remain innocent. Sometimes it's considered more ethical to kill one person rather than five, and save a net of four lives. Sometimes less-conventional solutions are proposed, like sacrificing yourself to try to stop the trolley.

      The perception of ethics also changes when more circumstances are known. If the one person on the other track is the villain who tied up the other five, he is almost universally chosen to die instead. If he's an innocent child, he's usually chosen to live in preference to five elderly people.

      The circumstances matter, and selecting which circumstances the audience does or does not know means the ethical perception of the issue can also be selected. This was seen directly in the "Collateral Murder" video, where WikiLeaks made extensive use of editing to minimize the evidence that the targets were hostile, and emphasizing the evidence that they were innocent. They also edited around the protocols used to confirm a target, and intentionally made no acknowledgement of the fog of war, letting the viewers know from the beginning that the victims were innocent.

      Even if the original footage were unclassified ("honestly and transparently", as you put it), a full understanding of events requires an expert's knowledge. As we've seen from other cases where official full reports were released, they're usually ignored because they don't agree with the earlier biased reports released to the public.

      Always consider the source for all information, and consider any bias they may have. The more outrageous the scandal, the more incentive there is to editorialize it, or even to outright fabricate the information. Even if the US government were fully transparent, it would always be possible to claim that there is some secret agency (or department, or program, or person) that isn't transparent, and exists to do all of the distasteful things the rest of the government can't do.

    • The current 2 party duopoly is a corrupt manipulative mess [...].

      The parliamentary system sounds much fairer, but is more subject to letting radicals get total control of a country.

      Both Hillary and Trump are AWFUL candidates.

      Hillary is only AWFUL if you believe all the right-wing smears. I've actually come to think more highly of her after following all the bogus scandal stories we're being fed.

      People on the left generally wish she was more liberal. Bernie's views matched mine better than hers do, but there's about a negative chance that he would get a congress that would let him pursue his agenda. (Even centri

  • by Beeftopia ( 1846720 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @08:43PM (#52831817)

    Yeah, it's the Russians, not the post Iraq war and post financial crisis revelations that have sown mistrust in institutions.

    Uh huh.

  • Paper ballots

    Problem solved

    • you're funny, paper ballots are counted by machine and even if tallied by humans are subject to fraud and error just as any other system

      • by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @09:30PM (#52832023) Journal

        you're funny, paper ballots are counted by machine and even if tallied by humans are subject to fraud and error just as any other system

        And you are desperately naïve.

        Obviously, any voting system is vulnerable to fraud if it is easily compromised by bad players. But what would you prefer? A tangible, macroscopic paper-trail of the choices that voters have made, or an ephemeral whisper of them in the ones and zeroes on the magnetic domains of a hard-drive that are written and read by computer software?

        You tell me which of these two options is more susceptible to fraud. You tell me which is harder to verify by all interested parties. You tell me which is more easily tampered with.

        I'll wait...

        • You are the ignorant naive one, rigging paper elections is a mature art in this country. The paper election is the easiest by far to rig, the methods are tried and true. Actual tech knowledge is required to rig the voting machines.

          • In areas where elections can go either way, both major parties have poll watchers to guard against known forms of rigging like ballot-box stuffing. As long as the process is monitored by opposing interested parties, undetected rigging is very difficult.

            With electronic voting, many forms of fraud are possible without any visible symptoms; all that is required is that someone with enough knowledge of the system and adequate tools comes into unmonitored possession of the system at any time of its existence - e

      • The problem is that every solution that is 99.9% perfect in testing will still be wrong up to 3 million times in a national election.
      • 1-You only need 1 (one) person to rig an election run entirely by computer. You need thousands to rig a paper election, minimum of one in every counting room. The more people who know a secret, the harder it is to keep the secret. 2-The political stability (lack of civil wars) you get from democracy is because most of the people believe they can change the system by voting instead of having to overthrow the government. Being able to trust the voting system is a basic requirement of that trust, and abilit
  • Public Service Announcement from the Obama Adminstration:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • As a result, the issue has "moved up as a priority" for the intelligence agencies, which include the FBI and Department of Homeland Security as well as the CIA and the National Security Agency.

    Good, this sort of thing is supposed to be their job. Given that they've been so focused on domestic surveillance since 9-11-01, let's see how well they do at it.

    • Good, this sort of thing is supposed to be their job. Given that they've been so focused on domestic surveillance since 9-11-01, let's see how well they do at it.

      Come on. They're way too focused on SERIOUS domestic threats like OWS and Black Lives Matter to squander resources on stopping foreign spying and misinformation campaigns inside the US. Besides, spying on innocent US citizens and coercing half wits into FBI originated terror plots is far easier than catching foreign spies. It gets them bigger headlines too.

  • by russotto ( 537200 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @09:20PM (#52831973) Journal

    ...a briefing is taking place. The director of the CIA is there, as is the head of the NSA, the National Security Counselor, and the Federal Elections Commission. The briefing, being given by an anonymous deputy

    D: "Ladies and Gentleman, we have a problem. Vladimir Putin has developed a new weapon which he plans deploy to disrupt our electoral process."

    NSA (interrupting): "He's resurrected the Tsar Bomba and he's going to set it off on election day, isn't he?

    CIA: "No, no, no, nukes are too crude even for Putin. Clearly he has a new weapon to cut off all electrical power on election day."

    NSC: "Come now, this is foolish. Certainly he has come up with a virus to cause all our voting machines to record all votes for Putin himself, as a thumb in our eye."

    D: "No, it's not any of that"

    NSA (interrupting again): "It's not that thing where he takes his shirt off again, is it?"

    D: "No, it's more horrible than that. Putin intends to tell the American public... the TRUTH"

  • demand an manual court of each vote and if you have the choice DO NOT USE THE TOUCH SCREEN TO VOTE use paper

  • ...they want their foreign policy back.

  • by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @09:26PM (#52832005)
    Smells like complete bullshit. don't get me wrong I would not put this past Russia (or the US) to engage in such practises but the US election is a world wide laughing stock at this point, If Russia had been manipulating it all along they could not have created a better 2 candidates themselves. I think more likely they are sitting back having a good old chuckle knowing that no matter who wins this election the US loses.
  • by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @09:27PM (#52832007)
    Anyone with half a brain knows HRC is corrupt as fuck, and Trump is 100% unsuited for the office. FFS, the mainstream media has done a fine job of showing 2/3 of the electorate is aware of this is a fact, they're voting against someone instead of for someone.. Most of us don't think either one should be top dawg.

    Mainstream media needs to start focusing on the alternatives, like Johnston and Stein, and quit telling us we're stuck with the two fuckwits we see on 99% of the news coverage.
    • by dbIII ( 701233 )
      But what are Johnston and Stein going to do for Rupert Murdoch?
      The mainstream media have reasons to pick winners which is why it's a threat to democracy when it is owned by so few.
  • There was some famous person from the US that was making fun of Canada for having a law against people residing in another country trying to influence Canadian elections by telling people who live in Canada how they should vote, or not vote..

    Now suddenly that it's happening to the USA as their election draws near, why the change of heart?

  • Why bother investigating? The overt stuff is bad enough.
    It's as if Trump is ticking every box to do whatever he had ever accused someone else of doing.
    The "truther" thing of 2011 was to imply that Obama was a "Manchurian Candidate" (watch the movie of that name if you haven't - good even if the science is wildly wrong) under the control of another power. So what does Trump do in 2016 - puts himself deep in debt with Russian banks tied very closely to Putin to theoretically put himself under the control of
    • Also Trump himself is already going on about how the election will be rigged - he's deliberately sowing distrust in the election.

      What's funny is that he has also said the primaries were rigged. Where does that leave his nomination?

      Frankly I don't think he's "sowing" anything - he's just saying whatever crackpot idea crosses his mind while he's talking.

  • by Phydeaux314 ( 866996 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @10:03PM (#52832151)

    The people tearing into electronic voting are going after the wrong target.

    In a state where there is only one news agency (the government one), it's possible to steal an election by ballot stuffing, fake votes, etc. In a state where there are a fairly large number of independent and semi-independent news agencies, it's pretty much impossible. If all the pre-election polling and exit polling indicates candidate A is winning by 7%, and candidate B suddenly comes out with a 5% lead despite that, everyone starts taking a *really* close look at the election mechanisms, because statistically you just don't see that kind of inaccuracy across the board.

    To steal an election in America, you have basically three options:

    1. Have a deniable asset do an unanswerable last-minute negative campaign. Think "election day mailer claiming candidate B has ties to organized crime." It doesn't need to be true, it just needs to skew the "undecided" voter long enough to go to the polls, because we don't invalidate election results after that kind of event here.

    2. Gerrymander the districts so your party has an overwhelming advantage. This is very well-described elsewhere, so I'm not going to go into the mechanics behind it, but needless to say it works and it's legal in a lot of the country.

    3. Make it harder for members of the other party to vote. Want to make it harder for the elderly to vote? Put restrictions on voting by mail, because many of them have mobility issues. Want to make it harder for the poor and working class to vote? Put specific ID requirements (driver's license is a common one since there's not a whole lot of reason to have a driver's license if you have no car) in place, or restrict polling place hours so that they won't be able to vote during work. There's also the popular "play games with the voter rolls" stunt, but we're starting to wise up to that one, so it's getting less effective.

    So there you go. Want to steal an election? Manipulate who is allowed to vote and how their vote is apportioned, not how their vote is cast.

  • I would think there's more of a likelihood of a domestic entity engaging in electoral fraud. More motive and more evidence.

  • by melted ( 227442 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @10:39PM (#52832341) Homepage

    If true (whic it is not), it's only fair. The US interferes with everyone else's elections (including Russian) all the time. Sometimes through CIA, sometimes by financing NGOs which serve its needs. This doesn't work in Russia, of course, because Putin is famous for his 146% voter turnout, but they still try.

  • As if "we the people" need any more help not trusting our government.

  • by rnturn ( 11092 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @11:05PM (#52832445)

    ... would be, uh, pretty difficult to hack into. A lot more difficult than some crappy Diebold voting machine running some Windows variant.

  • Do you believe this crap, Dascombe?

    DASCOMBE: It's not our job to believe it, Lewis. Our job is to tell the people --
  • Everyone who has the slightest idea about how electronic voting works is against it. And for good reason, as electronic voting is against many basic principles of a democratic voting process.

    It is completely pointless to cry "Russia wants to manipulate the vote!", because a lot of interested parties want to do this, and pointing at Russia (or China, or the aliens) is just about distracting attention from the problem that electronic ballots make an election easy to manipulate. And it is not that US politics

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