Pretty Clear GRU's Goal Was To Weaken a Future Clinton Presidency, Former Facebook CSO Says (zdnet.com) 345
Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt tech conference this week, former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos reflected on his time dealing with fake news and Russian intelligence interference ahead and after the 2016 US presidential election. From a report: The former Facebook security head said "it [was] pretty clear the GRU's goal was to weaken a future Hillary presidency. Putin has a [you know, it's been well-documented] like a personal antipathy towards her and believes that she was behind the protests against him in the 2012 Russian election, and so, the GRU activity was specifically focused on weakening her."
"I think it was less about actually electing Trump," Stamos added. "I find it unlikely that the Russians are better than Nate Silver at predicting elections." What kind of attacks could we expect in the near future? Per Stamos, "Throwing an election one way or another is going to be very difficult for a foreign adversary but throwing any election into chaos is totally doable right now."
"I think it was less about actually electing Trump," Stamos added. "I find it unlikely that the Russians are better than Nate Silver at predicting elections." What kind of attacks could we expect in the near future? Per Stamos, "Throwing an election one way or another is going to be very difficult for a foreign adversary but throwing any election into chaos is totally doable right now."
Read another way... (Score:5, Insightful)
Install a weak president.
Re:Read another way... (Score:5, Insightful)
Read another way... Install a weak president.
No, help to make sure a weakened president was elected. Hillary Clinton getting elected was a foregone conclusion for everyone but a statistics guy inside the Trump campaign, maybe Ann Coulter, and a few others. Every foreign government was saying it out loud, every media outlet in the US was sure of it, every academic expert was convinced of it. The Russians were taking steps to turn her taking power into something more suited to their taste: make it as awful for her as possible, making her as ineffective (at blunting Putin's aspirations) as possible. Another hint that was the case: the Russian actions altered tone, pace, and targets the moment she lost. They didn't want Trump as president, they wanted known-to-be-corrupt, feckless person like Clinton - someone whose family they had already enriched and who exhibited a taste for cashing in on Russian and similar engagement from other nasty types.
Re:Read another way... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that Trump also fits quite well into the known-to-be-corrupt, feckless category just as well as Clinton (or most other politicians for that matter) so they knew that they wouldn't have a problem dealing with Trump either. He's in real estate and has enough history prior to his foray into politics to leave them comfortable in that assessment.
My guess is that if Clinton were elected, she would similarly beleaguered at this point in her presidency. As much as you might like to argue that the media would be on her side, they also like blood in the water.
Re:Read another way... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Read another way... (Score:4, Funny)
they wanted known-to-be-corrupt, feckless person like Clinton
Hey -- HEY!! Quit throwing around bad terms at people. You're going to taint feckless much worse than it really is.
Re: Read another way... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hillary Clinton getting elected was a foregone conclusion to everyone except the millions of people who decided to vote for Trump well before he was even nominated. You know, the silent folks who work every day, who don't engage in narcissistic social media bullshit, who didn't put stickers on their cars or signs on their lawns because they didn't want their property vandalized by lawless unhinged leftists. THOSE people. The ones who matter. The ones who weren't influenced by low budget Russian Facebook
Re:Read another way... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hillary is universally hated by virtually every Republican, and disliked by a good percentage of the Democrats. Then you have those who are not in either party but tend to vote for one party over the other, and THOSE tended to dislike Hillary a lot as well. The best way to avoid foreign interference is to have candidates who people want to see as president, rather than candidates who are only seen as slightly better than the other(depending on your perspective). Clinton vs. Trump, neither one should have been allowed anywhere near the White House!
Re: (Score:2)
Hello my Russian friend. You should declare your interest as a paid Kremlin sockpuppet before posting here. It's only fair.
Said the AC who was afraid to reveal his own identity - and could be literally anyone.
Re: (Score:2)
this kind of shit is why president trump won. ^^^^^
Its simply amazing how little money the russian actors spent on facebook and how effective it was in derailing the democrats. Clinton didnt even campaign in every state.
So lets just focus on people posting with anon ids and call them non-credible while ignoring the reality that more Anti Trump Russia stories were anon-source based. The Trump resistance is so insulated by facebook-echoing that rickb928 can joiin a dog pile on any body NOT being anti Trump.
th
Re: Read another way... (Score:3)
There's no accounting for taste.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Read another way... (Score:5, Insightful)
Think this through - Putin & friends were able to thwart the election for abut $100K in ads, and Hillary with her $1BN budget couldn't overcome that influence/meddling?
Serious question - what was the last US presidential election the Russians *didn't* meddle in?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
A campaign to damage America, not to elect Trump (Score:5, Insightful)
The closer an election is, the more a small effect will tip the result. The 2016 election turned out to tilt on 80,000 votes in three states, a very small margin in an election in which 57.6 million people voted.
The Russian campaign contributions had a significant advantage; they didn't even have a need to pretend to truth or accuracy or morality. They were aiming for disruption of America by any means necessary, with no concern for collateral damage.
(and note that your figure of "$100K in ads" is the documented part of the advertising budget for their interference-- we don't have any idea of the full extent of it, but that is only the barest tip of the iceberg, not even including the money spent on trolls and fake grass-roots organizations. The full extent was a lot higher than that, and we have no idea how much higher.)
Re: A campaign to damage America, not to elect Tru (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, no. She doubled Trump up. Even if you add money for Russian interference.
Re: A campaign to damage America, not to elect Tru (Score:5, Insightful)
But the big question is: why did the GRU know where to spend their (up to) $100,000 (including post electoral expenditures), while Hillary Clinton and her staff did not? Probably because it is all an excuse for a very poor performance, after all the money she spent and all the media support she gained.
Re:A campaign to damage America, not to elect Trum (Score:5, Informative)
Both sides spent roughly a billion dollars on their campaigns.
False. Hillary's campaign cost about double what Trump's did. And that ignores all the backdoor bullshit with the media, the DNC, and the Clinton Foundation.
Re:A campaign to damage America, not to elect Trum (Score:5, Insightful)
So the callousness in which you treat the general population is quite amazing. If the two candidates where identical, you might be right. But this was black vs. white. There was no common ground between the two. If you are saying that 100K of advertising is all it takes to tip someone from black to white, then our "election" process is beyond repair. Really, people made the opinion early on, and disregarded information based on their bias.
This fantasy world that people live in where obviously the Russians are the ONLY reason Trump is president is amazing. Admitting Hillary was a flawed candidate would really help the democrats swing centrists, but instead they prefer to go off the rails.
Re: Read another way... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, please.
Firstly, that's the ads that Facebook found. There may be far more that Facebook did not identify.
But the ads were a tiny part of Russia's campaign. Russia used troll farms to influence people though cost-free posts.
Re: Read another way... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why there are laws in electoral advertising.When you don't have to be transparent, advertising can be far more effective/manipulative.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Occam's razor says "Hillary really was a shitty candidate" is an even simpler hypothesis than "Russians brainwashed everybody".
Re: Read another way... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hillary was torpedoed by Comey. Had that not happened the Russian interference would not have mattered except to elect more Republicans to congress perhaps. Which is what they wanted.
Re: Read another way... (Score:4, Funny)
Hillary was torpedoed by Comey.
What, like with a submarine or something?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Read another way... (Score:4, Insightful)
Odd, I'm a baby boomer and Donald Trump is doing exactly what I wanted him to do when I voted for him.
That's not gullibility. That is smart voting.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Read another way... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's only smart if what you "wanted him to do" is actually in your best interests. Otherwise we are back to gullibility.
Re: (Score:2)
Think this through - Putin & friends were able to thwart the election for abut $100K in ads, and Hillary with her $1BN budget couldn't overcome that influence/meddling?
The USA was able to completely overthrow a foreign government and install a selected dictator in their place for that money. Okay inflation adjusted more like $900k, but point is the same.
Re: Read another way... (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, there was probably a lot more money thrown around for Russian meddling, but thats beside the point.
The main reason Hillary lost is because she was literally the worst candidate the DNC could've chose. Back when she announced her candidacy in 2015 I posted this [slashdot.org] which listed all of her past scandals, and that you had better choices, even on the democrat side
After the Access Hollywood scandal, Trump should've been done. Period. Any other candidate would have been sunk, and Trump would've lost to any other candidate running against him. The difference is that he was running against Hillary, and all he had to do was divert people's attention away from the scandal by addressing the issue once, and then going back to his core voter issues while Hillary spun in circles trying to capitalize on the scandal instead of focusing on her core voter issues.
From my experience in this election, I can tell you that Trump was resonating with voters. I live in the rust belt (More Specifically North East Ohio, Western PA) where there is a ton of Democrat support. Almost all of the people I knew that traditionally voted Democrat were voting Trump, including my Grandfather, who was a WWII vet, a Retired Union leader who worked in the Railroad Business, and Voted straight Democrat except for Eisenhower. When I asked him why, he said he was the first Candidate he saw in decades that gets that Free Trade and especially Steel Dumping is killing heavy industry in this country and he felt he was the only candidate to actually fix it instead of talking about fixing it. Most of the other voters had similar reasons. Here on Slashdot, it was the H1B issue drawing voters since he was against it (but as of this post still hasn't done anything about it, which is going to hurt him come November)
Surprisingly, Almost no one I asked that went from voting Democrat to Trump voted for him because of Hillary Scandals or "Crooked Hillary" or any anti Hillary message that you commonly saw with these Russian troll ads. They voted for Trump cause They liked Trump's stance on issues (particularly anti free trade) vs Hillary. Many of them also like Sanders over Hillary because of the same issues and reasons, since many of Sanders issues were similar to Trump when it came to Jobs. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that Sanders would be in the White House if he won the nomination.
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect they spent *far* more than that, especially if you consider the Russian investments in Trump real estate and casino projects. Before you replay that this is a half baked conspiracy theory, read House of Trump, House of Putin.
Even if you ignore that, your argument is fatally flawed. $100k spent on a cheating illegal effort is far more powerful than $100k legally spent. A good analogy would be a race car where a $100 part that adds horsepower
Re: (Score:2)
Because in comparison to Hillary's official spend, it IS minimal?
Re: (Score:2)
No it is not a bogus comparison. Those couple of thousand people needed to be voting in a only a couple of swing states. Which means that the Russian ad money would have needed to been focused on those states and probably even at the county level within a state.
I know for FACT I saw Russian advertising, and I am located in the deep south which is not swing state territory. So if the budget was only $100,000 then why was I seeing adverts and I'm not even close to Ohio?
Re: Read another way... (Score:2)
Re: Read another way... (Score:5, Insightful)
There were protests this year too. Did Trump cause them? Or better, Trump's secretary of state?
A dictator who runs rigged elections blames popular protests on old-timey mortal enemy. News at fucking 11.
Re: Read another way... (Score:2)
Laws have always been enforced through the state's monopoly of force.
The U.S. Is quite capable of projecting it's force anywhere in the world, although they don't have a global monopoly (which is why there's no global government).
Re: (Score:2)
If it's so easy to brainwash voters, why didn't Hillary win? She spent far more on propaganda than Trump did. She's so much smarter than Trump is. The DNC is so much smarter than the voters are. The media is so much smarter than the public. Etc.
Re: Read another way... (Score:5, Insightful)
When elected, Trump was the most disliked president elect in history. If Clinton had been elected, she would also have been the most disliked president elect in history.
Re: (Score:2)
FTFY (Score:2)
Re: Read another way... (Score:5, Informative)
But if the foreign influence was "pretty clear" before the elections why exactly is this chief security officer not an accomplice of the GRU?
If you read the actual article [zdnet.com], he says that the extent of Russian interference was not clear until after the elections.
In fact, the article itself is pretty interesting-- the speculation about Russian motivation is the least important part; the talk about what they did and how they did what they did is more interesting.
Clinton Meddling (Score:3, Insightful)
Fair Question: Did Clinton meddle in the Russian election?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Clinton Meddling (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
Yes, she did.
Re:Clinton Meddling (Score:4, Interesting)
Fair Question: Did Clinton meddle in the Russian election?
There are two broad categories of states, functioning Democracies where the leaders can be booted out by the public, and countries where you're going to need a revolution to change leadership.
I'm actually fine with a policy where you should leave the functioning Democracies as is but you're free to screw around with the other countries to make them functioning Democracies since the common thread is you're trying to make the leadership of those countries accountable to the people.
Therefore I'll happily condemn Russian meddling in US elections but encourage US meddling in the Russian theatre productions they call elections. The US meddling in Ukraine is a bit more ambiguous, they were a semi-functioning Democracy but with a leader trying very hard to entrench himself for life. The Ukrainian revolution actually made them a lot closer to a functioning Democracy, which as it turns out was a great motive for Russia to invade them and steal some territory.
Re: (Score:2)
By the definition used by democratic party today, they didn't meddle.
By a reasonable definition, in which Russia didn't in fact meddle in any significant way beyond the minor "divide them and make them fight" unless you're counting the whole Bezmenov issue as "Russian meddling" and give it significant weight as the primary reason for rise of the far left forces in governing structures of US, US meddled at the very least in the second Yeltsin election. It was blatantly open on that one, because Yeltsin was u
Re:Clinton Meddling (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
No it doesn't. Not across borders. Nations reserve the right to internally bitch and moan about what happened to them regardless if it is blowback or not. That is how things work on two different sides of a fence. It just happens to work better when you're fully in control of the media too.
Re:Clinton Meddling (Score:5, Informative)
Because when you fuck with people, they often have the desire to fuck with you right back. Preferably in the exact same way you did to them. This is typically known as "the cycle of violence".
For example, did you know the US meddled in the 1996 Russian election to get Yeltsin re-elected? It's absolutely true, a lot of people were proud of it at the time and it wasn't a secret. [i.redd.it] He was in fifth place with ratings in the single digits before the Americans got involved. This was disastrous for Russia, as the oligarchs and Western neo-liberal economists made a mess of things. This started the chain of events that led directly to Putin seizing power four years later. Action, reaction.
Re:Clinton Meddling (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, for those who may not actually know about it, the US government (and in some cases also corporations!) has meddled in the elections of every single country in Central and South America. Every last one. They've also off the top of my head meddled in German, Iranian, French, and pretty much all of the Soviet bloc states elections.
So did they meddle in Russia? You bet your sweet caboose they did. I'd be willing to bet there isn't a country on earth whose elections the US hasn't meddled in, unless of course it's one that has no elections with which to meddle.
Re: (Score:2)
" Putin uses typewriters."
Like that's secure [cryptomuseum.com]...
Re: (Score:2)
Second Yeltsin election. Explain that away.
chaos? (Score:5, Interesting)
but throwing any election into chaos is totally doable right now."
"Chaos"?
First of all, we would know that how, lol? Aren't they all chaos?
In any case, real elections are "chaos" ... in real elections there's real potential for the voters to actually choose something different, whether the elites like it or not.
That feels like "chaos" to the people who think that only one party should rule and that any other parties are to be kept around only for appearances sake.
Re:chaos? (Score:4)
I totally agree.
The Russian "involvement" in the 2016 election is being overplayed. We act is if the U.S. and other nations don't try to affect the outcome of elections around the world, and that the fake news on Facebook/Twitter in our last election somehow influenced a large swatch of the electorate -- people other than died-in-the-wool conservative. It's not as if moderates were suddenly believing Pizzagate was real and Hillary Clinton and top Democratic operatives are running an underground and possibly satanic child sex ring out of a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C.
I think it would be interesting to see the results of an objective poll or some other study showing just how much influence fake news had in the election. To date, all we have is a narrative being pushed by sore losers.
Re: (Score:2)
But what it did do, just based on my own observations and interactions with my more "conservative" friends and family, is convince the... dimmer... of those people that the news was true. IE, it didn't make them any more likely to vote for Trump, but it did make them more likely to think any criticism of Trump is a conspiracy to overthrow this company and turn it into the Soviet Union.
Which I th
What's a GRU? (Score:3)
Was I the only one that had to look up "GRU" and "IRA Troll Farm" because neither the article nor summary explained it?
From Wiki: The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russia... and still commonly known by its previous abbreviation GRU... is the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation ... whose heads report directly to the president of Russia.
The Internet Research Agency... is a Russian company, based in Saint Petersburg, engaged in online influence operations on behalf of Russian business and political interests.
Yes, you are alone :) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it is. And I would expect a well-written news article about it to explain CIA stands for "Central Intelligence Agency" and give a short description of what it is. I may already know these things, but the article should not make such assumptions.
Re: (Score:2)
I am not American and will happily shit on them as much as any foreigner, but on an American news site one would expect people to know the American country and not the acronym of a former name of an intelligence agency whose acronym in english doesn't even make up the current or former translation.
Thank you (Score:2)
Skimmed the article and still had no idea. Journalism fail at all levels. Maybe I'm old but when I see IRA I think about assholes in England planting bombs.
Re: (Score:2)
When you hear "Irish Republican Army", you think of assholes in England??!
That was my thought. If you really wanted to rile up the IRA, just tell them they're in England not Ireland.
Re: (Score:2)
What do you expect? Fucking Brits.
Re: (Score:2)
Weren't most of the bombs built by the IRA set in England?
Does funding of the IRA by the IRA affect my IRA? (Score:2)
CSO.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not diplomat or political scientist, meaning Stamos opinion on why Russia is about as good as yours.
Personally I think Russia would have been sowing discord regardless Clinton, Trumps behaviour, narcissism and lack of diplomacy make him a particularly good stooge for attempting to create turmoil in western nations. See also brexit.
only after clinton stole from Bernie (Score:2)
Either way its THE SYSTEM that's at fault. EITHER ONE WAS DESTINED TO BE THE WORST PRESIDENT OF THE USA.
You elect Clinton she will go onto be a pig at the trough of the military industrial complex. You elect trump he will go onto be a pig at the trough of the military industrial complex.
Russia is unimportant to the outcome of the election. Mountains of collusion with Cambridge Analytics, Israel, Oligarchs in the USA like Robert Mercer. Facebook is subservient to the US military industrial complex now anyw
Hillary wanted a no-fly zone over Syria (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember the debates? Hillary was firm in wanting a no-fly zone in Syria. This would have led to direct conflict between USAF and Russian AF. It could have easily broken out into a big shooting war. Heck, I get the idea that a lot of people in DC (the unelected government, so-called deep state) would have greatly desired that. World War II hero and former U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) once observed, in a different context: "There exists a shadowy government with ... its own fundraising mechanism." [danielkino...titute.org]
Also remember, just before the inauguration, that US armored brigade landed and the jokes wrote themselves? Obama just sent tanks into Poland, that sort of thing. They then traveled to the Russian border? That was Hillary's big stick. Plant a bunch of troops near them and then start shit in Syria. But she wasn't elected, and they just did some training and then left. Peace broke out instead.
Re: (Score:3)
Plant a bunch of troops near them and then start shit in Syria. But she wasn't elected, and they just did some training and then left. Peace broke out instead.
If 46,000+ dead (per Syrian Observatory for Human Rights) and 900,000 registered refugees(UNHCR) since January 2017, and 700,000 internally displaced in the first half of 2017 alone (Pew research) is "peace", I would really hate to see war.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:2 years later... (Score:4, Interesting)
Clinton was loved by Centrists and the Establishment Right.
What? Centrists, sure, but the right? You're off your nut. Big Pharma loved her, centrists, and the near left, but everyone else disliked her. That's why polls showed that Sanders could beat Trump, but Clinton couldn't. The DNC chose to run Clinton when it was clear that democrat voters preferred Sanders, and that is the primary reason we have president Trump right now.
Re: (Score:2)
The DNC chose to run Clinton
The DNC didn't choose anything. It was the feckless democratic primary voters who voted for Hillary when they really wanted Bernie because they thought she had a better chance of winning in the general among other stupid reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
The only people that "loved" Hillary were the Democratic party establishment. Minorities that had massively voted for Obama stayed home, the American far left preferred Bernie and centrists just preferred Hillary over Trump.
Re: (Score:2)
Clinton was loved by Centrists and the Establishment Right
Loved by RINO's and neocons, sure. Certainly not by textbook conservatives.
Re: (Score:3)
Go to sleep Bill, you're drunk again.,
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
... And there's still a ridiculous amount of derangement.
When there is evidence of foreign interference and it's all leaning one way then it's not a matter of psychology. At this point, it's the people like you who are denying the possibility of interference by claiming other people suffer from "derangement" (and that our national security apparatus is plotting against their favored candidate, no doubt conspiring with multiple social media platforms) who are in a psychologically questionable state.
It is ridiculous but not in the way that you believe.
Re: (Score:2)
... And there's still a ridiculous amount of derangement.
Definitely.
Hilldog was a bad candidate who few outside the far left liked.
Hilldog?
She was a crappy candidate in the sense she sucked at campaigning. But her base wasn't the far left, it was policy wonks.
She was caught meddling in her own party's process to boot Bernie. She tried pretending that destroying evidence on her personal email server was an innocent mistake.
The private server was a screw up the violated department regs, but that's all.
And for deleting emails she did exactly what she was supposed to do according to regs, turn over the emails her team deemed work related and then securely delete the server.
The screw up was the IT guy not deleting when the original request was given, but instead deleting when the subpoena ca
Re: (Score:2)
The "far left" (really, fuckstick?) hated Hillary bad enough to throw the election to a fucking moron over it.
Hillary is an unremarkable center-right politician of the Third Way Democrat vein. Since you're too politically ignorant to really grasp what at's play here, just think of her as a 1950s Republican.
No shit. That was the point all along. (Score:2)
The press pushed and promoted a landslide Hillary victory and they convinced everyone. I know this will be modded down, but the Democrats are doing exactly what the Russians wanted better than the Russians could imagine.
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.mediaquant.net/2016/11/a-media-post-mortem-on-the-2016-presidential-election/ [mediaquant.net]
https://www.thestreet.com/story/13896916/1/donald-trump-rode-5-billion-in-free-media-to-the-white-house.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/09/
Re: (Score:2)
Constant attacks are worth five billion?
People must hate 'the media' more than I thought.
Five billion [Re:No shit. That was the point] (Score:2)
...In fact, what they did was give Donald Trump tons of free media coverage-- about five billion dollars worth, by some estimates. http://www.mediaquant.net/2016/11/a-media-post-mortem-on-the-2016-presidential-election/ [mediaquant.net]
https://www.thestreet.com/stor... [thestreet.com]
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Constant attacks are worth five billion?
Getting his name in the media, the media covering his speeches, the media covering his campaign rallies (while ignoring the comparable events from other candidates), the media covering his talking points-- yep, turns out to be worth about five billion dollars worth of free publicity.
The media covered him because he was outrageous. And he used that.
He seems to be following the model of George M. Cohan: "I don't care what you say about me, as long as you say something about me, and as long as you spell my
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, Bullshit. They kept up the attacks, all day long, now they claim it helped him. Whatever gets them through the long nights.
'No bad publicity' is when you are looking for name recognition. Both the clowns in the election already had that.
Re: (Score:2)
The press didn't promote a landslide, the statistics favored an electoral landslide for Hillary. The error margins were concerning in the midwestern states that ultimately cost her the election, but there was a reasonable assumption that that not *every single one of those states* would fall to the R side of the error bars.
That would be like the Cubs winning the World Series. Possible, but extremely
Cue the carrier photo op (Score:2)
National turmoil (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
What weakened Clinton? (Score:2)
Was anything released incorrect? Were the emails false, for instance? Was her insulting a sizable portion of the country Russia's doing? Was Russia behind her corrupting the DNC primary process?
Is Russia's biggest crime, in fact, that it did the job the media might have done in past generations? Today's media was all about helping Clinton to the presidency by almost any means necessary, and let me tell you; ironically that hurt Clinton more than it helped.
Trump just happened to be in the right place at
Fake news sharing In US is a rightwing thing .. (Score:3)
It's not really that hard (Score:2)
A lot of Canadian veterans succeeded in getting rid of the last PM and his MPs, and will do it again if need be.
Of course, that's not a foreign attack on another nation, but using techniques we learned in counter-terrorism ops and our local knowledge, and it's all perfectly legal.
You don't have to hack things to change them. Hacking is what you do when you're not connected to the systems already.
Multiple goals (Score:2)
Re: Well duh (Score:2)
There is no such thing as a popular vote. Journalists can go out and collect dissimilar numbers to add up, but the total is not some 'popular vote.' That's similar to trying to add up 'interception recoveries' to determine the winner of a football game.
Re: (Score:2)
They were co-opted by the religious nuts and the organization became worse than useless. Pretty much SOP for popular R movements.
Of course, the people are still out there.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Russian geopolitics are pitch black.
Re: (Score:2)
Same reason Cheney isn't. The DNC and RNC have 'mutually assured destruction' level dirt on each other.
Re: (Score:2)
Trump asked them for copies of Hillary's emails. A server that was already down at the time.
They didn't deliver. If the Ruskys wanted Trump elected, they would have delivered all the emails.
Re: (Score:2)
Then you had the progressives claiming that the Koch brothers had cheap matter transporters that could move oil over 1000 miles at a cheap price.
And you have liberal environmentalists claiming that motor companies are holding back fully electric vehicles, perpetual motion home generators, and other similar things that would totally remove
Re: (Score:2)
Quadafee was also fucking insanely rich. Didn't help when it came time for the knife enema.
At that level they measure wealth in 'power'. But if they lose, they die.