> escalation will not end well This seems like a good moment to differentiate what we want to do from what we can do. One reading of this is "just ignore the

> escalation will not end well This seems like a good moment to differentiate what we want to do from what we can do. One reading of this is "just ignore the bully and they won't make things worse", which I agree is silly. But the other reading is "holy shit guys, don't set a norm of publicizing state hacking efforts, we will not look good." Granting the claim that Russia did this, it's worth following up with the possibility that the Equation Group auction was done to embarrass the TAO and the US more broadly. A few people I've seen (including the grugq, who is hardly a partisan) have suggested that it was revealed to threaten escalation if the US keeps pushing to embarrass Russia over hacking. In which case, the compliance argument may be totally reasonable. It wouldn't be giving in, it'd just be counseling politicians that maybe they don't want to take the moral high ground here.