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Aside from the accusations made by US intelligence agencies there has not been any data presented that links the Russian government with the stuff you mention.

Aside from the accusations made by US intelligence agencies there has not been any data presented that links the Russian government with the stuff you mention. Surely there has been lots of mischief on both sides, but it's absurd to think that anything Russia did altered the outcome of the election. If you look into the details the evidence is not there. The reason Russia is being blamed is because the US has lost the chess game in the middle east with Russia and will need to do something more aggressive to fight back, but can't do that unless Americans start hating Russians again. Let's not buy into the hype.

meowface 9y ago
I agree it's unlikely Russia altered the outcome of the election; Trump likely would've won with or without their influence. But intent matters more than results here. If a country tries to affect your country's election through deceit, even if they're not really that successful, it still deserves a response. I'm not sure what "if you look into the details the evidence is not there" is supposed to mean but in terms of intentions, the Russian government did intend to help Trump win (or at least help Clinton lose) and did intend to achieve this goal in part through spreading misleading information. The evidence is pretty damning.
- grandalf 9y ago
  What information was misleading or false? There were lots of emails leaked. The FBI investigation was concerned with the legality of using the private server, but none of the potential campaign finance or ethics violations revealed by the contents of the emails has received any attention at all. As an American citizen who is not aligned with either major party, I'm pleased when one of the power mongers from either party is destroyed. What should have happened is that a panel of experts should have reviewed the troubling aspects of the emails and issued a statement. But the partisans wanted to pretend the issue was either a) automatically damning or b) a complete non-issue. The truth was likely somewhere in the middle. RT did nothing at all wrong by reporting on those things, and surely would have been happy to report on more Trump scandals or leaks if they'd existed. I think that what people miss is that the intention of RT was simply to reveal unflattering truths to help make Americans unhappy with their leaders. This is not a bad thing. If our leaders have committed crimes or ethics violations I want to know about it so that it can appropriately impact my vote. The most peculiar implication of the criticism of RT is the idea that somehow Americans should not know these things or should remain blissfully naive of embarrassing things about our leaders. It's almost too patronizing to believe.
  - meowface 9y ago
    You're picking one of many of the events that occurred during the election. No, RT is not necessarily biased for reporting on the leaked emails, which did contain legitimate information that was in the public interest to report (and which US and other outlets of course did report on), but it puts it in a different light when it became known that it was Russian intelligence who procured those emails. But even if we pretend that whole thing never happened, RT regularly pushes stories that cast the Russian government in a good light and the US government in a bad light. Ukraine, Syria, Trump, Hillary. They have the right to do that, being Russia's media, but doing that while also being owned by a state whose intelligence agencies interfered in the election is what creates the major journalistic conflict of interest.
    - grandalf 9y ago
      > when it became known that it was Russian intelligence who procured those emails So the server in question was apparently un-patched for months. Chances are dozens of third world intelligence agencies had the emails. Is it really plausible that Russia would have its highly trained hackers infiltrate a server and then leave a trail of Russian language metadata on the data? We also saw recently in some of the stuff leaked by Wikileaks that US intelligence agencies have tools for making attacks look like they were state sponsored from one of any number of other agencies (by leaving code comments in the language of that nation). This doesn't add up. Also, if a true political adversary obtained the emails, the most damning way to do it would be to release the worst stories one by one before key campaign events. The troves were too large to be processed in a timely fashion and many of the scandals faded from view almost as soon as they were revealed.
      - linkregister 9y ago
        Podesta's G-Suite account was unpatched? Please review the history of events. The Hillary email server emails were released as part of FOIA actions, and reposted by Wikileaks. The Podesta emails were novel because they had been exfiltrated by the Guccifer 2.0 persona, reasonably attributed to Russian state actors by Crowdstrike.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  This is a general comment, not particularly aimed at the russian stuff as I see similar comments about other stuff too, but the American election result was super close. There's probably a thousand different factors that could have swung it either way. There doesn't seem to be any logical reason to exclude Russian support from that list. That doesn't mean the opposite is true, and that only Russian support for one candidate matters, but I think your statement is far overestimating the size of the final result in comparison with the impact of Russian support. It probably doesn't help that the President continually refers to it is a historic landslide, which will probably confuse people who aren't paying attention. But it wasn't, it was very close.
linkregister 9y ago
I think you should change "there has not been any data" with "there has not been any data that I like". The Crowdstrike, Mandiant, and the Facebook & Twitter reports all linked Russian government actors with unregistered election interference, with varying amounts of forensic evidence; the Crowdstrike and Mandiant ones were chock-full of evidence, while the Facebook and Twitter ones just claimed that Russian media agency IP ranges were used to control the social media accounts.
- grandalf 9y ago
  So basically what you are saying is no conclusive evidence, or no evidence that can be considered conclusive since any state actor could forge it. Further, any state actor (such as Russia) could easily avoid leaving such a trail if it wanted to. Of the many "campaigns" linked using loose turns of phrase to the Russian government, several would certainly have been obvious/easy to keep under the radar if they were indeed conducted by Russia. Why hand the US a smoking gun due to amateurish mistakes? I am not aware of any forensic evidence that it seems reasonable to consider conclusive. In fact, statements issued by Homeland Security concerning the exact same bits of evidence were not considered concerning or confidently linked to the Russian government prior to the insane politicization that occurred after the election. So as someone who does not want to help fuel the escalation of tensions toward war with a nuclear power, I demand that all evidence be made public so that independent security experts can conduct a full audit under full transparency.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    What specifically about the Crowdstrike and Mandiant reports was particularly suspect? They have tracked these campaigns and found them completely consistent with APT 28, whose infrastructure leads back to GRU. All actors leave traces, how do you think Kaspersky was able to track down Equation Group? Why did you choose to deflect with the Homeland Security "report"? I didn't bring it up, and it isn't meant to be evidence of anything. Why are you choosing to be a bit disingenuous in this argument?

meowface 9y ago

I agree it's unlikely Russia altered the outcome of the election; Trump likely would've won with or without their influence. But intent matters more than results here. If a country tries to affect your country's election through deceit, even if they're not really that successful, it still deserves a response. I'm not sure what "if you look into the details the evidence is not there" is supposed to mean but in terms of intentions, the Russian government did intend to help Trump win (or at least help Clinton lose) and did intend to achieve this goal in part through spreading misleading information. The evidence is pretty damning.

grandalf 9y ago
What information was misleading or false? There were lots of emails leaked. The FBI investigation was concerned with the legality of using the private server, but none of the potential campaign finance or ethics violations revealed by the contents of the emails has received any attention at all. As an American citizen who is not aligned with either major party, I'm pleased when one of the power mongers from either party is destroyed. What should have happened is that a panel of experts should have reviewed the troubling aspects of the emails and issued a statement. But the partisans wanted to pretend the issue was either a) automatically damning or b) a complete non-issue. The truth was likely somewhere in the middle. RT did nothing at all wrong by reporting on those things, and surely would have been happy to report on more Trump scandals or leaks if they'd existed. I think that what people miss is that the intention of RT was simply to reveal unflattering truths to help make Americans unhappy with their leaders. This is not a bad thing. If our leaders have committed crimes or ethics violations I want to know about it so that it can appropriately impact my vote. The most peculiar implication of the criticism of RT is the idea that somehow Americans should not know these things or should remain blissfully naive of embarrassing things about our leaders. It's almost too patronizing to believe.
- meowface 9y ago
  You're picking one of many of the events that occurred during the election. No, RT is not necessarily biased for reporting on the leaked emails, which did contain legitimate information that was in the public interest to report (and which US and other outlets of course did report on), but it puts it in a different light when it became known that it was Russian intelligence who procured those emails. But even if we pretend that whole thing never happened, RT regularly pushes stories that cast the Russian government in a good light and the US government in a bad light. Ukraine, Syria, Trump, Hillary. They have the right to do that, being Russia's media, but doing that while also being owned by a state whose intelligence agencies interfered in the election is what creates the major journalistic conflict of interest.
  - grandalf 9y ago
    > when it became known that it was Russian intelligence who procured those emails So the server in question was apparently un-patched for months. Chances are dozens of third world intelligence agencies had the emails. Is it really plausible that Russia would have its highly trained hackers infiltrate a server and then leave a trail of Russian language metadata on the data? We also saw recently in some of the stuff leaked by Wikileaks that US intelligence agencies have tools for making attacks look like they were state sponsored from one of any number of other agencies (by leaving code comments in the language of that nation). This doesn't add up. Also, if a true political adversary obtained the emails, the most damning way to do it would be to release the worst stories one by one before key campaign events. The troves were too large to be processed in a timely fashion and many of the scandals faded from view almost as soon as they were revealed.
    - linkregister 9y ago
      Podesta's G-Suite account was unpatched? Please review the history of events. The Hillary email server emails were released as part of FOIA actions, and reposted by Wikileaks. The Podesta emails were novel because they had been exfiltrated by the Guccifer 2.0 persona, reasonably attributed to Russian state actors by Crowdstrike.
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
This is a general comment, not particularly aimed at the russian stuff as I see similar comments about other stuff too, but the American election result was super close. There's probably a thousand different factors that could have swung it either way. There doesn't seem to be any logical reason to exclude Russian support from that list. That doesn't mean the opposite is true, and that only Russian support for one candidate matters, but I think your statement is far overestimating the size of the final result in comparison with the impact of Russian support. It probably doesn't help that the President continually refers to it is a historic landslide, which will probably confuse people who aren't paying attention. But it wasn't, it was very close.

linkregister 9y ago

I think you should change "there has not been any data" with "there has not been any data that I like". The Crowdstrike, Mandiant, and the Facebook & Twitter reports all linked Russian government actors with unregistered election interference, with varying amounts of forensic evidence; the Crowdstrike and Mandiant ones were chock-full of evidence, while the Facebook and Twitter ones just claimed that Russian media agency IP ranges were used to control the social media accounts.

grandalf 9y ago
So basically what you are saying is no conclusive evidence, or no evidence that can be considered conclusive since any state actor could forge it. Further, any state actor (such as Russia) could easily avoid leaving such a trail if it wanted to. Of the many "campaigns" linked using loose turns of phrase to the Russian government, several would certainly have been obvious/easy to keep under the radar if they were indeed conducted by Russia. Why hand the US a smoking gun due to amateurish mistakes? I am not aware of any forensic evidence that it seems reasonable to consider conclusive. In fact, statements issued by Homeland Security concerning the exact same bits of evidence were not considered concerning or confidently linked to the Russian government prior to the insane politicization that occurred after the election. So as someone who does not want to help fuel the escalation of tensions toward war with a nuclear power, I demand that all evidence be made public so that independent security experts can conduct a full audit under full transparency.
- linkregister 9y ago
  What specifically about the Crowdstrike and Mandiant reports was particularly suspect? They have tracked these campaigns and found them completely consistent with APT 28, whose infrastructure leads back to GRU. All actors leave traces, how do you think Kaspersky was able to track down Equation Group? Why did you choose to deflect with the Homeland Security "report"? I didn't bring it up, and it isn't meant to be evidence of anything. Why are you choosing to be a bit disingenuous in this argument?