4 ms·

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,

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.
  - meowface 9y ago
    There are two different things being argued here: is it right for Google to do this, and did Russian intelligence actually interfere in the election. You're trying to re-open a debate into the latter, in which case the discussion of the former is kind of moot. The latter has been discussed and debated ad nauseam in a lot of places and this thread isn't really the appropriate environment. But as someone who works in the infosec industry, I can say yes it is believable GRU would accidentally leave some tracks (NSA has done the same, which were caught by Kaspersky), and that there is far, far more evidence tying Russian intelligence to election interference than merely the DNC and Podesta email breaches. And also that it was more than just the US intelligence agencies and more than just Crowdstrike that came to these conclusions.
linkregister 9y ago
> surely would have been happy to report on more Trump scandals or leaks if they'd existed. If only, then RT could have had the balance they were craving! But poor RT, thwarted by ol' squeaky-clean Trump. Why is it shocking that a Russian government-owned news agency would promote things aligned with the Russian government? Do you think Voice of America doesn't push American topics?

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.
- meowface 9y ago
  There are two different things being argued here: is it right for Google to do this, and did Russian intelligence actually interfere in the election. You're trying to re-open a debate into the latter, in which case the discussion of the former is kind of moot. The latter has been discussed and debated ad nauseam in a lot of places and this thread isn't really the appropriate environment. But as someone who works in the infosec industry, I can say yes it is believable GRU would accidentally leave some tracks (NSA has done the same, which were caught by Kaspersky), and that there is far, far more evidence tying Russian intelligence to election interference than merely the DNC and Podesta email breaches. And also that it was more than just the US intelligence agencies and more than just Crowdstrike that came to these conclusions.

linkregister 9y ago

> surely would have been happy to report on more Trump scandals or leaks if they'd existed. If only, then RT could have had the balance they were craving! But poor RT, thwarted by ol' squeaky-clean Trump. Why is it shocking that a Russian government-owned news agency would promote things aligned with the Russian government? Do you think Voice of America doesn't push American topics?