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And Russia would like to be seen as completely uninvolved in the whole matter.

• rsynnott 6y ago
  Eh. Not so sure about that. The Russian government has long had a tendency of doing things in a manner that is officially deniable but where it is made deliberately obvious that they are responsible. See the novichok and polonium poisonings; they _could_ have used far more plausibly deniable agents there if they had wanted to. Notably, "Guccifer 2.0"'s IP address was part of a block allocated to the GRU headquarters in Moscow. I seriously doubt that was an _accidental_ disclosure; it was an advertisement. It's an implicit threat to others.
  • mhh__ 6y ago
    In my experience of reading material on spies, and watching panels with ex-spooks and analysts etc. one thing I have learnt is that you shouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt but you shouldn't refuse to assume incompetence either. You only have to get your tradecraft wrong once to get caught - in this case I don't think they were at all bothered if they got caught early but it's not impossible that someone got lazy
    • rsynnott 6y ago
      Maybe, but the Guccifer example seems like very basic stuff, and there's an established pattern of deniably advertising the they did the things.
  • elliekelly 6y ago
    That's fair. Russia does seem to enjoy the grey area of borderline ridiculous plausible deniability. Perhaps I overstated.