It's Official, Russians Corrupted The Election

[ZeroJunk]

Originally Posted by Oerets

Is that suppose to be a dig? Working for the Government is working for the rest of us man! My guess jealous envy somewhere in there on having a good job.



Man we all get paid by other people taxes if lucky to live long enough Dude! But you have to pay in taxes to get there first!



Barney

My job sucked, but I made a whole lot of money doing it.

If I had put what I paid in to SS in to a simple index fund when I started in 1972 I would have a hell of a lot more money coming in now than SS will ever pay me.

[nailer]

Originally Posted by finnbow

Certainly not ZeroJunk's. He doesn't do reality.

Everyone does their own reality.

[Oerets]

So where are the hearings to investigate, setup new laws much like the outrage over a perceived voter fraud. Only when if effects the GOP is there outrage. What a narrow minded blind bunch they are.

Russia won the election for Trump, history will tell the tail. If we make it to the telling.


Barney

[Rajoo]

Interesting how Adobe flash installs the Freeware McAffee unless you are vigilant.
Let's not forget McAffee made his name before the internet so basically he is yesterday.

[donquixote99]

Heh. Speaking of massive retaliation....

[bobabode]

Originally Posted by donquixote99

Heh. Speaking of massive retaliation....

Just callin' 'em as I see 'em, brother.

[Rajoo]

Originally Posted by bobabode

Just callin' 'em as I see 'em, brother.

And you said it well and ended it with a good one.

[Dondilion]

Originally Posted by donquixote99

Heh. Speaking of massive retaliation....

Bob gone nuclear.

[whell]

Back to the OP, the title of this thread is, once again, not reflective of the facts. There's always been evidence that the attack on the DNC server likely came from Russia. There's no doubt that if Podesta didn't click on a phishing email that apparently came from Russia, we probably wouldn't be reading about his emails.

Nor do I think you can go as far as Trump and say that the publication of emails had ZERO effect on folks thought processes when they went to the polls.

However, there's no way that anyone can claim "the election was corrupted". Hillary did ultimately win the popular vote, after all. So if there was an effort to "corrupt the election" - something that no one thinks was possible anyway since there was no hacker access to the voting machines - the effort was pretty lame.

I think this piece from Politifact does a pretty reasonable job of cutting through the crap:

"The presidential election, with its national constituency, is decided by multiple, interrelated causes, all of which were necessary but not sufficient," said Kyle Saunders, a Colorado State University political scientist. Referring to such factors as the candidates’ personalities and messages as well as the general political environment, Saunders said that "no one determinate cause can be offered as ‘the’ explanation, and doing so is a fool's errand."

Saunders agreed that one doesn’t have to believe that hacking did affect the election to say comfortably that Trump is wrong to say it absolutely didn’t affect the election -- there's simply no way of knowing either way with any certainty that something affected the outcome.

He added that while a reasonable case can be made that the hacking did help Trump, that's informed speculation -- not certainty -- and said there’s no way to know how big a factor it may have been compared to other factors.

Also, right from Clapper:

Clapper’s most direct remark at the Senate hearing on this issue came in this exchange with the panel’s chairman, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.:

McCain: "So really, what we're talking about, is if they succeeded in changing the results of an election, of which none of us believe they were, that would have to constitute an attack on the United States of America because of the effects, if they had succeeded, would you agree with that?"

Clapper: "First, we cannot say -- they did not change any vote tallies or -- or anything of that sort."

McCain: "Yeah, I'm just talking about…"

Clapper: "And we have no -- we have no way of gauging the impact that -- certainly the intelligence community can't gauge the impact it had on the choices the electorate made. There's no way for us to gauge that."

Was there influence of popular opinion by releasing info from the DNC? Sure. Was it purposeful? Very likely. Did it help Trump and hurt Hillary? With some folks, sure. But some of those folks were pre-disposed to be influence by that info one way or another anyway. In other words, some folks pre-disposed to support Hillary were possibly even MORE invigorated to vote for her because of this.

The BIG question: was all of this specifically designed and intended to help Trump? As I've said all along, NO WAY TO KNOW, and as Clapper suggests, even if we knew there's NO WAY TO ASSESS THE IMPACT one way or another.

Let the retaliatory chips fall where they may over the hacking. We probably need to be pretty careful with retaliation anyway since the US is engaged in electronic surveillance and hacking other countries infrastructure as well. But as a story that relates to the actual outcome of the 2016 election, Case Closed.

[whell]

From the computer tech world:

The US government's much-anticipated analysis of Russian-sponsored hacking operations provides almost none of the promised evidence linking them to breaches that the Obama administration claims were orchestrated in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

The 13-page report, which was jointly published Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, billed itself as an indictment of sorts that would finally lay out the intelligence community's case that Russian government operatives carried out hacks on the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Clinton Campaign Chief John Podesta and leaked much of the resulting material. While security companies in the private sector have said for months the hacking campaign was the work of people working for the Russian government, anonymous people tied to the leaks have claimed they are lone wolves. Many independent security experts said there was little way to know the true origins of the attacks.

Sadly, the JAR, as the Joint Analysis Report is called, does little to end the debate. Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks, it largely restates previous private-sector claims without providing any support for their validity. Even worse, it provides an effective bait and switch by promising newly declassified intelligence into Russian hackers' "tradecraft and techniques" and instead delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups.