Indictment bombshell: 'Kremlin intel agents' hacked, leaked Hillary's emails same day Trump asked Russia for help

American prosecutors have accused 12 suspected Russian spies of hacking Democrat and Hillary Clinton campaign officials to publicly leak their sensitive emails and potentially influence the 2016 US Presidential Election. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein today announced criminal conspiracy charges against a dozen people …

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't make any difference

Trump could be caught with big bag of Rubles marked "Loot from your bestie; Vlad" under his bed.

His history and subsequent behaviour is so irrational and erratic that no one could unravel the shit storm that is him.

He will continue.

The best hope reasonable people now have is that he will be a one termer.

- Wonko the Great

[FlamingDeath]

I bet the democrats

are now wishing they didnt field a political crook as a presidential candidate, poor Berny, he would have made a good well balanced POTUS

Whether Russia are involved is kinda irrelevant when your basis of reality is pivoted to your own ego and hubris

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I bet the democrats

I think after any election loss the losing party second guesses their choices. If McCain hadn't chosen Palin as his running mate in 2008 I would have voted for him, but that told me he'd completely sold his soul to the right wing nut job fringe. Would there be enough people of like mind to have swung the election his way, who knows, but the people who were excited about Palin were still going to vote for McCain over Obama, so it was a politically stupid move.

[JEDIDIAH]

Re: I bet the democrats

Not sure about that really. I am not convinced that the GOP honestly examined their screw up with Palin any more than Democrats at large are willing to admit that Hillary screwed the pooch.

[tom dial]

Re: I bet the democrats

No, we don't want a bunch of foreigners with motives we should not trust mucking about in our elections whether or not the parties put up decent candidates.

Agreed about Sanders, though; I probably would have voted for him as a Democrat, instead of Gary Johnson or Evan McMullin.

[Anonymous Coward]

If voting systems are hacked and the count altered, what does a democracy do?

I believe that the other shoe is yest to fall and we will find out that computers used in the voting system - the voting machines and the computers used to collate the votes - were compromised.

Kieren McCarthy's October 2017 article "US voting server in election security probe is mysteriously wiped" https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/26/voting_server_georgia_wiped/ talks about an incident with one voting system.

Bruce Schneier's blog post "Hacking and the 2016 Presidential Election" https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/11/hacking_and_the.html adds the perspective that evidence might indicate that by targeting systems in key states the electoral college vote was tipped in favour of Trump (potentially explaining why Clinton won the popular vote by a huge margin),

And there is Matt Blaze's testimony to Congress https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Blaze-UPenn-Statement-Voting-Machines-11-29.pdf. In his wrap-up he says:

"In summary, the architecture of current electronic voting systems, especially those based on DRE voting machines, makes disruption attacks especially attractive to adversaries and difficult to effectively prevent. These systems can give hostile state actor s inter est ed in disruption an even easier task than that facing corrupt candi date s seeking to steal even a small local office. And the consequences of election disruption strike at the very heart of our national democracy."

I'd further argue that it is particularly difficult to detect especially if the practice of wiping systems as described in Kieren's article is common.

But the real issue is this: if the voting systems are hacked and the results altered, what does a democracy do? This is a question not just for the US, but perhaps for other countries. Brexit?

[tom dial]

Re: If voting systems are hacked and the count altered, what does a democracy do?

Those considerations are exactly why we ought to revert to systems that are transparent or can be made so after the fact, for which the most efficient solution almost surely is hand marked paper ballots, counted by machine, maybe, for quick results, audited by hand on a sample basis and, if discrepancies are found, recounted in full by multiparty teams.

There still will be issues - hanging chads are a bad memory from the 2000 election, and various techniques are known and were used somewhat commonly for a century or more before voting machines came into use. Ultimately, the questions that come up are decidable, however, and the real constraint is legal requirements for certification of results, for instance before the required date for electoral college action on a president and vice president, or date of inauguration or legislative organization. The latter are not always fixed: Al Franken, for example, was not determined to be the Senator-elect from Minnesota until June 30, 2009, nearly six months after organization of the 111th Congress to which he was elected.

As far as I can tell, the primary beneficiaries of voting machine use are the manufacturers and the TV news media, who can report many or most results on the 10 or 11 PM news election night.

[DemeterLast]

Politics 101

The concept is so common it's almost a cliche in America: when you want to illegally collude with a foreign government, you do so explicitly at public rallies where cameras are rolling and the press is in attendance. This gives you the ultimate alibi, because nobody would believe that you organized a coordinated attack live and in real time over broadcast news. Why bother with cut-outs and bagmen when you can just directly communicate with your co-conspirators on the TV?

For my brethren and sisteren across the pond, y'all have the wrong end of the stick here. After some 70 years of hot and cold war, America and Russia have found they have more in common than otherwise. We're coming up on 30 years since the Big Red Menace became just another mostly stable semi-corrupt nation. The U.S. is rapidly running out of money to spend and fucks to give in overseas adventurism. Trump is a lot of things - some good, some bad - but primarily he is indicative of a new wave of American politics that is weary of the old order.

According to all news sources available to the average American citizen, the entire world hates the U.S. with a suicidal passion. This conflicts with the average American citizen's awareness that every shitkicker from the rest of the third world wants to come here and stay. Not many people can relate to being the most hated prom queen in history, but that's more or less how Americans see themselves on the world stage. (The former candidate for this role was the British Empire. Did you you want to talk about the Falklands?)

Where my friends in Blighty gripped the wrong stick-end is how we feel about Russia these days. We don't have the same fright of Russians circa 1983. Russians are looking out for their own interests. This is understandable, and when their interests intersect our own, we're in favor of them. We are completely confounded by England and the British Isles succumbing to an outside authority.

(This confusion is entirely explained by our 2nd Amendment. When your rights are abused, shooting the jackhole what abused them is the only scalable means that works.)

[Homeboy]

Re: Politics 101

Looking from the British side of the pond I (mostly) agree with you.

I find it amazing that anyone is surprised by the fact that Russian spies....spy. It's what they do, it's what they always do and they've been doing it to everyone for years. You only have to look back through British history and you'll find names like Philby, Burgess and McClean who were senior British intelligence agents...spying for the Russians (USSR in those days). From time to time we still see Russia "diplomats" expelled for various activities "incompatible with their status" i.e. they've been caught spying.

Its still going on in the US, look up the "Illegals Program" which caught a group of Russian sleepers/spies in the US and resulted in a prisoner exchange with Russia in July 2010

To spend umpteen millions on a total time wasting witch hunt run by a Democrat with a team of bitter Democrat lawyers to find out, gasp!, that spies spy is ridiculous. They spy on everyone all the time....especially if the targets run a server with zero security.

We don't want a war.You don't want a war. Russia doesn't want a war. The only person that does appears to be the defeated, bitter Clinton. Time to move on.

[james7byrne]

poor security

If the russians hacked this in one day, what does that say about Hillary. She sure picked a poor IT firm to setup her server. If the Russians hacked this on one day, so did everyone else.

[Homeboy]

Re: poor security

I think the total lack of security on her "home brew" server is well known. For example Podesta's password was "pas$word" - not exactly bombproof is it?

[strum]

Re: poor security

>If the russians hacked this in one day, what does that say about Hillary.

Fuck all. Stop blaming the victim.

[JEDIDIAH]

Re: poor security

> Fuck all. Stop blaming the victim.

This isn't your piddly personal email server. This is part of the government. They are no "victim".

[Wolf_Angel]

Re: poor security

Not really the government. Servers used personally by Hillary and the Democratic National Committee.

[Wolf_Angel]

Re: poor security

What’s worse is they did it by social engineering. “Hi, I’m from IT and we are testing our firewall. Could you give us your account and password so we can test and make sure it’s secure” ...

[Aodhhan]

Smoke and mirrors

The democrats are basically shouting over everyone and taking any little thing they can and running with it.

They're doing this to cover up the fact Hillary broke the law and set up a private server, used her position of power against her rivals, made terrible choices both in and out of office (including choices which killed people).

Hillary's strategy is... if you shout really loud and don't allow anyone else to talk, then the public will not be able to hear the real truth and see just how bad you really are. The only fallacy in this, is not shutting up long enough to understand the public isn't stupid.

The DNC will continue it's push against Trump, but there are a lot of people in Hillary's own party who are very happy she didn't win the election; could you imagine?