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Hillary Blames Putin's Personal Beef

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Hillary Clinton blamed the election loss partly on Vladimir Putin, saying he had a "personal beef" with her and ordered his people to hack emails. Apparently she once accused him of rigging a Russian election in 2011, and 2016 was his revenge on her.

So, the story has slightly changed, I think. At first she wanted us to believe that Putin was trying to help his buddy, Trump, win. But now the story is that he was actually holding a grudge and getting revenge on her for something she said five years ago.

I automatically doubt whatever Clinton says. So now I'm wondering if this revision has anything to do with Trump's threat to investigate her corruption. Perhaps he'll be less likely to go after her, if she invents this new motive for Putin, which has less to do with Trump and Putin being buddies, and more to do with Hillary and Putin being enemies.

Edited by MisterSwig
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10 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

So now I'm wondering

I'm wandering why you started a thread about your wanderings. Do you have anything factual to share with us, or is this going to be a thread entirely unrelated to reality? Because we already have those, every time Dr. Hurd wanders into the field of politics.

And it is wandering. At least I hope you're not wondering at any of this.

Edited by Nicky
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1 hour ago, Nicky said:

Do you have anything factual to share with us, or is this going to be a thread entirely unrelated to reality?

Did I hit a nerve or something?

I wonder if you missed the linked article and my first two paragraphs of hopefully factual content.

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I kind of question that Putin and the Russian government is responsible. Russians, sure, but I don't know any evidence that traces it to the government.

I don't care what Hillary suspects, but it's possible she thinks that Putin -also- has a personal vendetta against her and that he wanted Trump to win. Besides, the pragmatic thing to do is blame a third party even if evidence is lacking. That way you appear as some sort of moral crusader against the "real" enemy, such that Trump looks weaker. Hillary seems to position herself as a bulwark against Russia, even while no one seems to know which Russians did it (Putin isn't the only bad Russian, even if he indirectly benefits). 

Edited by Eiuol
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15 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

Did I hit a nerve or something?

I wonder if you missed the linked article and my first two paragraphs of hopefully factual content.

This isn't the first thing she's played the blame-game on. I tied it into a post by Gary North back in mid-November.

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22 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

I kind of question that Putin and the Russian government is responsible.

Me too. Maybe it came from a Russian hacker, but Assange said the emails did not come from the Russian government. And I don't know why he would lie about that, since it would potentially ruin the credibility of Wikileaks. But then our intelligence services are potentially ruining their credibility by claiming it was the Russians. So what gives?

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It's most likely that many different countries "hacked" into the DNC and Podesta emails (and RNC and Trump, for that matter).  The real question is, which one gave it to Wikileaks?  It could just as easily (more so, actually) have been a Bernie supporter.

If I were Putin -- and assumed that Clinton would win -- AND if I had incriminating evidence of quid pro quo deals made on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, then I would wait for her to get into office and use the emails as blackmail or to embarrass her.

I still think that those 30,000 Clinton "yoga" emails are out there.....

Edited by New Buddha
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9 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

I'm not aware of US intelligence blaming, after a full report, the government. Only that Russian hackers did it.

Here is an article about it. Our government sounds pretty confident that it's the Russian government, and Obama has already confronted Putin about the alleged hacking.

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I'm sure there are people here who know more about this than I do; I'm only aware of these things by looking at the occasional news source, because frankly, I don't like keeping up with politics at the best of times (and these times are far from it).

But here's a passage from an article on this subject that popped up on my Yahoo! homepage just a few minutes ago:

Quote

In October the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security released a joint statement that read, “The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions.”

It continued, “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s seniormost officials could have authorized these activities.”

Well, okay. Maybe this is wrong. Intelligence agencies get things wrong, and sometimes very wrong. But again, this is one of those situations where I don't see the justification in advocating doubt, unless we have some reason to doubt this is true.

Edited by DonAthos
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46 minutes ago, New Buddha said:

If I were Putin -- and assumed that Clinton would win -- AND if I had incriminating evidence of quid pro quo deals made on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, then I would wait for her to get into office and use the emails as blackmail or to embarrass her.

Now you're talking! Some actual spycraft right there. They might also keep the emails in reserve simply to counter possible U.S. attempts at blackmail. Intelligence services usually don't give away their "products" to the whole world for free. That's their bread and butter. 

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16 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

Now you're talking! Some actual spycraft right there. They might also keep the emails in reserve simply to counter possible U.S. attempts at blackmail. Intelligence services usually don't give away their "products" to the whole world for free. That's their bread and butter. 

Are you suggesting this part of a particular group is perpetuating something for a universal purpose?

Edited by dream_weaver
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19 minutes ago, dream_weaver said:

Ha, ha! Yeah, that would be the Russians conspiring to take over the universe.

Edit: I deleted a link to a possible fake Reuters story. You can't trust anything on the Internet anymore.

Edited by MisterSwig
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41 minutes ago, dream_weaver said:

James Comey, the Director of the FBI, said that there is reason to believe that there were attempts by 5 separate groups to hack Clinton's emails.

It's a given that EVERYONE attempts to hack EVERYONE.    That's what intelligence agencies do.  I wouldn't doubt for a minute (nor be surprised) that this would include Israel and Britain and many other "close" allies.

The question is not "who hacked the emails?" [everyone did].  The question is "who leaked the emails to Wikileaks?"

The point of my post was to insert a little Game Theory into the discussion.

If Putin thought that there was no chance in heck that Clinton  Trump would win (as everyone assumed) then why would he release embarrassing emails?  Why wouldn't he hold onto them until she was in office?

It calls to mind the breaking of the Enigma code by the Allies in WW2.  The Allies even allowed some bombings, that they knew about, to take place, rather than risk letting the Germans know that their code had been broken.

Edit: Obama could very truly say that "Russia hacked the email".  But it can also be true that some else, did and that they were responsible for their being released.

 

Edited by New Buddha
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10 minutes ago, New Buddha said:

The question is not "who hacked the emails?" [everyone did].  The question is "who leaked the emails to Wikileaks?"

I had to delete a link in my prior post, because it was a suspiciously biased article. But I found the original source for the story at the Daily Mail. An associate of Assange has claimed that he received the leaked emails from a disgruntled whistleblower.

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10 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

I had to delete a link in my prior post, because it was a suspiciously biased article. But I found the original source for the story at the Daily Mail. An associate of Assange has claimed that he received the leaked emails from a disgruntled whistleblower.

I heard the same news story too.

And it could still be true that Russia hacked the emails, but it does not necessarily follow that it was Russia that leaked the emails.

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56 minutes ago, New Buddha said:

If Putin thought that there was no chance in heck that Clinton  Trump would win (as everyone assumed) then why would he release embarrassing emails?  Why wouldn't he hold onto them until she was in office?

Playing along, I wouldn't assume that Putin thought Clinton would win. He probably trusts our mainstream media less than we do.

He clearly did not like Clinton and may have absolutely wanted to interfere in the election. Perhaps for foreign policy reasons like Syria. Maybe the thought of having to deal with liberals like Hillary for another four or eight years was too much to stomach, and so he tried to ruin her before the election.

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1 hour ago, DonAthos said:

But again, this is one of those situations where I don't see the justification in advocating doubt, unless we have some reason to doubt this is true.

Frankly if it's a choice between Assange's word and Obama's word, I'm leaning toward believing Assange. That might be a mistake, but Obama lost me a long time ago.

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5 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

Playing along, I wouldn't assume that Putin thought Clinton would win. He probably trusts our mainstream media less than we do.

He clearly did not like Clinton and may have absolutely wanted to interfere in the election. Perhaps for foreign policy reasons like Syria. Maybe the thought of having to deal with liberals like Hillary for another four or eight years was too much to stomach, and so he tried to ruin her before the election.

That's a valid line of reasoning -along the lines of Game Theory.

Another is that Putin might have only released "embarrassing" emails while holding back the more damning and incriminating ones.

The larger point is that I've yet to see any concrete evidence that it was Russia that leaked the emails to Wikilieaks.  And, absent of that evidence, everyone is merely speculating.

 I think it's HIGHLY likely that the emails were in the hands of MANY DIFFERENT GROUPS - including Russia - and that assuming otherwise would be a failure on the part of U.S intelligence agencies and/or the news media.  It's highly possible that - if many groups possessed the emails - that no one knows who was behind their release, except Assange, and even he may not know why or how they were obtained.

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8 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

Did I hit a nerve or something?

No, I just don't think far right propaganda should be left unchallenged on this site. None of what you're talking about has any basis in reality.

There is overwhelming evidence, and a pattern of behavior leading up to this, pointing to Russian intelligence services hacking the DNC and using Wikileaks as their publisher. There was overwhelming evidence even before US intelligence services confirmed it.

There is also overwhelming evidence of Russian propaganda outlets working with far right organizations in promoting the anti-establishment wave of misinformation that is causing confusion among the general population in western countries.

Edited by Nicky
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5 hours ago, Nicky said:

There is overwhelming evidence, and a pattern of behavior leading up to this, pointing to Russian intelligence services hacking the DNC and using Wikileaks as their publisher. There was overwhelming evidence even before US intelligence services confirmed it.

Nicky, because I am fascinated by the nature of the exchange on this topic (and Trump in general) amongst Oist, I'd like to ask you if you could list what some of that evidence is?

Edit: Also, do you consider the raw data from Wikileaks misinformation?

Edited by Plasmatic
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10 hours ago, Nicky said:

There was overwhelming evidence even before US intelligence services confirmed it.

Huh? How could you be aware of this "overwhelming evidence" before the CIA told us about it?

Are you a government spy with access to secret information?

Regular folk still haven't seen this "overwhelming evidence." I hope you'll keep that in mind before accusing me of spreading far Right propaganda.

I hope you'll also consider giving your evidence to news organizations, because they don't seem to have it either.

Quote

The CIA has concluded that Russia's motivation was to sway the election in favour of Mr Trump, but no evidence has been made public.

Nicky, you act as if we should automatically trust what Obama, Clinton, and the CIA are telling us, when we have numerous reasons not to trust them, least of which is the fact that Wikileaks has gone out of its way to deny their claims. I won't bother going into prior CIA, Obama, and Clinton trust issues. Those should be obvious by now.

Edited by MisterSwig
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6 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

I won't bother going into prior CIA, Obama, and Clinton trust issues. Those should be obvious by now.

There isn't a reason to not trust the CIA any more or less than any other government agency. The thing to keep in mind is lack of public information and official reports. Even the article you linked me last has vague identifiers for sources that may or may not be discussing final decisions. Reporters are taking statements as final verdicts, when in reality all a reporter can know is possibilities and what -seems- to be most likely. Intelligence operates on a lot of unknowns, and if we can't see their evidence, we must be cautious about what we extrapolate.

 

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7 hours ago, Plasmatic said:

Nicky, because I am fascinated by the nature of the exchange on this topic (and Trump in general) amongst Oist, I'd like to ask you if you could list what some of that evidence is?

This Wikipedia page does a good job listing all the known facts about the hack, and providing sources for them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guccifer_2.0

In a nutshell, when you hack a server or a protected network, you leave a lot of evidence behind, because you use all kinds of malware style exploits to get past the defenses.It's not like in the movies where some guy just has a computer and his brains, and gets "in" by himself. There are pre-made programs that copy themselves onto the target system... often multiple times, and execute there. When they execute, those events are logged, honeypots are used to monitor breach attempts, etc. (precisely to allow a forensic analysis of security breaches).

A good analogy would be to conventional warfare: A "unit" of hackers (each specializing in defeating specific types of systems) is given a mission, and they use a set of tools their organization built up over years (cyber weapons: pieces of software designed to exploit commercial systems, like router software, web servers, or security tools like firewalls) to accomplish it.

These tools get extremely sophisticated, and, past a certain level of sophistication, can only be realistically manufactured by state actors. Not only that, but they are reused...even state actors can't afford to spend the hundreds or thousands of ultra-qualified man-hours necessary to create these tools, only to use them once. Just like weapons: you don't build the Abrams tank for one mission, you build it once and use it for many missions and wars.

The details of all the stuff the Russians left behind, that proves it was them (tools they used before, stuff written in Russian, not to mention an MO similar to previous hacks proven to have been done by them) are listed in the wiki page. Not gonna go over everything, but it's a bit like if the US invaded Belgium one night, and left a couple of F-117s,  an F-35, and regulation US Air Force manuals on how to use them, behind. It would be impossible to deny that it was them. Only difference is, these tools can't be filmed and shown on the news, for laymen to see for themselves. You have to trust the experts who have seen the code to identify it as Russian made.

There's also a piece of interesting investigative journalism that doesn't require an understanding of cyber security: a text-chat interview the so called "Guccifer 2.0" did with Lorenzo Franceschi-Biccherai (writer for Motherboard, and occasional contributor to the Risky Business podcast - both great resources for infosec related news), in which they asked him to communicate in Romanian (that's the nationality he claimed to be)...and he failed to use it above Google Translate level (it's reference nr. 34 on the wiki page, or you can just google for the transcripts of the interview).

 

Quote

Edit: Also, do you consider the raw data from Wikileaks misinformation?

It's certainly not information. It's a massive data dump, impossible to interpret correctly without inside knowledge of the system, not to mention the thousands of man-hours needed to sift through it. The only way it can be used effectively is for mis-information.

What makes propaganda effective isn't the ability to tell a good lie. It's the ability to make it impossible to know the truth. The first step in Putin's propaganda war at home was to ban the most reputable sources of news that didn't tow the line. But he didn't ban every source of information. Russia certainly has access to the Internet, for instance, he didn't ban that.

Instead, what he (or rather his propaganda master, Vladislav Surkov) did in step 2 is to create uncertainty by sponsoring groups with conflicting points of view (everything from skinheads to liberal activists), and then undermining them by revealing that he was funding them. So, instead of having full control over the news, and promoting a single, pro-government narrative like the Soviets attempted to do (making it clear to everyone with half a brain that it was a lie), he made the anti-Putin news ineffective.

That is exactly what they're doing in the West now: they're not trying to promote American nationalism, Donald Trump, or the leftist WikiLeaks: they're trying to make sure Americans stop trusting their news and their government. Any news, and any government: left, right or center. They're not going to openly admit that Surkov has his hand up Assange's ass (because then the US would have to retaliate, to save face, in a much more decisive manner than just by releasing Surkov's private e-mails...which is all they've done so far, publically at least), but they're also not trying very hard to hide it. People knowing that they did it doesn't hurt their plan in any way: they want people to become cynical of everything, including Wikileaks.

It's a pattern they've repeated over and over again, both at home and across the West (there are countless examples of the same exact tactic being used in European elections...in "support" of every kind of politician you can think of. It doesn't matter to them, this is not an ideological fight or an attempt to help one side or the other. It's an unmistakable pattern of behavior. It's always them, and it's never meant to share any useful information.

 

Edited by Nicky
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2 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

Nicky, you act as if we should automatically trust what Obama, Clinton, and the CIA are telling us

You don't. It's investigative journalists in the infosec field, independent cyber security experts, European law enforcement, etc. Everybody who ever dealt with, or knows anything about, the Russians, is providing an endless stream of evidence proving it was them.

What you would need to do is not repeat what you've read on far right outlets, verbatim.

Edited by Nicky
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