[spaceseaman]

> Our media and our government lied to generate a case for war. And I feel lately that they are now trying to build a case for some sort of conflict, presumably cold, against Russia

I mean, there's verifiable evidence Russia tried to influence our election. That's pretty new for a lot of Americans. I imagine that's why the government and the media are running wild with it. Mueller is still investigating. I would say to wait till that report comes out before jumping to conclusions. I personally don't think the media and government are gearing up for some Russia conflict. This is just the first time Russia has been so involved in our politics since the Cold War, and the media is rightly running with that idea. Is it that unbelievable for some people that Russia was involved in trying to influence our election? I can't tell if you're rightly scared of the media or just can't believe Russia would do something bad.

With respect to the quality of work at the NSA?

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

And finally with respect to all the leaking... I think it's pretty clear that's just the NSA's lack of confidence in its leader.

[Consultant32452]

>I mean, there's verifiable evidence Russia tried to influence our election. That's pretty new for a lot of Americans.

That might be new for a lot of Americans, but not for anyone who has ever paid any sort of attention to international politics. In reality it would've been bigger news if Russia hadn't tried to influence our election. And that's not specific to Russia, I'd say that about any major economic power including allies.

>since the Cold War

We've been in a proxy hot war with Russia for years. Syria is a major Russian ally and a big part of our activity in Syria is to reduce the regional influence/power of Russia.

>I can't tell if you're rightly scared of the media

One would think that a group of people whose job it is to report on global politics would understand how much of a certainty it is that Russia would try to impact all of our elections. And yet they're pretending like this is shocking. I can forgive the general public, but any media outlet feigning shock is bold faced lying.

[c3534l]

Where is this verifiable evidence so I can actually verify it?

[dmix]

It's only been ~1yr since the election. You have to be patient for big cases like this.

Until then we have to trust the US intelligence community. Their messaging has been consistent that their arch-enemy they've been competing with for decades pulled a fast one on them and was unexpectedly effective at influencing an election.

Government sources have been leaking a bunch of stuff to the press in the meantime. This week it was alleged "Russian-linked" sources supporting the Republican party had bought Facebook ads [1] in the critical swing states:

> A number of Russian-linked Facebook ads specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin, two states crucial to Donald Trump's victory last November, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the situation.

Two states which Clinton's $500 million campaign reportedly neglected [2] despite the pleas of her former-president husband and advisors:

> Clinton made no visits to Wisconsin as the Democratic nominee, and only pushed a late charge in Michigan once internal polling showed the race tightening.

The other big leak was that of the hundreds of people the Trump campaign staff met and had phone calls with in 2016, it turns out 2-3 of them had connections to the Russian government. But it's not clear if they had any follow up meetings.

I'm looking forward to the full report showing the "critical role" Russia played in getting him elected...

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/politics/russian-facebook-ads-...

[2] http://wtvr.com/2016/11/11/bill-clinton-strategy/

[c3534l]

> You have to be patient for big cases like this

So in other words, no “verifiable“ proof at all, just rumors, hearsay, and unbacked assertions.

> Until then we have to trust the US intelligence community.

Sorry, no. Their success rate and overall trustworthiness is abysmal, let alone it's foolish to trust secret data even if it weren't the case.

[jejeuei73737]

You are out there every day pushing back against anonymous voting then?

Who voted for which candidate is secret and we rely on counts that aren’t broadcast live

[c3534l]

Anonymous doesn't mean secret. If the governor of Ohio says his people want Trump over Hilary, just trust him, you don't need to know how he knows would you? I mean, I don't trust unauditable electronic voting machines. I certainly wouldn't trust someone who couldn't even point to the machine he got his info from.

[linkregister]

Much of the voting system is an exercise of trust. The most reliable part of it, besides the fact that election officers are publicly known and accountable, is that officers from both parties oversee each voting center. Your trust is that the adversarial nature of the political parties will raise alarms if the ballots are tampered with.

[nl]

It's odd that people keep saying to trust the intel agencies, since much of the best research on the propaganda side is done in academia, and the data is out there.

Here's a Tableau of the influence of just 6 of the ~200 recently banned Russian-run groups on Facebook: https://public.tableau.com/profile/d1gi#!/vizhome/FB4/TotalR...

Here's the raw data: https://data.world/d1gi/missing-fb-posts-w-share-stats

Here's some analysis: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/05...

I also like http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/

If you want to look at research, Oxford is doing some good work in this area. They have a whole research group on computational propaganda: http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/category/publishing/academic-art...

[dmix]

I read through each of your links and there's some interesting stuff there. Overall it looks like Russia basically ran a full-time campaign marketing team with access to a few million dollars for ad and social media sharing buys.

That said, the breathlessly covered "tens of millions of ad impressions" isn't that much on Facebook. From my experience getting 0.1% of viewers to care would be a significant number.

Being familiar with online marketing makes a lot of this sound less scary.

What I'd love to see is the Russian ad spending in the great context of the entire campaign. Considering both sides spent $1 billion on their combined campaigns it's entirely possible that the ~200 PR stories and 10M ad impressions are a minor blip in the wider scale.

What's interesting is how many people voluntarily shared these posts because it struck a chord with them (although it's equally as easy to buy fake likes/shares). And the fact they were focusing on critical swing states that Hillary's massive campaign failed to hit, basically non-english foreigners outperforming the most expensive American consultants...

The leaked data is another story and Wikileaks will never be proven, which means 50% of the leaked data is very likely via Russia.

For each of these, there were plenty of moving pieces out of Russia's control (the FBI and media's handling of pretty insignificant stuff, the highly receptive audience sharing the propaganda, etc) that all worked in their favour. Even if their contributions were minor, the US political environment played a huge role in amplifying it into something far bigger than they could ever do themselves.

Outside of some future smoking gun connection with the Trump campaign (which seems highly unlikely so far) it's going to be very difficult to measure exactly how much meaningful influence Russia really had on the elections. But it's an interesting lesson for the future regardless and the vagueness will offer plenty of leeway for the Clinton's campaign to sidestep responsibility for both running a bad campaign and for being a generally unlikable person (which matters more in these popularity contests than capability).

And if you didn't notice my entire original comment was satirizing mainstream discourse. I don't think you need or should trust intel agencies nor the media's uncritical interpretation here. I left it purposefully vague for those smart enough to see through the popular narratives.

[nl]

Measurement of effectiveness is pretty hard, I agree. And as I point out elsewhere, the Russians promoted diversive left-wing causes as well.

But I wish people would stop making claims that it didn't happen just because they (reasonably!) doubt the intel agencies. This stuff is trivially verifiable by anyone with the desire to do so.

[spaceseaman]

Wow I wasn't aware this was so directly available.

Thanks!

[nl]

No problem. It's a bit sad how rarely people bother to look into this.

People spend hours arguing on HN about this, and it takes a lot less time to take a look at the data.

You don't even have to be anti-Trump to agree with what the data shows: That set I linked to had strongly anti-Trump groups like "Blacktivists", "United Muslims of America" and "LGBT United".

[state_less]

Don Jr. personally admitted to meeting with Russians.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2017/07/12/536782047/donald-trump-jr-admi...

[peoplewindow]

"A lawyer who happened to be Russian" is not the same thing as "the Russians", the latter implying some sort of official Russian government conspiracy - presumably at vast scale, to affect something as large as the US election.

I too would like to see this verifiable evidence. So far all evidence presented of so-called Russian "interference" isn't even remotely credible.

[travmatt]

"A lawyer who happened to be Russian" is an extraordinarily significant misrepresentation of who Natalia Veselnitskaya is.

[VVayneTracker]

She's "former" FSB. And there's no such thing as "former" FSB.

[state_less]

> I too would like to see this verifiable evidence.

He went to the meeting because Russians said they have dirt on Hilary and admitted it.

Also, There was at least one Russian troll farm targeting voters.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/facebook-says-it-sol...

Russia also has a history of influencing elections in other countries.

[peoplewindow]

"Russians" didn't. A woman did. It turned out she had nothing and the meeting was a waste of time. Very far from what the phrase "meeting with the Russians" implies - some sort of large, organised group engaged in official Russian state business.

[nl]

Veselnitskaya is a paid member of a group registered to lobby against the Magnitsky act[1]. The group paying her was organized by a former GRU agent[2] and paid for by a Russian oligarch Denis Katsyv.

Reversing the Magnitsky act is pretty much the number one thing the Russian government would like.

Of course there is nothing wrong with this in itself. But while Veselnitskaya may not have been a Russian official, she was promoting official Russian policy and paid by politically connected Russian interests.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalia_Veselnitskaya#Advocacy...

[2] https://www.grassley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/judiciar... (Note this complaint was made in 2016, before the election)

[travmatt]

It’s odd how you are trying to misrepresent and confuse other people about the truth.

[zghst]

We are witness to the return of menace and mischief by a motivated adversary, nonetheless they have always had their hand in US and EU politics.

The revisionist, election hacking narrative is a massive thoughtform, propped up by some savvy scoop every couple of weeks just to die down and go nowhere. Everything the media covers is tainted by an air of sentimentality and idealism, hardly great elements of good journalism, but it sells papers.

Those who think they really know men like Putin, those who believe they really know and understand evil, you will never know them. People who think they know live in a world of black and white, right and wrong, living within society but not operating in the raw layers of society where people make civilization a reality. Men like Putin, they live in this space, desperately trying to keep their reality/world alive. The way they do this is the same how we keep ours alive, they lie. Russians tell very good lies, they are very good at making whole new truths, but if you look very closely, it starts to come apart.

[linkregister]

What non-fringe authorities or publications are claiming that the election was hacked?

[DrScump]

  I think it's pretty clear that's just the NSA's lack of confidence in its leader.

The leak addressed in this article stems from 2015.

[rdtsc]

I think he meant Obama. By 2015 many have given up on hope and change. Unless the hope was to drop over 20k bombs on countries we were not even at war with after receiving a Nobel Peace prize. Overthrow governments in Middle East and arm dangerous rebels in that region.

[VVayneTracker]

Don't forget state sanctioned extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens.

[notyourday]

> I mean, there's verifiable evidence Russia tried to influence our election. That's pretty new for a lot of Americans. I imagine that's why the government and the media are running wild with it. Mueller is still investigating. I would say to wait till that report comes out before jumping to conclusions.

I'm shocked, shocked, shocked there's gambling going on here! Shocked! We are the only ones who are supposed to be doing that!

[philipov]

I crush your Hanlon's Razor with my Grey's Law:

"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

[rdtsc]

> I mean, there's verifiable evidence Russia tried to influence our election.

No doubt, I don't think anyone argues that point. Russia and ex-Soviet Union's KGB have always tried to manipulate Western governments. Propaganda and planting stories in newspapers was one of their favorite methods.

Any developed country would be trying. US is too important for anyone with any power or resource to not try to influence it.

However I don't believe what they did had any meaningful effect on US elections. We would have found out by now. I didn't believe it since it came out and I still don't. So far I see a PR story that has gone out of hand, it was pushed and promoted in order to explain what happened. Heck, people tell that story to themselves. "Surely, my compatriots couldn't have voted this, way, it must have been some super villain spy thing".

> This is just the first time Russia has been so involved in our politics since the Cold War, and the media is rightly running with that idea.

When did Russia stop involved being in our politics. It sent undercover spies to live and try to infiltrate think tanks and such. Remember the spy ring that was uncovered. Literal KGB agents living illegally around NY and such. That stuff never stopped.

> Is it that unbelievable for some people that Russia was involved in trying to influence our election?

It is unbelievable that they singled out Russians and keep running with it for a year without any proof that the Russian did anything to change the result of the election. The amount of talk this received, it would seem they have proof the Russian changed the votes in those Rust Belt states' voting machines. Unless we think those states are full of KGB agents this is story is mostly a waste of time.

And yes, the tragedy here is the opportunity cost of wasting energy on something like this instead of focusing efforts and coming with a new platform for the Democrat party, starting a new party. Instead its Russia, Trump said a stupid thing, his taxes, more Russia, he ate 2 scoops of ice-cream, back to Russia.

Sure they tried, they deserve some credit:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/24/politics/democratic-agenda-unv...

---

"Schumer: Democrats' top priority is health care, not Russia"

The plan -- "A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future" -- is a three-pronged approach that focuses on improving wages, lowering costs of everyday expenses and boosting job-training opportunities.

---

But compared to Russia and the piss dossier and scoops of ice-cream that doesn't seem to interest very many people (if we assume media reflects and presents to people what they really want to hear).