Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lobochrome 70 days ago
How did PRISM affect civilian life?
1 comments

Honest question: how do state-sponsored attacks from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia affect civilian life?
Presumably, those have influenced elections, though I guess it depends what you count as an attack.

Plenty of bots try to modify public opinion. Someone hacked the DNC in 2015/16, the result of which also alleged attempted manipulation in 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_National_Committee_...

Since we (as old Rummy said) do not know what we do not know, we cannot be certain about the extent of cyber attacks and what they might have influenced, and may not know these things until discoveries decades later, if ever.

Note the RNC was also hacked but the data was not leaked. Presumably used to influence the election and policies in other ways.
I believe the popular sentiment is that when they hacked the DNC they found a handful of things that would provide bad optics for the party. But the RNC? They found so much evidence of criminality that near to the entire party flipped positions on issues related to Russia. So we have 2x successful hacks, one of which yielded some bad press for the Dems, and yielded an entirely compromised party in the Repubs who now are being actively blackmailed.
All of that applies equally to PRISM and any internal propaganda campaigns that was feeding into, no?
Yes... they might have influenced elections and now, as a result, the world must cope with the Trump regime.

Let's now fool ourselves.... Trump is probably the best, most successful attempt at world de-stabilisation all those rogue states ever achieved.

Maybe Americans should take responsibility for electing a maniac as their President. In the end, the buck stops with Americans.
~1/3rd of US citizens voted for him. Don’t lump us all in.
Some of you are just guilty of negligence yes.
Good. But the parent was blaming Trump on disinformation propaganda, and it is important to point out that the remaining 1/3-rd of the country is not some kind of idiot army that replaced their brains with FB propaganda. They voted for this actively.

Also, in a democracy you don't get to disavow 1/3rd of the population that didn't vote with you.

Not if the election was stolen. There was a smattering of evidence after the election but the speed with which is disappeared was truly something to behold.
WannaCry massively affected the NHS.
century energy ransomware no?