The Secret to Russian Hacking

If Russians are hacking the voting machines, let's return to paper ballots.  Try hacking that from Siberia, comrade.  Problem solved.

More Pointless Indictments

Does anyone think that the American military is not actively hacking networks in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Turkey, and countless other nations?  If they aren't, I am disappointed in US intelligence.  Should we extradite to these countries if they indict our hackers?  Obviously not.  This is pure idiocy.  Of course they are hacking us and we are hacking them.  These same indictments could be applied to most of our international adversaries and probably many of our allies.  This is what intelligence agencies do.  Just think of James Bond: he crosses borders illegally, breaks into secure locations, steals secret plans, assassinates enemy spies, and so forth.  This is not a court fight.  The only reason these bogus indictments exist is to feed the Russian Collusion narrative.  After all, if we can indict Russian hackers, why not indict the Russian soldiers who shot down an airliner over Ukraine?  Maybe we can indict the North Koreans who hacked Sony and put their extradition on the list of items for the next summit.  Then we can indict the Chinese hackers who stole American technology.  Foreign policy by indictment.

Maybe the Russians went to the equivalent of the FISA court in Moscow and got a warrant to hack US servers in much the same way that the FBI got a warrant to investigate Russian links to Trump's campaign.  Heck, look at what Snowden exposed on how the US government hacks its citizens but I should care about Russian hackers.  Ha.

Master of Distraction

Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!

Donald Trump, Twitter

 

I do not believe for a second that 'everyone' is talking about that.  I suspect you could count the number of people talking about it on one hand and still have four fingers remaining.  This is a silly claim.  However, it puts Podesta and the DNC back in the news.  The President has tweeted and that is automatically newsworthy.  Looking at it from that perspective, it's plain wrong.  Podesta had no role over the DNC server; he was Hillary's campaign manager and not in any way in charge of the DNC server.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz was in charge of the DNC when it was hacked by Russians or others.  The released emails showed that the DNC had put a thumb on the scale for Hillary in the primaries, not the sort of news that pleased Bernie supporters.  The DNC did not allow the FBI to examine the server but instead hired a company with no discernible biases:

 

The Russian expat leading the fight to protect America: In a war against hackers, Dmitri Alperovitch and CrowdStrike are our special forces (and Putin's worst nightmare).

Esquire

 

Why have US law enforcement investigate a crime at taxpayer expense when we can spend donor money to have a private company reach a convenient conclusion for us?  What happened with Podesta is that he fell for a phishing scheme and accidentally granted access to his email to another hacker, perhaps Russia.  Those emails exposed collusion between various media sources and the Clinton Campaign.  The CIA has nothing to do with all this and it is baffling why he mentions it.

 

And there you have the crazy like a fox brilliance of the tweet.  In exposing Trump's apparent ignorance of the issue, the DNC and John Podesta are again painted in a negative light.  While the left keeps the Russian collusion story alive, Trump keeps the DNC and Podesta email story alive.

 

Meanwhile, while the media gape at his latest tweet, Trump is meeting with Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit!

Election Hacking Hoax

When someone claims that an election was hacked, what does that mean?  The most reasonable interpretation would be that someone either changed the votes or altered the counting of the votes via a computer.  Did the Russians access computers in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania?  No.  Did they somehow hack into the machines that tally the vote counts and transfer some Hillary votes to Trump?  No.  So, the most reasonable interpretation of "The Russians hacked the election" is completely wrong.  What did the Russians do?

The Russians managed to hack DNC servers and also access John Podesta's email.  They released this data to WikiLeaks (WikiLeaks denies that Russians were the source, but they would be required to deny anyone to protect their sources).  WikiLeaks then started posting it and it had an impact on the election.  The Clinton Campaign did not respond to the veracity of the leaked emails but rather attacked the source of them.  So, it's all true but you shouldn't have them.

 

However, if you are going to get all huffy about another country trying to fiddle with your elections, maybe you shouldn't be doing the same.  For instance, Obama helped fund the opposition to Netanyahu in Israel.  His administration was transparently hostile to Netanyahu.  This is how we were treating an ally but we should demand that a foe not do something similar to us?  Was the election hacked when the New York Times published Trump's 1995 tax return or was that just good reporting?  If something harming a Republican - say the Pentagon Papers - is released, the leaker is celebrated.  But if information harmful to Democrats is released, let's attack the source - WikiLeaks, Russia, Ed Snowden, etc.

 

As a geopolitical foe, we should expect Russia to attempt to influence our elections to best benefit them.  I trust that our intelligence agencies are doing their best to influence our foes' politics for the best interests of America.  It is the governments' job on both ends to prevent the other.  Who was on watch for us during this recent hacking?  Rather than blaming Trump and declaring his election illegitimate, should we not be looking squarely at our failed cyber security strategy?

Where will the Hacking Stop?

Yet again, the Democrats have been hacked.  First, it was Hillary at State, then the DNC, and now it is Nancy Pelosi.  If you want to secure something, DO NOT give it to the Democratic Party.  Considering the willful failure of the Democrats to secure the national borders, it should come as no surprise that they can's secure their email either.

With all this hacking and, thanks to it, the demonstrated fact that the DNC did indeed put a finger on the scale in favor of Hillary through the recent primary against Bernie, there is unsurprisingly a discussion of how secure is voting.  With the proliferation of hacking, is it rational to put trust in electronic voting?  I discussed this in another blog.  Whereas electronic voting provides the opportunity to hack from anywhere in the world, a paper ballot must be forged onsite.  That makes it both tougher to corrupt and, if it is, easier to narrow down the culprit.  What paper ballots lack in instant tabulation is more than offset by immunity to foreign hacking.

 

Being in the computer field, I have long regarded electronic voting with skepticism.  I want there to be a hard copy that can be examined if their are any doubts.  Electrons on a silicon chip are much easier to manipulate than holes punched in paper or ink markings.