Serious question. On the news either television or print I keep hearing that Russia wanted Trump to win. At the same time every once in awhile, real quietly, I hear that Putin didn't like Secretary Clinton because she was a large part of the sanctions that came down on Russia after Crimea. All the talking heads seem to want to talk about is why Putin would want Trump in. Couldn't, and maybe shouldn't, we be talking about this more from the perspective that Putin didn't really care who was president as long as it wasn't Clinton? And the fact that Trump was seen as being more favorable to Russia was a bonus? Good questions Glad we can stop hearing about and talking about voter tampering. Link USA Today This is about identifying Putin as ordering the hacking. At least they explained why they think it was Putin, rather than just saying "unnamed officials think". <---- why should I trust that. (CBS said that this morning) If it goes along with how the government works at least it is a little more credible. Link NBC news Don't be a dick. Don't be an idiot.
Any electoral system worth its salt should present zero profile for hackers. In the US they increasingly use freaking computers for voting. An open invitation. What a decentralized system most certainly does is leave the door wide open to theft by more old-fashioned means. And citing Comey as a source LOL. He certainly helped throw the election to Trump.
Even if Putin wanted to keep Hillary from the presidency regardless of her opponent and Trump's sycophancy was just a fortunate happenstance... so what? It doesn't make any of this better.
Seconded. I mean, I'd be glad to know Trump wasn't deliberately colluding with the guy, but I'd rather not having foreign powers involved in our elections at all.
Trump/Putin and their proclivities aside, the long and short of it is that nobody can any longer really believe in the result of elections for US presidents. To this day, apparently, nobody is exactly sure how many votes were cast for whom, we all remember the shenanigans in 2000 and 2004, and the system is rife with eminently hackable and otherwise defective machines. It's a terrible mess and nobody with the power to do it has the slightest interest in changing it. Meanwhile, Guess Who is about to become President. It's going to be an interesting ride, no doubt about that.
My understanding is that computerized voting machines don't have nics...much less MAC or IP addresses. It would be pretty hard to hack those.
Well, I'm hardly an expert. Far more knowledgeable people than yours truly seem to be taking the possibility very seriously indeed. I wouldn't bet a plugged nickel on their unhackability. Or their immunity from tampering other than remote hacking. Machines of any description have no place in the casting or tabulating of votes.
Unless you leave the machines themselves in an unlocked room in a church hall (per the NYT article I cited a few days ago), in which case the average computer nerd can open them up and fiddle with them individually. Takes some work, but it can be done.
They could certainly be tampered with...but you would have to physically plug something in to each and every voting machine, one at a time in order to pull any shenanigans. It would be very hard to influence an election that way.
One machine = thousands of votes. A hell of a lot easier and more feasible than stuffing ballot boxes. I'm afraid all machines are an invitation to fraud, on a more or less gigantic scale. And I can't for the life of me understand Americans' fascination with the things.
So this is for both of you. My point is, that shouldn't this get as much play? One narrative causes even more divisiveness in our country, one keeps it at a more neutral level. I'm not saying not to talk about the first, but to make it the only channel of responsibility. So by constantly talking about the divisive view and not really bothering with the neutral view is the press deliberately pushing for drama and separation of our nation over the issue. Or is it just them being so far up their own ass they have no idea they are pulling the country further and further apart and the damage it does to this country.
What neutral view is there? I've had some problems sleeping lately, so maybe I'm missing something, but either Russia tampered with our election or they didn't. The same as Hilary was either purposely hiding emails of a sensitive nature or she wasn't. There's no neutrality there.
That said: I'm not ignorant of the damage the media has brought on this election, either. Their only locality overall is to the all mighty dollar, and riding Trump's coattails achieved that goal.
This question isn't about whether tampering happened or not. It did, since the media is so easily puppetted, it is always tampered with. In this case it was directed to keep a certain person out of the white house or crippled while in the white house by a foreign country, rather than by someone's campaign. Each side has kept information back about the other side that they release when they think it will do the other side the most damage, rather than release all at one time. That is tampering whether it is from the inside or not. That it was so easily done from outside forces is the disturbing part here. That being said my question in the OP is not about tampering, it is about the motives behind that tampering. Was Putin really looking to put Trump in the white house or was it all about Hillary and either her loosing or making her impotent in the oval office. And my question specifically to your comment was whether the media should be only talking about one possibility (the most dramatic and divisive) which is where Putin wanted Trump in and did what he did to get Trump in the oval office. And the puppet that makes Trump. Or should the media be giving more credence, as some of the articles I linked to do, that this has nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with Clinton and Putin getting revenge on Clinton for Russia's sanctions after Crimea. <---- I consider this more neutral as it takes out the pull between Republicans and Democrats. If it didn't matter who was running against Clinton then Trump isn't a puppet (because of the tampering, not saying he isn't for something else. That isn't the point of this).
Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the clarification And yes, I agree that focusing on one angle is the wrong thing. That the media is doing this still proves nothing of value was learned in the last five weeks.
I find this post a trifle confusing. It's probably safe to say that that Putin wanted to see Trump ----- a guy who has publicly expressed admiration for Putin (right?), is already picking a fight with China, and has just appointed as secretary of state a person who knows dick-all about foreign affairs but is in the oil business (oil being the make-or-break factor in the Russian economy) up to his neck and who in 2013 received the Russian Order of Friendship, the highest honour that can be bestowed on a non-Russian citizen ---- in office. Did he want that ol' Cold Warrior Hillary? No, probably not, eh? But to me the far more important question is what you're doing with an electoral system that (leaving Putin aside for a sec) is so obviously wide open to tampering, and has been tampered with in the past. The past decade and a half have seen several highly questionable (to put it mildly) presidential elections. Why are Americans --- once again --- failing to raise hell about this ramshackle system?
And you are free to engage in that question, which you have done so in other threads. That is not what I asked about and am trying to keep on track about here. Yes there was tampering, It was only worse than normal because it was an outside force. My question was about whether Putin cared who was running against Clinton, or was it just revenge for Crimea sanctions, and should the media be giving this equal time?
I haven't seen much time given to why Putin supported Trump, only that evidence is coming out that he did. And in a binary choice, anti-Clinton is pro-Trump. I think you are trying to make a distinction there that makes no difference.
OK, fair enough. Yes, I have raised it on other threads. I find it a pretty urgent question. I should think Trump is Primary in Putin's mind, Clinton Secondary. In other words, Trump-as-candidate had greater potential to do Putin good than Clinton-as-candidate had to do him harm. Does that constitute an answer to your question?
First point, it depends on your definition of "tampered." Putting out data that might influence voters (who are already knee-deep in data affecting their decision) or literally stealing your vote that you cast for Hillary/Clinton? Second point, did Hillary hide e-mails of a sensitive nature because she was trying to hide something that she knew was classified, or because she didn't want to deal with security procedures (because they are a hassle) and lumped sensitive shit in with cake recipes? Sadly there are no "binary" answers unless all the information is available at one time, in one place, for everyone from every walk of life to examine and come to a logical decision. And that's not going to happen in our lifetimes.
The media should be giving this time, but not equal time. For one thing, Clinton is no longer as relevant as is the future President of the United States. Putin's views on her are thus equally less relevant. But more importantly, Putin, for all his glaring faults, is not stupid. Helping A get elected to B's detriment with no regard whatsoever for A's own policy would be lethally stupid. We have to assume that Putin finds Trump's positions at least acceptable, and since we haven't been given any coherent account of that policy ourselves, that's worrying.
To what end? To hold Trump blameless for the Russian interference that benefited his campaign? To make this an America/Russia issue and not a Trump/Clinton issue? Because I'm seeing it as an America/Russia issue, except that Trump and a lot of Republicans are siding with Russia because it's beneficial for them in the short term. I think I'm pretty good at my job and totally deserving of a promotion, but if I got promoted tomorrow and it turned out Vladimir Fucking Putin had been pulling strings to try to make it happen, I'd support any and all investigations into it, and I wouldn't be doing my best to convince the public it wasn't true.
Kind of both, I'd say. They've noticed since 9/11 at least that pissing people off seems to result in better ratings. I'd also say a lot of it comes down to many in the media being true believers and are thus trying to push that, like a missionary preaching the good word and condemning whatever they see as evil.
But the computers on which the voting software is developed and/or built most certainly do, as do the computers on which the ballots are created. If I was going to hack an election, that's how I'd do it: first modify the voting software to get bias data from the ballot configuration, then target the ballot configuration creation software to phone home and find out what races should have biases and how large. Even if the configuration file is a text file and looks normal when opened in a text editor, it would be trivially easy to hide bias data encoded in various non-printing whitespace and control characters. Unless the ballot creators are inspecting the files with a hex editor, they'd never see it. To cover my tracks, I'd install root kits on the aforementioned machines so they'd have to inspect the files on other machines to even see the whitespace-encoded bias data. Do it right and even if election offices are doing disassembly inspection on the voting software (which, given that the hardware in most voting machines is x86 running Windows, is a huge PITA), if they do it on the dev or build machines (which they probably would), they'd never catch it. Lack of a network connection is not a problem for a determined bad actor, unless the whole development, build, and configuration toolchain are all airgapped.
Oh, coherent accounts aren't necessary - Trump has unveiled his nature to the world via Twitter. He's going to do whatever makes him money - or, more accurately, what he THINKS will make him money (Donald no comprehendez de investmente intelligente) - or whatever will stroke his yuge ego (and tiny... erm.. hands). Doesn't take a genius to manipulate a man like that. I'm sure Russia's objective was "anyone but Hillary" but Trump is the icing on their Siberian troops.