1. The DNC reported a hack of its emails by a Russian server a month ago.
In mid-June the company announced that the intruders appeared to include a group it had previously identified by the name “Cozy Bear” or “APT 29” and been inside the committee’s servers for a year. A second group, “Fancy Bear,” also called “APT 28,” came into the system in April. It appears to be operated by the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, according to federal investigators and private cybersecurity firms.
3. From the same article: Pro-Putin Russian hackers have been a thorn in the side of American cybersecurity for years now.
The first group is particularly well known to the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence unit, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies. It was identified by federal investigators as the likely culprit behind years of intrusions into the State Department and White House unclassified computer system.
4. Wikileaks, along with publishing the emails, published unredacted credit card numbers, passport numbers, social security numbers, and home addresses of hundreds of Democratic donors. They called this “not an error.” This is known as doxxing, and it is illegal in US jurisdictions.
Doxing is always illegal, whether it is done against a federal employee, a state employee, or a regular person. There are federal and state laws that specifically address doxing government employees. With regular citizens, doxing falls under various state criminal laws, such as stalking, cyberstalking, harassment, threats, and other such laws, depending on the state. Since these doxing threats and activities are made on the internet, the law of any state may be invoked, though most often an investigator will look to the state in which the person making the threat is located, if this is known, or the state in which the victim is situated. A state prosecutor can only prosecute violations of the laws of his or her own state, and of acts that extend into their state. When acts are on the internet, they extend into all the states.
Misinformation was spread that doxing is legal. I am not sure how or why anyone fell for that misinformation. Surely, people must understand instinctively, even if they were misled about the law, that if they are threatening someone or putting them at risk, or tormenting or harassing the other on the internet, that this must be illegal. Common sense would tell you that bullying or jeopardizing another would be illegal in some way. So yes, doxing is illegal, no matter who the target.5. Wikileaks has offered support to the racist, sexist agitator and Trump supporter Milo Yiannopoulos after his ban from Twitter for inciting hate mobs. This support was not merely a tweet or two extending a hand: it was an offer to build an entire new social network fine-tuned to Yiannopoulos’ needs.
6. Milo is a vocal Trump supporter and headlined an event at the RNC.
After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.
11. There is nothing in the DNC emails that indicates breaking of any laws.
12. Bernie Sanders only declared himself a Democrat this election cycle. The DNC was not obligated to support him, and yet they did – there are emails where staffers complain about bending over backwards for the Sanders campaign. There’s also an email from the Sanders campaign demanding a private jet to be paid for by the DNC after Bernie had reached the point where it was mathematically impossible for him to win the nomination. (They also called Lin-Manuel Miranda a baby for not doing a fundraiser on his off day, which is frankly hilarious.)
12c. Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic nomination by 3,775,437 votes. He lost badly among registerd Democrats, black Democrats, and Latino Democrats. If the DNC is incompetent enough not to secure their servers against hackers, they are sure as shit not capable of stealing nearly four million votes.
13. Hillary Clinton does not have mind-control powers and is not responsible for every single word typed in a private DNC email server.
14. The release of the emails was timed for when Trump would have a large amount of goodwill – the “convention bump,” as noted in several large-scale polls by reputable organizations – and before the Democrats/Hillary would have a chance to respond to the bump at their own convention.
15. Trump has engaged in much worse political ratfucking of his same-party opponents than the DNC did in its emails, in public, and it is widely known that the RNC has been attempting to sabotage him for months.
16. It ain’t like Putin hasn’t done shit like this before. He killed a journalist with plutonium. I could go on about what he does inside his country, but I’m not super familiar with it, and frankly "sitting head of state ordered the assassination of a journalist in exile by means of nuclear material" is fucked up enough.
Conclusions that can be reasonably drawn from these facts:
1. Wikileaks, whatever its intentions in the past, is not a neutral whistleblower and cannot be, given the money their founder draws from the Russian government.
2. The DNC did not engage in any political ratfuckery beyond what is normal for any and especially this cycle, nor did they break any laws.
3. Wikileaks is not a progressive actor, given its support for both Milo Yiannopoulos and Vladimir Putin.
4. The hackers sat on the material for more than a month, and the reveal of the documents was timed to hurt Hillary Clinton and buck up Trump.
Other conclusions that can be drawn:
1. Trump and Putin colluded somehow on this hack job.
2. Putin wants Trump in the White House because Trump has, among other things, publicly stated that he will not defend NATO states bordering Russia if Russia invades, and is willing to sponsor illegal activity to make this happen.
Conclusions the FBI has drawn:
(Also, on that note – the DNC is not gonna accuse a foreign state of trying to influence the election via cyberterrorism without some cold hard proof. That’s not an accusation you throw around lightly, especially when you represent one of the two largest parties in America.)
TL;DR
Debbie Wasserman Schultz complaining about an independent tanking her anointed candidate should not make you mourn the death of American democracy. What should be making you furious – and terrified, honestly – is that a foreign state, led by an autocrat with a history of human rights abuses, has used a “pro-transparency” organization to achieve its goal in installing a malleable strongman and has committed cyberterrorism in the process.
Please don’t vote third party this election. Please.
this bears repeating, because it’s both terrifying and transparently evil. They have a lot of money invested in Trump, after all, and they’d like to see the payoff:
The
FBI is publicly saying that they suspect the Russian government did
this. Several unnamed US officials suspect this was “a deliberate
attempt to influence the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump,
according to five individuals familiar with the investigation of the
breach.”
Tag: election
Patron Saint Bluebell
Hey, listen. I know the world’s on fire. But listen.
I’ll tell you a thing.
On
the day after the election, when everything was worst and all I could
do was go numb or cry hysterically, do you know what gave me the most
comfort?It wasn’t the words of Lincoln or Gandhi or Maya
Angelou, it wasn’t Psalms or poetry, it wasn’t my grandmother, it wasn’t
contemplating the long arc of history. It wasn’t even hugging the dog.It was the Twitter account @ConanSalaryman.
This
is a joke account. It’s somebody who narrates as if Conan was working
in an office. Tweets usually sound like “By Crom!” roared Conan. “You
jackals cannot schedule a mere interview without gathering in a pack and
cackling?!” or “Conan slammed his sword through his desk. Papers and
blood rained through the office. Monday was slain.”I followed
it awhile back and have found it funny. (I’m not a huge Robert Howard
fan inherently, but whoever is writing these does the schtick well.) But
if it had not posted once that day, no one would have noticed at all.Instead, Conan the Salaryman posted something inspirational. And then replied to dozens of people replying to him, for hours, in character,
telling them that by Crom! it was only defeat if we did not stand up
again, that the greatest act of strength was to keep walking in the face
of hopelessness, that the gods have given the smallest of us strength
to enact change, that we must all keep going as long as Crom gave us
breath, and tyrants frightened Conan not, but we must look to those
unable to fend for themselves. (“Though by Crom! We must hammer
ourselves into a support network, not an army!”)I have no idea
who is behind that account. But it was the most bizarrely comforting
thing I saw all day, in a day that had very little comfort in it. There
was this weight of story behind it. It helped me. I think it helped a
lot of people. If only a tiny bit–well, tiny bits help.I have been thinking a lot lately about Bluebell from Watership Down.
There’s absolutely no reason you should remember Bluebell, unless, to take an example completely and totally at
random, you read it eleven thousand times until your copy fell apart
because you were sort of a weird little proto-furry kid who loved
talking animals more than breath and wrote fan fic and there weren’t any
other talking animal books and you now have large swaths memorized as a
result. Ahem.Bluebell is a minor character. He’s Captain
Holly’s friend and jester. When the old warren is destroyed, Captain
Holly and Bluebell are the last two standing and they stagger across the
fields after the main characters. By the end, Holly is raving,
hallucinating, and screaming “O zorn!” meaning “all is destroyed” and
about to bring predators down on them. And Bluebell is telling stupid
jokes.And they make it the whole way because of Bluebell’s
jokes. “Jokes one end, hraka the other,” he says. “I’d roll a joke along
the ground and we’d both follow it.” When Holly can’t move, Bluebell
tells him jokes that would make Dad jokes look brilliant and Holly is
able to move again. When Hazel, the protagonist, tries to shush him,
Holly says no, that “we wouldn’t be here without his blue-tit’s
chatter.”I tell you, the last few days, thinking of this, I really start to identify with Bluebell.
I
am not a fighter, not an organizer, certainly not a prophet. Throw
something at me and I squawk and cover my head. I write very small
stories with wombats and hamsters and a cast of single digits. I am not
the sort of comforting soul who sits and listens and offers you tea.
(What seems like a thousand years ago, when I had the Great Nervous
Breakdown of ‘07, I remember saying something to the effect that I had
realized that if I had myself as a friend, I would have been screwed,
because I was useless at that kind of thing. And a buddy of mine from my
college days, who was often depressed, wrote me to say that no, I
wasn’t that kind of person, but when we were together I always made her
laugh hysterically and that was worth a lot too. I treasured that
comment more than I am entirely comfortable admitting.)But I can
roll a joke along the ground until the end of the world if I have to.
And increasingly, I think that’s what I’m for in this life. Things are
bad and people have died already and I am heartsick and tired and the
news is a gibbering horror–but I actually do know why a raven is like a
writing desk.So. First Church of Bluebell. Patron Saint.
Keep holding the line.
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