- Tue Nov 14, 2017 8:52 pm
#38410
You raised so many topics and questions, it is hard to answer them all and as lengthy as they deserve. But I think, in general you confuse some things here that need to be straightened up.
Certainly, the USA of today has the best cyber capabilities of the world. All the big players and most important internet companies are American and the intelligence agencies have backdoors built in their software. The Russians are far behind that. But that doesn't mean, they cannot do anything. Like with spacecraft, a less sophisticated technique can still lead to successes. With the antivirus software kapersky they were able to get secret codes of the NSA. No big company with many people working in is completely secure. That is even true for the NSA.
And the DNC is a totally different thing. They were pretty dumb and unprepared in the security department. please watch the frontline deocumentation, especially the second part. they also made public all the interviews they did with many people involved and experts there. Especially the interview with Julia Ioffe is revealing. You can learn a lot about how systems of countries and bureaucracies really work. We have a much idealized idea of it from the movies.
The kind of proof you ask for is not to be found for the usual citizen. We need good journalism for that, the kind of journalism that is hard to find these days due to the shrinking resources for newspapers. The NYT, WP, the Times, Die ZEIT, newspapers like that still have this kind of journalism, and all those that laletly worked on the paradise papers. That doesn't mean they don't make mistakes. The NYT did let itself instrumentalize by the Bush Administration for the desinformation campaign the for illigitimate war on Iraq (to say it bluntly, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz should stand for trial as war criminals) and the NYT had no real rehabilitation process to this day. But lots of newspapers had different accounts and put the account of the Bush administration into doubt.
Proof of Russian interference is everywhere if you start looking for it. See what the social media like facebook and twitter had to report before the congressional committee after first talking the problem small. I do read and discuss in the German flagship of journalism Die ZEIT everyday and can experience the same tactics Julia Ioffe and others talk about, today even British Prime Minister Theresa May talked about it. Pro-Russian trolls and bots interfere in the discussions heavily whenever topics relate Russia, Syria, or Trump - even energy related topics - and heavily fuel the discussion with controversial statements. Its a real nuisance. You cannot discuss in public forums in a moderate democratic way anymore, the discussion is so tainted that many of the usual readers and participants drop out. Interestingly, supporters of the new right party AfD here work hand in hand with these Russian forces.
For me it is shocking. Democracy is on the line here. The doubts you express are exactly those always raised by those people. They continually raise doubts about everthing and want to confuse everything until you don't know what is right and wrong anymore. So I often discuss with people maintaining that the Russian and the US side are equally right or wrong. But there is an important difference between democracies and athoritarian regimes. In Russia, free press is gone. In the USA, even under Trump, it still works.
The problem is that doubts can be raised so easily because the Russians exploit the very success of the press, namely the uncovering of governmental and big company conspiracies and wrong doings. So we were feed with such stories, which are often amplified by Hollywood. Now we are educated to not believe everything without giving it a second thought. The Russians amplify that even more and turn it against the fundamentals of our societies. That's vicious. They thrive because we have some education on politics and stuff, but usually rather superficial. We are not used to scrutinize sources if we didn't study humanities or journalism. I studied philosophy, history and political science, so a big part of that time was to learn to tell good and relevant sources from tainted or irrelevant. Even then it's not always easy to dig all these stories. But I can tell you that this frontline documentation and the Julia Ioffe reasoning is the real deal. Watch the PBS newshour regularly and you learn about the high standards of good journalism in the long run. It takes years. But it's worth it. Democracy is on the line worldwide.
