Senate Intelligence Committee details Russian activities to disrupt 2016 vote

[brooklynite]

Source: Politico

The Senate Intelligence Committee issued on Thursday the first of its five-part report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, efforts the panel says began as early as 2014.

The heavily redacted 67-page report, which has been cleared by the U.S. intelligence committee, focuses on election security and details Russia’s attacks on the country’s voting systems.

It also lays out a series of public and classified findings and recommendations that are the result of the panel's roughly two-and-a-half year investigation examining the Moscow-led interference campaign in the last presidential election.

...snip...

While the committee found "no evidence" that attackers changed any votes or manipulated voting machines, the efforts “exploited the seams between federal authorities and capabilities, and protections for the states.”

Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/25/russia-interference-2016-election-1435436

[BigmanPigman]

1. Bit they won't secure the next election...

hypocrites!

[alwaysinasnit]

2. I am a little suspicious when a point is emphasized that there was "no evidence found that

attackers changed any votes or manipulated voting machines."

[Igel]

5. Heard an interview yesterday.

The interviewer kept coming back to Russian hacking of election equipment/computers, and the person being interviewed kept saying, to the interviewer's great frustration, that while voter registration equipment was hacked, there was no indication that a single vote was changed by direct Russian interference. The interviewer kept trying to suggest that the interference wasn't just looking at voter registration records or playing with news or even the DNC email server hack, but something truly serious.

Finally she just objected to all these things that it was clear that there was real, serious interference by Russians in the 2016 elections, thanked the interviewer, and shut him off. Apparently those things--news distortion, voter registration software hacking, DNC email hack, didn't qualify as "real, serious interference."

That's pretty much the extent of it, though. Problem is, a lot of people are convinced that vote changing really, truly, must have happened.

Even the disinformation campaign may not have been enough to account for even one flipped state. And while the DNC hack was annoying--at the time it was said hundreds of other organizations had been the subject of the same phishing attempt--it's still unclear to me that it changed a single voter's mind from voting for HRC to voting for Trump, or even from voting to not-voting. (At best it sowed discord and hurt HRC's chances at gaining the (D) nomination; but we like to ignore that above "support Trump" the combined intelligence report said "hurt HRC".

[JonLP24]

7. It had to change a lot of minds

A Russian troll gained 10,000 followers in a week after tweeting on #BasketofDeplorables the Russians got that trending and the next day the Trump campaign demanded an apology and cited the hashtag.

Even some on the left aren't happy what the DNC hacked emails revealed and there are some like Jimmy Dore or whoever that deny that even Russian interference took place. There is a lot of Russian denial.

[htuttle]

6. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Any hacker above script kiddie grade will know how to cover their tracks to avoid losing their prizes.

These guys were state-sponsored -- they weren't script kiddies.

[asiliveandbreathe]

3. READ the report...pg 33 is interesting...easy read..I am at pg 50 - here is some of pg's 46-50

States fearful the Feds want to take over elections...

(U)

One of the most controversial elements of the relationship between DHS and the states was the decision to designate election systems as critical infrastructure. Most state officials relayed that they were surprised by the designation and did not understand what it meant; many also felt DHS was not open to input from the states on whether such a designation was
beneficial.

(U) Secretary Johnson remembers the first time he aired the possibility of a designation was on August 3, 2016. He went to a reporters' breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor and publicly "floated the idea of designating election infrastructure as critical infrastructure."^"^ Then, on August 15, 2016, Secretary Johnson had a conference call with election officials from all 50 states.

"I explained the nature of what it means to be designated critical infrastructure. It's not a mandatory set of [regulations], it's not a federal takeover, it's not binding operational directives. And here are the advantages: priority in terms of our services and the benefit of the protection of the international cyber norm."^-^ Secretary Johnson continued: "I stressed at the time that this is all voluntary and it prioritizes assistance if they seek it."^^^

(U) Some states were vocal in objecting to the idea. In evaluating the states' response, DHS came to the conclusion that it should put the designation on hold, deciding it would earn more state trust and cooperation if it held off on the designation as critical infrastructure and perhaps sought more buy-in from the states at a later date.^^^

Ready for this one..
(U)

For most states, the story of Russian attempts to hack slate infrastructure was one of confusion and a lack of information. It began with what states interpreted as an insignificant event: an FBI FLASH notification on August 18, 2016,1
Then, mid-October, the MS-ISAC reached out to state IT directors with an additional alert about specific IP addresses scanning websites. At no time did MS-ISAC or DHS identify the IP addresses as associated with a nation-state actor. Given the lack of context, state staff who received the notification did not ascribe any additional urgency to the warning; to them, it was a few more suspect IP addresses among the thousands that were constantly pinging state systems. Very few state IT directors informed state
election officials about the alert.

[certainot]

4. after beign stymied in foreign countries for decades by the voice of america radio we have to

assume the kremlin wouldn't try to infiltrate and piggyback what was and still is the most successful propaganda operation authoritarians have ever had in the US - 1500 coordinated radio stations

why is the name where 'hannity' would be in the glossary of the mueller report, between graf and hawker, redacted for harm to ongoing matters.

they say it was happening at least as far back as 2014. that's the same year sam nunberg says he was told by trump/stone to listen "to 1000s of hours of talk radio". media needs to ask him what states he listened to it in and see if they matched the states the russians were active in. that was the same year a russian troll says he
"got a list of topics to write about"

any sampler of rw radio knows much of the russian trolling piggybacked those same talk radio memes.

at $1000/hr 1200 radio stations doing 15 hrs a day are worth about $5BIL FREE. why wouldn't they try to figure out how to feed limbaugh and other talk radio gods, who most of the rest of the blowhards have to follow? all tehy have to do is plant stories in breitbart and word net daily and drudge and the radio tells the story all over the country over and over and over

they can also call programs, and have emails read over the air to millions

then piggyback it with social media

[Blue_Tires]

8. Greenwald, Assange and Snowden were unavailable for comment

[Talitha]

9. Remember when Ivanka recently went to China to buy voting machines?

They're probably infested...

No wonder Mitch McTraitor isn't allowing investigations.

[Kid Berwyn]

10. The committee found "no evidence" of vote tampering.

“And by the time the public sees the redactions, I’ll be long gone Don.”