Tag Archives: Russian hackers

International news, national news, political news

No select panel, but let’s get to heart of hacking matter

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Mitch McConnell says he won’t appoint a select Senate committee to examine the impact of alleged Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election.

OK. Fair enough, Mr. Majority Leader.

But let’s not allow these questions to wither and die now that your fellow Republican, Donald J. Trump, is about to become president of the United States.

We’ve got some questions that need clear, declarative answers.

What did the Russians do? How did they do it? Did their computer hacking efforts have a tangible impact on the election outcome? How in the world does the United States prevent this kind of computer hacking in the future?

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mcconnell-rejects-calls-for-select-panel-on-russian-meddling/ar-BBxmZzP

If the majority leader were to ask for my opinion, I’d suggest that we need an independent commission that doesn’t answer to Senate Republicans or Democrats. We formed one of those after the 9/11 attacks and it came out with some serious findings about what went wrong and how we can prevent future terrorist attacks.

McConnell’s decision to nix a select committee is at odds with many Republicans — such as Sen. John McCain — along with Democrats are demanding. They want a select panel that would be tasked solely with looking at this most disturbing matter.

The new Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said this, according to The Associated Press: “We don’t want this investigation to be political like the Benghazi investigation,” he said. “We don’t want it to just be finger pointing at one person or another.” Schumer added: “We want to find out what the Russians are doing to our political system and what other foreign governments might do to our political system. And then figure out a way to stop it.”

McConnell wants to hand this over to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Fine. Then allow them to clear the decks and concentrate on getting to the heart of what the Russians have done.

Seventeen intelligence agencies have concluded the same thing: The Russians intended to influence the presidential election. The president-elect has dismissed their conclusion, opening up a serious rift between his office and the intelligence community.

Trump and his team are virtually all alone in their view of this disturbing matter. Congress needs to get busy and tell us what the Russians did and when they did it.

national news, political news

FBI joins CIA in fingering Russian hackers

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What do you know about that?

FBI Director James Comey has concluded that the CIA analysis is correct, that the Russians hacked into our nation’s electoral process and might have helped Donald J. Trump win the election over Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Oh, the irony is amazing.

Just to be clear, I am not going to suggest that Comey’s conduct near the end of the presidential campaign cost Clinton the victory most of us thought she would win. The letter to Congress about those e-mails may have contributed some to Hillary’s defeat. Was it decisive? Did it doom her campaign by itself? I don’t believe so.

But now we have the FBI climbing aboard the CIA hay wagon, endorsing the spook agency’s findings that the Russians sought to do the very thing Comey has been accused of doing.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fbi-backs-cia-view-that-russia-intervened-to-help-trump-win-election/ar-AAlEvfm?li=BBnb7Kz

I don’t know all the facts about how the FBI works. I damn sure know even less about the CIA and the work its agents and analysts do to compile intelligence information. I probably don’t want to know.

When two pre-eminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies draw the same conclusion, though, that’s a huge deal.

If only the president-elect would exhibit some respect for the work these professionals do every day, rather than dissing them while denigrating their findings.

Indeed, the candidate who himself questioned the integrity of the electoral process — remember how the president-elect proclaimed the system to be “rigged” against him? — ought to be among the loudest voices demanding a full accounting of what the Russians have done … allegedly.

International news, national news, political news

Smooth transition running into serious bumps

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There goes my trick knee again. It’s throbbing. My gut is grumbling. My fingers are tingling.

Something is telling me that the “smooth and seamless transition” from the Obama administration to the Trump administration is going to become a lot less smooth and seamless.

Why? Gosh. Let me think. Oh! It’s that Russian hacking thing, I reckon.

Donald J. Trump is dismissing — and dissing — the intelligence community’s assessment that Russian spooks hacked into our cyber network and sought to affect the presidential election.

President Obama, meanwhile, is declaring his intention before he leaves office in a little more than month to strike back at the Russians.

Who’s reacting correctly here, the president or the president-elect?

I’m going to go with the man who’s still on the watch in the Oval Office.

Trump’s stated view that the CIA is all wet and his belief that the Russians didn’t do anything wrong is a profoundly dangerous posture to take, given what we know about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s world view and his demonstrated ability to commit atrocious mischief whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Barack Obama is planning to take action against the Russians, while hoping for an easy handoff to the man who’ll succeed him.

The transition could be made a lot smoother if the new guy, Trump, would accept what the intelligence community already knows. The Russians aren’t our friends and they aren’t likely to become friends if they detect they have a patsy sitting behind that big desk in the Oval Office.

My hope, of course, is that the president retains the dignity he has brought to the office and ensures as smooth a transition as possible. If only, though, this Russian hacking matter hadn’t gotten in the way.

International news

Let’s avoid righteous rebuke of Russians

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I feel the need to stipulate a couple of things that might seem to contradict each other.

First, I shudder at the notion that Russian computer geeks hacked into our vast cyber network to seek to influence the outcome of the 2016 president election. It galls me in the extreme to believe that Russians might have engineered the election of Donald J. Trump as the next president of the United States.

Second, it’s time we put all of this into some historical context, which is that the United States of America isn’t squeaky clean in this regard. Far from it. Indeed, we’ve interfered as well with other countries’ political processes.

Some examples come to mind:

* 1963: South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in a coup with backing by U.S. diplomats.

* 1961: U.S.-trained troops stormed ashore at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in an effort to overthrow Fidel Castro. The invasion failed, the invaders either were killed or captured. President Kennedy took full responsibility for the failure.

* 1973: CIA-led insurgents managed to overthrow the government of Marxist Chilean President Salvadore Allende.

* 2003: U.S. troops invaded Iraq with the expressed purpose of “regime change” in Baghdad. They drove Saddam Hussein from power, then found him hiding in that “spider hole.” Saddam was put on trial, convicted of crimes against humanity and was hanged.

The anger at the Russians’ interference with U.S. political processes is taking on the air of righteous indignation that we would do well to rein in. The United States of America has gotten involved, too, in other nations’ internal affairs.

local news, national news, political news

Cyber-security honcho is strangely silent

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There was a time — about a half-dozen years ago — when the then-speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, John Boehner, R-Ohio, called on my congressman, Clarendon Republican Mac Thornberry, to head up a cyber-security task force in Congress.

If memory serves, Boehner tasked Thornberry with finding ways to improve our cyber network protection against the kind of things that have been happening of late: hackers seeking to disrupt the U.S. electoral process. Those pesky Russians have been fingered as the major culprits in this cyber issue; President Obama has ordered a full review of what we’ve learned; Donald J. Trump has dismissed the CIA analysis as “ridiculous.”

So, where is the one-time GOP cyber-security expert on all of this? He should be a major participant in the public discussion. I haven’t seen or heard a thing from the veteran GOP lawmaker since the Russian hacking story hit the fan.

I checked Thornberry’s website to look for a statement from the congressman about what he thinks regarding this matter. I didn’t find anything. I looked at the link titled “Press Releases” and came up empty; I went through the “Issues” link, nothing there, either. I scanned the list of Thornberry’s essays on this and that and couldn’t find a commentary about recent events relating to cyber security.

Here’s the link to his website. Take a look.

http://thornberry.house.gov/

Thornberry is a busy man, now that he’s chairing the House Armed Services Committee. He’s not superhuman.

However, Speaker Boehner gave Thornberry a big responsibility to craft a cyber-security policy that — one could surmise — was supposed to protect our secrets against foreign agents’ snooping eyes.

I’m wondering about the status of whatever it was that my congressman delivered to the speaker and whether any of his recommendations will become part of the cyber-security solution.