I disagree with this logic. Yes what the DNC did was wrong. No question. But that does not change the fact that a foreign power did try to influence the election to get a guy who they like more, who is a lunatic. This is a foreign power that does not hold the American people's interests at the highest priority. This was not some charity hack so that Americans could choose the right guy. This was a deliberate attempt to harm America, or to make America a vassal state.

I get that, but let's be real here. Revealing emails did not impact this election. Did it swing some undecided voters away from the Democratic party? Yes, but there is no data to show it swung them to the Republicans. If I were a Democrat with concerns about my party, I would choose a party as close to mine as possible if I were to change my vote. That means Green party, Libertarian, etc., but NOT Republican. Personally, i didn't vote because I am a Republican and cannot stomach Trump. The Democratic party is as far from me ideologically, politically, and religiously as any party can get. The third part candidates were just Democrats in different clothing. One thing I know for certain though is that I would never have voted for the Hillary. I would dare say the same could be said about Democrats and Trump.The hacking didn't get Trump elected, so let's get past that nonsense and focus on going after the perpetrators for the crime of hacking. The "stole the election" is a sideshow.

Realistically no one knows the impact of the emails and what not. Not you, not me. It could certainly not have impacted the election. It may have impacted the election a lot.

Playing politics? Literally everyone there is playing politics with this. Doesn't change the fact that it's a serious concern.

I can easily imagine many groups attacking voting systems.

I can easily imagine those attacks changing the results of local elections, as many of these have a few hundred or thousand total votes and are decided by slim margin. There are always a few elections around the nation that are decided by a handful of votes, and always a few that result in a tie.

While I can imagine some modifications, I struggle to imagine those attacks causing widescale changes at the presidential election scale. There would need to be small attacks made at tens of thousands of unrelated disconnected systems affecting several million votes.

I think it is the current news of the day. In a few weeks there will be different news stories because it will be "olds" rather than "news". In a year it will be ancient history as far as news companies are concerned.

Yea I don't think anyone's saying that the voting machines were hacked, not even the CIA. Most intel folks say that Russia got at private emails and released those to sway election to Trump.

Russia's hack (confirmed?)

The idea that Russia is hacked the DNC / the Hillary campaign in order to expose their corruption in order to sway the election towards Trump is a completely laughable insane conspiracy theory / propaganda campaign.
What on earth makes you take it seriously?
The fact that so many people are taking such obvious propaganda as fact, without any evidence whatsoever, is itself extremely troubling. Just as troubling as the fact that Trump is now president :P

I'm fairly certain there is evidence for this. We aren't talking wild conspiracy theories being thrown around here. And I don't believe that all the arms of the US government are just throwing around wild ideas for kicks.

In any event, why is Trump the Asshole defending Russia so much? We act as if Putin is a shining example of honesty, etc. He has no reason to defend Russia whatsoever.

Russia's hack (confirmed?)

The idea that Russia is hacked the DNC / the Hillary campaign in order to expose their corruption in order to sway the election towards Trump is a completely laughable insane conspiracy theory / propaganda campaign.
What on earth makes you take it seriously?
The fact that so many people are taking such obvious propaganda as fact, without any evidence whatsoever, is itself extremely troubling. Just as troubling as the fact that Trump is now president :P

I'm fairly certain there is evidence for this. We aren't talking wild conspiracy theories being thrown around here. And I don't believe that all the arms of the US government are just throwing around wild ideas for kicks.

That's the point of the propaganda - to make you feel certain that there is evidence when you've actually seen none. Just because you've been absolutely bombarded with propaganda doesn't change how wild this conspiracy theory is.

Even the CIA didn't make this accusation as an official statement. They made up a fake memo that implied that there was evidence, and "leaked" it to a compliant reporter who trusts them without requiring any fact-checking (i.e. got a presstitute to regurgitate their propaganda)... and then everyone else reported on those initial reports also without doing any fact-checking.
Seriously, next time you find an article on it, try to trace back the accusations to their source and find the evidence, or even the specific name of an official spokesman at the CIA who vouches for the evidence.

And then start applying the same skepticism to US corporate media that you apply to Russian state-owned media, because they're both just as corrupt in holding up the principles of journalism and both publish the same level of bullshit.

And I don't believe that all the arms of the US government are just throwing around wild ideas for kicks.

It's not all arms of the government, there's plenty of dissenting voices who are calling out this bullshit... and what planet are you from where the US govt doesn't routinely and knowingly peddle bullshit conspiracies that are eventually shown to have no evidence? That's literally every war they've been involved in since WW2.

Then there's the absurdity of the real situation that we live in VS what this conspiracy actually says. They're accusing Russia of interfering in their governance by telling the citizenry the truth.

Meanwhile, the US has been funding anti-government terrorism in Syria since Bush was in power and all through Obama, violently overthrew Libya without evidence and handed it to Islamists on a silver platter, and financed and trained the coup in Ukraine for their new hand-picked government there -- which would be equivalent to Russia overthrowing Mexico and installing their own puppet government... yet people are outraged at a fictional story that Russia told you the truth? There's no words for this lunacy!

And let's assume for a moment the DNC had done nothing (just imagine for a minute). Do you really think Russians would've been like "oh well, nothing here, let's move on. They'd keep digging. They'd make shit up and make it look real.

I don't think the Russians could do that much damage with false information. The reason why the hacking was substantial and effective was because the emails were real. Hillary Clinton admitted sending the emails. There were trials, and there were questions being asked and answered. There were processes happening in the Congress when the emails were leaked. If the emails were fake, it'd be no news and so easy to be debunked. Everybody would be like "wtf? I didn't send this..where did this come from?" Our justice system is strong enough for that.

I am with MarkS here. What the Russians did was very minimal in terms of hacking: just released what's already there. I mean any teenagers with access to the emails could've done the same. Did you read the report? Here's the official report from the US government. All it talks about is how RT (a Russian media) is spreading news favoring the Russian government and Trump. I mean come on, a news outlet run by a government favors the government? Surprise? Shocking? That's like complaining now the CCTV (the Chinese media) is hacking Americans by only talking about news favoring the Chinese government and American perception of the Chinese. Holy shit every government does that.

I am seriously still wondering if that hack report is a joke or just an executive summary. But the news coverage and people reaction (especially the democrats) are unreal.

EDIT: with this much media coverage, and people reaction to it, I was expecting that there were Russian agents inside the FBI/CIA and the Congress pulling strings, hacking the voting machines, because that would be what you'd call a real hacking. But after reading the official report and that it's comparing RT's Twitter followers with CNN and other news media, I was just like "are you fucking kidding me? How does this deserve this much media attention?"

More EDIT: FYI, the DNC wanted Trump to win the Republican primary thinking it's an easy win against Trump. My take on this whole Russian thing is that the DNC is bitter as hell that their plan backfired, and found some evidence of Russian involvement, as apparently the Russians were like "Hey, we want Trump too!", and is putting all effort to blame the Russians. And the American public is eating it all up.

I had heard that Assange knew the password was “password" for the email account too, it was on local radio news here in the UK.

If this is true the leak could have come from anyone, even bots and worms brute force emails and check for these passwords.

What's more likely;

A foreign government pays high level hackers to hack into a server and leak emails that tell the truth, or some person or program figures out the password, and someone reads the email and leaks it, unrelated to international espionage?

It's in the interests of the intelligence community to state they know what happened, as everything they do is classified how can we be sure they're truthful? Where is the oversight?

I've never said that the hacking was something really sophisticated, nor that the DNC isn't unbelievably dumb for not having good IT standards, just that it was indeed Russians behind it. Moreover, this wasn't some charity hack for the betterment of the American people, like I said before. If that was the case, why not do the same with the RNC? Why is it that all the leaks were all uniformly anti Democrat? Why the hell is Donald Trump so intent on defending Russia to the extent that he is?

I apply reasonable skepticism and I don't see reasons to be skeptical here.

I never supported the idiotic foreign policy in Ukraine and Syria, or for that matter, a series of disastrous wars and proxy wars that have currently created the mess that is ISIS. I get the irony in this story. Doesn't mean people won't be outraged or make it any less wrong.

I would believe the conspiracy theories stuff, except that this isn't like throwing around wild accusations of some kid stealing something from a cookie jar. Shit, Obama expelled Russian diplomats over this. Plus the people calling bullshit on this are really pro Trump, who would probably be unwilling to believe anything bad about Trump even if there was video evidence of him murdering someone. There's been bipartisan support behind the accusations.

We don't really know what the effect of this was. I admit that it's entirely possible that the effect was nothing.

Democrats should seriously get their shit together. They lost partially because some idiot overlooked the chance of losing Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (among other states). The effect of this thing is entirely unknown because there's no easy way to measure it. We could look at polling data, but polling data seems to have been off anyways.

And let's assume for a moment the DNC had done nothing (just imagine for a minute). Do you really think Russians would've been like "oh well, nothing here, let's move on. They'd keep digging. They'd make shit up and make it look real.

I don't think the Russians could do that much damage with false information. The reason why the hacking was substantial and effective was because the emails were real. Hillary Clinton admitted sending the emails. There were trials, and there were questions being asked and answered. There were processes happening in the Congress when the emails were leaked. If the emails were fake, it'd be no news and so easy to be debunked. Everybody would be like "wtf? I didn't send this..where did this come from?" Our justice system is strong enough for that.

Well we know that there was plenty of false information being spread on the internet anyways. Remember Pizzagate?

I get people's skepticism, and I acknowledge that there is a degree of this being overplayed (i.e., it's not hacking the election, it's just getting bad shit from poorly secured machines onto the Internet), but I still strongly believe that there is a degree of truth to this.

In any case, true or not, the only effect of this story is that if you hate Trump, you've got one more reason to hate him now and if you support Trump, you won't care anyways, because let's face it, if nothing from the last year has bothered you about Trump, there's no conceivable reason to start now.

And of course, if you don't buy it, well then there's no effect anyways.

Well we know that there was plenty of false information being spread on the internet anyways. Remember Pizzagate?

I am not talking about the reaction of random strangers or fake news. I am talking about that there are due process, like investigations, by the CIA, FBI, and the Congress over these emails. Hilllary Clinton went to trials for this. She got asked questions like "Did you send this email yes or no", "Did you know this person X you sent an email to", "What is your relationship to this person". And she admitted to and answered those questions. That's what makes the email leak powerful because they were real. If the information in the email was fake, the trial would have ended too soon and everybody would have just moved along.

Trump, hate him or love him, is just a political puppet because he is perfect for that. Brash, rude, rich, and white, doesn't think twice before saying anything, makes him predictable. He is not just the Russian puppet, but also the DNC's puppet. Russia just doubled down on the DNC plan and made the plan backfired.

It is hilarious in so many level.

Sadly, the public is eating this all up thinking it's all about racism, and people got hurt over this. While in reality, it was just the DNC wanting Clinton to win.

Russia's hack (confirmed?)

The idea that Russia is hacked the DNC / the Hillary campaign in order to expose their corruption in order to sway the election towards Trump is a completely laughable insane conspiracy theory / propaganda campaign.
What on earth makes you take it seriously?

The fact that so many people are taking such obvious propaganda as fact, without any evidence whatsoever, is itself extremely troubling. Just as troubling as the fact that Trump is now president :P

seriously? thats a real stretch. The USA, Russia and China are pratically "hacking" each other on a daily basis. Its part of war now.

Hilllary Clinton went to trials for this.

She didn't, though. She was never charged with a crime, hence there was no trial. There may have been a deposition (don't quote me on this), but that's completely different from a trial.

I had heard that Assange knew the password was “password" for the email account too, it was on local radio news here in the UK.

You've said that twice now, but I haven't been able to find any evidence that it's true. In fact, it seems to be unlikely for a number of reasons.

Even the CIA didn't make this accusation as an official statement. They made up a fake memo that implied that there was evidence, and "leaked" it to a compliant reporter who trusts them without requiring any fact-checking (i.e. got a presstitute to regurgitate their propaganda)... and then everyone else reported on those initial reports also without doing any fact-checking. Seriously, next time you find an article on it, try to trace back the accusations to their source and find the evidence, or even the specific name of an official spokesman at the CIA who vouches for the evidence.

I'm not totally sure what you mean, but I think this is what most people are referring to, so I'm not sure where you got "fake memo" from. Now, it's by no means possible to judge the conclusions of that assessment with the relevant supporting evidence being classified, but it'd probably be a lot more constructive if you could at least point out exactly which aspects you're skeptical of.

The password thing could have been made up by assange, yes, that much could be true.

However it was stated on local bbc radio news so that is a valid source as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't mean they would necessarily bother to check if what he said was true (and how can they?) but they are able to say "Julian stated..." because that part is true.

Also I'm not American I'm not too bothered beyond that but I think like I program, and it's a case of "keep it simple" and simple hacking by teenage ioks is far more plausible than international espionage...