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.

The point is that two wrongs do not make a right. As far as the DNC puppet goes...they certainly preferred Trump, thinking he'd be easy to beat. I'm not sure if there was a plan though.

I'm going to say one thing about racism and the election, and that's it, as I don't want to derail the thread, but you'd be delusional to think that race wasn't a part of this entire tragedy known as the 2016 election.

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...

Assange isn't really a trustworthy source in what he's doing. And like RivieraKid said, cyber attacks from foreign states are actually extremely common nowadays. It isn't far fetched at all actually.

Imagine that you are married and that it's a long lasting marriage. Let's say that some stranger (Russia in this case), tells you that she is cheating you... repeatedly and with different people. What would you do? ... Now some other dude hears obout this, and now he tells you that the stranger is a bad person because he pointed you the fact... but it turns out that this dude was the one who fucked your wife.

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 story first broke when the CIA deliberately "leaked" a memo to NBC reporter Ken Dilanian, who republished the allegations it contained without question -- which is no surprise as he is known to be a CIA presstitute. The whole first wave of news coverage on the story was based on Dilanian's unverified secret memo, hand delivered to him by the CIA for the exact purpose of manipulating public opinion... which ironically is the thing that the public is up in arms about, but blaming a different boogeyman for it!

Read any of this early coverage and notice the lack of fact-checking, official sources, or names whatsoever. It's all "officials believe blah", without naming them. Dilanian also just presents his claims as fact, without the disclaimer that the CIA provided him with the claims and asked him to publish them, which is important context for a skeptical reader to have... But these anonymous claims were so widely published that everyone felt like the government had actually made these accusations publicly, when they actually hadn't yet.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-officials-putin-personally-involved-u-s-election-hack-n696146

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-review-of-russian-hacking-during-presidential-campaign/2016/12/09/31d6b300-be2a-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-hack.html

I'm sorry, but that's a blatant CIA-originated propaganda campaign, and should cause you to immediately have significant doubts as to the truth of the story. Once you've got those doubts, you should need to actually see some kind of evidence in order to believe their claims Why is that so outrageous? IMHO choosing to believe unverified CIA propaganda is the outrageous thing to do here.

The real story here is how much influence the CIA has over public opinion and its ability to force the executive's/legislative's hand.

The 6th Jan report that you linked to is only a day old, and really contains nothing... It also reads like it was written by people who were told what conclusions they had to reach, and then filled in the blanks to get there. It's an essay trying to justify their conspiracy theory, not evidence for it. It's WMD's all over again. It's just there to give the media their talking points to continue the propaganda campaign, and reassure us that there is perfectly good evidence somewhere but also perfectly good reasons why we can't see any of it.

What's really scary is that the EU and the US have used this CIA-generated hysteria in order to push through extremely dangerous censorship legislation, allowing them to restrict the free press!

The story first broke when the CIA deliberately "leaked" a memo to NBC reporter Ken Dilanian, who republished the allegations it contained without question -- which is no surprise as he is known to be a CIA presstitute. The whole first wave of news coverage on the story was based on Dilanian's unverified secret memo, hand delivered to him by the CIA for the exact purpose of manipulating public opinion... which ironically is the thing that the public is up in arms about, but blaming a different boogeyman for it!

None the articles you linked to mention this (fake) "secret memo." I'm not claiming that it's not how NBC got their info, I'm just looking for a little context about how you got "fake memo" out of all of this. My impression was that the someone involved with the creation of that report just gave the press some info about what was in the report before the declassified version was released, which is not really unusual. I may well have missed part of the story, though, so feel free to enlighten me. And yes, the CIA tries to influence public opinion. They're the CIA.

The 6th Jan report that you linked to is only a day old, and really contains nothing... It also reads like it was written by people who were told what conclusions they had to reach, and then filled in the blanks to get there. It's an essay trying to justify their conspiracy theory, not evidence for it.

I didn't say otherwise. But it does contain a variety of different premises and conclusions, and I remain curious as to exactly which parts you disagree with, as, again, I think that'd make for a more productive discussion. Do you think Russia didn't attempt to disrupt or influence the presidential campaign at all, including through their state-sponsored media? Do you think they did try to influence it through propaganda, but weren't involved in cyberattacks against the US? Do you think they were involved in cyberattacks, but not for the purpose of getting Trump elected?

What's really scary is that the EU and the US have used this CIA-generated hysteria in order to push through extremely dangerous censorship legislation, allowing them to restrict the free press!

Such as? I haven't heard anything about this happening in the US so far, at least.

None the articles you linked to mention this (fake) "secret memo." I'm not claiming that it's not how NBC got their info, I'm just looking for a little context about how you got "fake memo" out of all of this.

"Fake memo" rather than "memo" is my own personal accusation, as I see it as more likely than not that the CIA fed Dilanian with disinformation and he simply trusted them :wink:
It's disturbing that there is no source cited in those articles -- that's garbage journalism, but none of your are bothered by such garbage? Articles like that should set off red flags when you read them! Instead of just attributing claims to "authorities", it should at least say "authorities who spoke to NBC on the condition of anonymity", "the authorities named in this leaked memo", etc, so that then at least the claims are tied to the author's reputation. You should doubly watch out for articles like that with no author on the byline.
IIRC it was twitter where Dilanian clarified that the source for that article was a leaked memo, and he mentions it in passing in this article.

I remain curious as to exactly which parts you disagree with, as, again, I think that'd make for a more productive discussion. Do you think Russia didn't attempt to disrupt or influence the presidential campaign at all, including through their state-sponsored media? Do you think they did try to influence it through propaganda, but weren't involved in cyberattacks against the US? Do you think they were involved in cyberattacks, but not for the purpose of getting Trump elected?

I think absolutely every media outlet in the US is trying to influence the public for the profit of their shareholders. That's not news.
If RT publishes something that's true but goes against US interests, it's absolutely wrong to call that "fake news".
If the Washington Post publishes actual fake news, but is the bastion of the "anti fake news" campaign, then that's also absolutely wrong (BTW WaPo has in the past has knowingly/willingly participated in US propaganda campaigns, so they are just as bad as RT/etc).
If RT or WaPo publishes lies or slander, then there's already legislation in place to deal with that.

The whole "trying to influence the election" nonsense is just not news. You can't hold RT to one standard and WaPo to another just because one is publishing "enemy" propaganda and the other is publishing "friendly" propaganda.

This whole "foreign propaganda" hysteria that's going on in the US right now (aka "fake news") is an extremely scary development. It's not actually targeting fake news at all, but alternative narratives. What's scarier is that this is largely being carried out by big companies like Google, without the need for the government to force companies to do it. Look at the secretive http://www.propornot.com that's popped up as a hub for this movement, with it's rediculous list of apparently Russian websites, which apparently "provide a warped view of the world, where Russia can do no wrong", when actually many just provide a balanced view of the world where America can do wrong. Apparently they can't see the irony from their nationalistic vantage point.

What's also scary is that google was manipulating search results in order to influence the election (which studies have shown can swing a vote by over 20%!) but that this development is apparently not at all newsworthy. Or the fact that the US routinely interferes in the sovereignty of other nations! This is insanity!
Again, it's "our propaganda" = truth, "their propaganda" = lies, regardless of what the actual truth is.

I think there's no evidence to suggest that Russia is behind the hacking of Clinton's emails, besides "the CIA said so", which honestly carries less wight than "reddit said so" -- note that most of her emails were gained via subpoena, some were deliberately deleted to avoid being gained via the subpoena and were instead gained from an inside whistleblower, and her campaign emails and the DNC email were gained both by anonymous hackers (and not very sophisticated ones at that) and inside whistleblowers.
There was already a ridiculously strong anti-Clinton campaign from domestic groups who believed that Hilary/DNC were corrupt, and who had the capability to do something like this. There was enough pissed off Bernie-bro's and alt-right'ers to explain this without having to jump to "Putin did it!". There were also enough people working for these groups who knew that there was dodgy stuff going on and who would've felt that leaking this info was the right thing to do.
Clinton's time as secretary of state also put her in a key position on the war against Wikileaks, even setting up plots to frame Assange as a Russian spy and a pedophile, which were ironically leaked causing a lot of people to want to dig up more dirt on her. Everyone also knew that the primaries were rigged, and that many news sites were rigging their polling data. A lot of people wanted to expose this stuff.

Occam's razor says there's a simpler explanation. And the "Russia did it" conspiracy is tainted from the start as being a CIA propaganda campaign, so why choose their convoluted plot over the simple explanation?

IMHO this whole "Clinton lost because of Russia" fantasy is a psychosis of the Democrats, who are unable to admit to their own failings, so have to project their own dirtiness onto a boogeyman. It's succeeded in taking the attention off them entirely.
If a person starts lashing out at the messenger who delivers news of their guilt, then you'd say that person has a personality disorder. This entire episode is symptomatic of an establishment-level personality disorder; group-think mental illness.
Meanwhile it's also a perfect tool for the internal intelligence community to try to force Trump into being as much of a cold-war era warhawk as Clinton would've been - to force his administration to continue the policy of accelerated Russian encirclement.

On a tangent - "state-sponsored media" as a denigrative term is a funny Americanism, as in many parts of the world state-owned media is actually legislated to be fair and balanced, unlike privatized media (such as all US media) :lol:

I haven't heard anything about this happening in the US so far, at least.

US hasn't gone to the same level of censorship as the EU yet, but they're heading that way. The defense authorization act for 2017 (approved by the senate and executive in December 2016 - during this "fake news" hysteria) includes a boatload of money to set up a new federal bureaucracy tasked with cracking down on "fake news", which as we've seen so far, does not mean cracking down on unverified claims and dodgy journalism, it means cracking down on outlets that don't toe the line in regurgitating the establishment's insane narrative.

You are entitled to your opinion on this, but I believe that you really are discounting how active foreign states have been in cyber warfare.

When did google manipulate search results? (I'm actually really curious in that. Any source?)

No Clinton certainly did not lose because of Russia, i think we can safely say that and agree on it.

There have been fake news things circulating around. Pizza gate was a pretty good example.

Yea I think you're buying into a much larger conspiracy theory than the one being "pushed" by the CIA, where way too many people are in on the truth and are instead pushing an alternative narrative. Just my .02 tho.

No Clinton certainly did not lose because of Russia, i think we can safely say that and agree on it.

Exactly. The DNC made a lot of bad critical moves because it's overconfident over Trump. Clinton campaign neglected Wisconsin, a long term Democrats state switched to Republican, not on a good Republican candidate either! Trump! Come on! Of all qualified decent Republican presidential candidates in the history of US elections, they decided to switch on Trump! The DNC seriously fucked something up.

Hardcore Trump supporters aren't that many. That 'intelligence' report only talks about RT, whose audience are probably already bought into their propaganda anyway. That's why some people are questioning if these "hack" are real hacking or just yet another propaganda spun by someone else to blame the election results on some other people. I am not saying the Russians didn't actually do what they said they did. Russians were running those propagandas alright, but it's hardly a "hack".

I personally do not care who did the hacking and I don't care if trump gets in bed with Putin. We're beyond that now. What irritates me is that the Democrats are looking in every direction but inward, blaming everything that moves but themselves, for the loss.

It's like an athlete running a marathon that loses and blames the crowd because someone held up a poster critical of the athlete. You may have missed a few steps when you saw the poster, but you lost because you did run as fast as your opponents.

You are entitled to your opinion on this, but I believe that you really are discounting how active foreign states have been in cyber warfare.

Why? Just because I don't choose to believe a CIA allegation without questioning it, that means that I'm discounting how much state-sponsored hacking occurs in the world? Those two things aren't really connected. If you know who did it, and have evidence that they did it, then try them in a court and prove it. That's American Justice. That's what the leader of the free world would do.
Sure, it's possible for Russia to direct agents to gain access to emails in the hopes of keeping an existing email scandal going. It's also possible that this happened without them. IMHO, it's a much simpler story that it happened without them. That doesn't discount their capabilities and other plots.

I believe that you really are discounting how active the US is in propagandizing and lying to achieve it's strategic objectives. When every single war is based on a lie, how do you just keep on believing them?

Yea I think you're buying into a much larger conspiracy theory than the one being "pushed" by the CIA, where way too many people are in on the truth and are instead pushing an alternative narrative. Just my .02 tho.

You don't need many people to be in on it at all. The CIA leaks a memo to a reporter who has a long standing "I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine" relationship, and he publishes it. This is a common arrangement for reporters -- you don't develop and keep great insider sources like this by hanging them out to dry. You can end up being a tool of the administration just by wanting to "be a good reporter" and get stories before anyone else. Even if you think something is up, you might feel that you're doing the right thing out of some sense of patriotism. You can see how much he trusts them in the leaked emails that I linked to, where he's asking his CIA handler "You wouldn't put out disinformation on this, right?". He has faith that they're only leaking him the truth. He sleeps soundly at night because he's one of the good guys™. He's not actually in on it.

Everyone else doesn't want to miss the story, so they report on his report and start asking every government agency for comment. Initially lots of agencies actually disagree with the claims, but by this point it's already become fact. People are calling for Russian blood. The CIA secretly briefs the senate and the executive on their proof in order to get anti-Russian laws passed, and laws are passed. Job done.
The only people "in on it" have to be within the CIA, or the people directing them. And any CIA insiders who dare to speak out against such a plot would be kept in line by the threat of life in prison, the death sentence, or even extrajudicial killing.

This is not unprecedented - you're ignorant of history if you think that this sounds at all far-fetched. Look up "operation mockingbird" -- during the cold war, the CIA recruited the publisher of the Washington Post to run their propaganda network. I'm sure he felt that it was his patriotic duty to do so. Many other "respected" publications such as the New York Times became part of this CIA propaganda network. It's not crazy. It's history. It's a fact that they had hundreds of reporters across the country on their payroll.
Meanwhile the Snowden leaks have shown that companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo are secretly cooperating with the NSA to illegally spy on the entire population. That's not crazy. It's now history. It's history repeating.
But you act like America couldn't possibly do such naughty things, and that because these companies aren't "state owned", they're somehow not a part of the state and don't act in the state's interest. This is the new cold war, to pretend they won't play by the old rules is to stick your head in the sand.

To pretend that these media outlets couldn't possibly be accidentally or knowingly involved in spreading propaganda requires far more ignorance than suggesting than an unproven allegation is still unproven.
Collectively, this propaganda is undermining our public discourse by providing a warped view of the world, where America can do no wrong. It is vital that this effort be exposed for what it is: A coordinated attempt to deceive U.S. citizens into acting in the CIA's interests.

Russian propaganda and hacking is real.
American propaganda and hacking is real.

There's no proof that this is a case of Russian hacking, except what the CIA says they have but can't show us. If they show me evidence or have a trial in a courtroom, I may change my mind.
There however, is proof that this is a case of American propaganda, with the story originally coming from a CIA-linked reporter.

Despite that (lack of) evidence, you can continue to believe that you're not being fed propaganda and simply accept all of the establishment's claims if you want. Regardless of how many times they've lied to you before.

Honestly, all of this comes down to sour grapes. The media's looking for a good excuse as to why Trump defied their polls so they're pressing the very flimsy Russian hacking angle. Of course Russia would try to manipulate our election if they could. Of course we would try to manipulate theirs. This has happened in the past, present, it will happen in the future.

But, from the released report Russia manipulated our election by having RT report that the American media machine is treating Trump unfairly... Which was absolutely true.

I'm more curious to see if anyone's perspective on Trump's changing as his approval rating's been climbing. He seems to be going for a bombastic approach still.