Hardly a day goes by without some “news” about the Russian
“threat,” and in the past twenty-four hours the hate-on-Russia campaign seems
to have picked up speed. After learning
from Hillary Clinton that Vladimir Putin is not only responsible for the
Trump campaign, but also for the “global nationalist movement” that yanked the
British out of the European Union, mainstream media are telling us that Russian
interlopers are supposedly invading our electoral process by hacking into voter
databases. The Washington Post “reports”:
“Hackers targeted voter registration systems in Illinois
and Arizona, and the FBI alerted Arizona officials in June that Russian hackers
were behind the assault on the election system in that state.
“The bureau told Arizona officials that the threat was
‘credible’ and severe, ranking as ‘an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10,’ said Matt
Roberts, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office.
“As a result, Secretary of State Michele Reagan shut down
the state voter registration system for almost a week.”
So the Russkies are invading the American polity,
launching a cybernetic assault on the very basis of our democracy? Really?
Well, no, as becomes apparent when the reader gets down in the weeds and
exercises his critical faculties, if such exist. Because by the time we arrive
at paragraph five of this “news” story, we learn that:
“It turned out that the hackers did not
succeed in compromising the state system or even any county system, but rather
had managed to steal the user name and password for one Gila County elections
official.”
Oh,
but never mind that nothing much happened and no data was altered, because:
“Nonetheless,
the revelation comes amid news that the FBI is investigating suspected foreign
hacks of state election computer systems, and earlier this month warned states
to be on the alert for intrusions.”
“Russian” hackers have now been magically transformed
into “suspected foreign hacks”: we aren’t supposed to notice this shift
in attribution because, after all, the FBI is supposedly putting its imprimatur
on this conspiracy theory. Except they aren’t: nowhere in the story does the
FBI confirm that the Russians or any foreign actors are behind this.
In Illinois,
election officials – who just happen to be Democrats – report a similarly minor
intrusion, which one Kyle Thomas, director of voting and registration systems
for the State Board of Elections, describes as “a highly sophisticated attack
most likely from a foreign (international) entity.” How does he know that?
Well, he doesn’t. As we read on, we are told that “The bureau has told Illinois
officials that they’re looking at possible foreign government agencies as well
as criminal hackers.”
In other words, it could’ve been a
couple of teenagers sitting in a cyber-café in Shanghai.
Is there a shred of evidence the Russians were behind any
of this, as reporter Ellen Nakashima states in her opening paragraph? The
answer to that question is an unequivocal no.
The same day the
Washington Post story appeared yet another act of Russian aggression on
American soil was revealed to a breathless world: Russian “state actors” have
hacked into a number of unnamed Washington thinktanks! The
story appeared in “Defense One,” a web site that caters to “insiders” in
the national security bureaucracy and their corporate cronies. In an
“exclusive,” they claim:
“Last week, one
of the Russia-backed hacker groups that attacked Democratic computer networks
also attacked several Russia-focused think tanks in Washington, D.C., Defense
One has learned.
“The perpetrator
is the group called
COZY BEAR, or APT29, one of the two groups that cybersecurity company
CrowdStrike
blamed for the DNC hack, according to founder Dmitri Alperovitch.
CrowdStrike discovered the attack on the DNC and provides security for
the think tanks.”
So the same company paid by the Democratic National
Committee to echo the party line on the DNC hacks is now telling us that they know
the Russians are behind this alleged hack. And yet, as cyber-security
expert Jeffrey Carr points out here,
there is no way CrowdStrike (or anybody else) could definitively point to
Russian “state actors” as the culprits in this or any other case: that’s
because the procedure they use in “tracing” a hack is inherently subjective,
what Carr calls “faith-based attribution.”
Technical
analysis of code and the software utilized by the hackers is less than helpful
in identifying hackers: if Chinese characters are found in code, well then
you’ve been hacked by the People’s Liberation Army. If Russian characters are
discovered, well then it’s Putin’s spies. Except this is nonsense: as
Carr explains it, if a Kalashnikov is used in a murder, does that mean the
murderer is a Russian? Well, uh, no – and no one would ever make that
assumption. And yet this is precisely the sort of “analysis” we’re getting from
the hucksters who infest the “cyber-security” industry. In short,the “scientific”
analysis marketed by these companies is based on assumptions that cannot be
objectively verified.
These companies
would like their customers to believe that their conclusions are based on
science, but as Carr points
out:
“It’s important to know that the process of attributing an
attack by a cybersecurity company has nothing to do with the scientific method.
Claims of attribution aren’t testable or repeatable because the hypothesis is
never proven right or wrong.
“When looking at
professions who use an investigative process to determine a true and accurate
answer, the closest profession to the attribution estimate of a cyber
intelligence analyst is that of a religious office like a priest or a minister,
who simply asks their congregation to believe what they say on faith. The
likelihood that a nation state will acknowledge that a cybersecurity company
has correctly identified one of their operations is probably slightly less
likely than God making an appearance at the venue where a theological debate is
underway about whether God exists.”
If you look at
the “analysis” done by those who attribute the DNC hack to Russian state
actors, a pattern of confirmation bias emerges, as Carr shows:
“On June 15,
2016, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and CTO Dmitri Alperovich announced in a blog
post that two Russian hacker groups were responsible for the DNC breach:
Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear; and that both hacker groups worked for competing
Russian intelligence services.
“Other
cybersecurity companies including FireEye, Kaspersky Lab, ESET, TrendMicro,
Microsoft, iSight Partners, and AlienLab have made similar claims of
attribution to the Russian government. The question that this article seeks to
answer is, are those claims grounded in evidence or guesswork?
“I chose to look
at Fancy Bear (APT28 in FireEye’s ecosystem). The most comprehensive report
on that threat actor was written by FireEye and released last October, 2014 so
I started with that. To my surprise, the report’s authors declared that they
deliberately excluded evidence that didn’t support their judgment that the
Russian government was responsible for APT28’s activities: ‘APT28 has targeted
a variety of organizations that fall outside of the three themes we highlighted
above. However, we are not profiling all of APT28’s targets with the same
detail because they are not particularly indicative of a specific sponsor’s
interests.’ (emphasis added)
“That is the
very definition of confirmation bias. Had FireEye published a detailed picture
of APT28’s activities including all of their known targets, other theories
regarding this group could have emerged; for example, that the malware
developers and the operators of that malware were not the same or even
necessarily affiliated.”
What we are
dealing with here is an industry – “cyber-security” – that has a vested
interest in promoting the idea that its methodology is “scientific,’ and that
it can provide answers to its paying customers who want to know for sure who
hacked their computer systems. It wouldn’t do to tell them that no definitive
answers are possible, and that any attribution procedure is necessarily based
on a whole range of assumptions that are not objectively verifiable. That
wouldn’t do much to improve their profit margins. So they market themselves as
“scientists” who have all the answers, when, in fact, they have no answers.
This is how a
corporate scam turns into a political scam. Reporters looking for “experts” to
verify what they already believe, and government officials and partisan players
who have a similar agenda, are all too willing to suspend disbelief. A
combination of technical ignorance, laziness, and extreme bias produces the
kind of “journalism” that is fueling the campaign to attribute every case of
hacking to the Russians.
In the case of
these mostly unnamed “Russia-focused” thinktanks, the bias is inherent in their
ideologically-driven orientation. One alleged victim is named, however,
the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Their Senior Vice
President, one James Andrew Lewis, boasted:
“It’s like a
badge of honor – any respectable think tank has been hacked. The Russians just
don’t get the idea of independent institutions, so they are looking for secret
instructions from Obama. Another benefit is they can go to their bosses and
show what they took to prove their worth as spies.”
Lewis is
naturally eager to pin himself and his employer with that “badge of honor,” as
well as to imbue CSIS with the penumbra of “respectability.” And as for actual
evidence that the Russians are responsible for this, Lewis couldn’t care less.
In a piece on the
DNC hacks, he avers:
“Wrangling over
evidentiary standards misses the point. The rules for great power politics are
not the same as the rules for a court, if a country wants to remain a great
power. This is politics, not jurisprudence.”
The rules of
logic, let alone legal standards of proof, don’t apply to Lewis and his
confreres in the national security Establishment. After all, he writes, “it is
far too late to reverse this story. Both private and government sources
attribute the hacking to Russia.” These are the same sources, I might point
out, who assured us that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” – and
who now exhibit same disregard for truth that resulted in that infamous
“intelligence failure.” The reality is that, for Lewis and the grandees of the
national security state, there is no truth, because “this is politics,
not jurisprudence.”
Oh, those
rascally Russkies are everywhere! According to our news media, they are
not only responsible for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, but
Putin’s spies have also gotten their mitts on the computer files of the Clinton
Foundation. The same evidence-free rationale – promulgated by the same
“cyber-security” companies in the pay of the Democrats – is utilized to
validate this latest claim. And indeed a
Bloomberg piece on the alleged hack informs us that
“If the
Democrats can show the hidden hand of Russian intelligence agencies, they
believe that voter outrage will probably outweigh any embarrassing revelations,
a person familiar with the party’s thinking said.”
Deny, deflect, distract – that’s Hillary’s strategy. With a
compliant media in tow, so far it seems to be working, at least to the extent
that Russian hackers are now generally accepted as a veritable arm of the Trump
campaign – when, in fact, there is absolutely zero evidence that Russian
state actors are involved in any way. We haven’t seen this level of
deception since the ginned up “evidence” of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.”
This entire
conspiracy theory is based on a much broader one, which has been pushed by a
number of groups with a vehemently anti-Russian cold war agenda. The Legatum
Institute, headquartered in Britain, as well as the usual neoconservative
suspects in this country, have long maintained that the Russians, while
militarily and economically weak, have turned to “information warfare” as their
primary instrument of “aggression.” Legatum has been pushing
for a government-subsidized “anti-disinformation” agency to combat this new
“threat,” as well as urging outright censorship of Russian state-subsidized
networks such as “Russia Today” and “Sputnik.” So who are these folks? Legatum
is the creature of one Christopher Chandler, a billionaire investor aptly
described by investigative reporter Mark Ames:
“The Chandler
brothers reportedly were the single biggest foreign beneficiaries of one of the
greatest privatization scams in history: Russia’s voucher program in the early
1990s, when each Russian citizen was given a voucher that represented a share
in a state concern to be privatized . . . and most naive Russians were fooled
or coerced into dumping their vouchers for next to nothing, snapped up by
clever vulture capitalists and factory directors from the inside. Institutional
Investor magazine described
how the Chandlers benefited by snapping up Russians’ vouchers and converting
them into stakes in some of the largest and most lucrative companies in the
world.”
When Putin took over from the corrupt and perpetually
drunk Boris Yeltsin, the Chandlers’ game was over. As Ames puts it, with
characteristic wit: “Putin’s cronies don’t need them; they replaced them and
pocketed the money for themselves. Therefore, Russia is a threat to western
civilization.”
The Legatum thesis, backed by Chandler’s billions, has
gained momentum with journalists in this country, and flies in tandem with the
“blame Putin” meme that now accompanies news of every hacking incident. We are
told that a Russian “disinformation” campaign is spreading “false stories”
designed to “sow discord” and causing people to question the policies favored
by their leaders, such as whether Sweden ought to join NATO.
As New York Times reporter Neil MacFarquahar put
it in a “news” story about this latest example of Putin’s perfidy, the
Russian President has “invested heavily in a program of ‘weaponized’
information, using a variety of means to sow doubt and division. The goal is to
weaken cohesion among member states, [and] stir discord in their domestic
politics.” Notice the phraseology: information is now a “weapon,” the
dissemination of which is an act of “aggression.”
In other words,
if you question the utility of NATO – now that the Soviet Union has been dead
and gone for some thirty years – you’re the functional equivalent of a Russian
spook. Are you seeking to “sow discord”? Well, then, you must be an agent of
the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB. The strategy of guilt by association
– so integral to the Clinton campaign’s tactics in this election – is on full
display in the MacFarquahar piece:
“Tracing
individual strands of disinformation is difficult, but in Sweden and elsewhere,
experts have detected a characteristic pattern that they tie to
Kremlin-generated disinformation campaigns.
"’The
dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state
media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context,’ said
Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.
"’Then the
fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or
far-right-wing websites,’ he said. ‘Those who rely on those sites for news link
to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from, but they end
up as key issues in a security policy decision.’"
“Fake document”?
What “fake document”? You can see how the framework for denying
the authenticity of embarrassing documents unearthed by WikiLeaks is being
built up by Hillary’s journalistic camarilla. And of course those evil “far
left’ and “far right” web sites – gee, I wonder which category Antiwar.com
falls under! – are also Moscow’s pawns, and therefore not credible.
It’s all so
transparent, and yet with practically every “mainstream” media outlet echoing
the same conspiracy theory, the effect is self-reinforcing. This is how fiction
becomes “fact.”
What we are seeing in this election season is a propaganda
campaign the likes of which we haven’t experienced since the run up to the Iraq
war.
We
are being buried in a veritable shit-storm of lies on a daily basis. Except
that, this time, the target isn’t some third-rate Third World despot like
Saddam Hussein, nor it is really Donald Trump, whose electoral prospects were
never that great to begin with. Trump is just collateral damage – the real
quarry is Vladimir Putin.
In concert with
a bevy of exiled Russian oligarchs and Western “investors” who plundered
Yeltsin-era Russia and were cut off from their orgy of lucrative looting by
Putin, the historically Russophobic Clintons and their newfound
neoconservative allies dream of regime change in Russia. The vast oil and
mineral wealth to be found in Russia’s central Asian provinces and “near
abroad,” is a tempting target for those who habitually combine profiteering
with politics. The Clintons and their crony capitalist corporate benefactors
are drooling at the prospect of looting a prostrate Russia, and Putin stands in
their way. Therefore, he must go – and if they have to risk World War III in
order to accomplish their goal, well then so be it.
Greed
and politics are pushing us to the brink of an all-out conflict with
nuclear-armed Russia. It’s an old story, but true.
We here at
Antiwar.com are doing our best to debunk this nonsensical – and dangerous –
“blame Putin for everything” meme. But we can’t do it without your help – your financial help.
We don’t have
billionaires with an agenda subsidizing this site: we don’t have the big
military contractors, who are ecstatic at this sudden eruption of Russophobia,
donating millions to Antiwar.com – of course we don’t! We just have you
– ordinary Americans who care about the future of this country, and don’t want
to see it dragged into foreign wars for the benefit of fat-cat globalists and
their bought-and-paid for politicians.
The time to make
your tax-deductible donation to Antiwar.com is right now – when we have
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NOTES IN THE
MARGIN
You can check
out my Twitter feed by going here.
But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often
made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
I’ve written a
couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here
is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with
an Introduction by Prof. George
W. Carey, a Foreword
by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon
(ISI
Books, 2008).
You can buy An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus
Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.
Read more by
Justin Raimondo
- Clinton’s
Crazy Conspiracy Theory – August 28th, 2016
- Syrian
Flashpoint – August 25th, 2016
- The
Foreign Invasion of American Politics – August 23rd, 2016
- Nicholas
Kristof: War Crimes Enabler – August 21st, 2016
- Back
to the Future – August 18th, 2016