The whole discussion around the recently disclosed Russian hacking – “is it traditional SVR espionage using the cyber domain or is it subversion or is it an act of war?”- is all fascinating and completely misses the two most important points.
The first is that from the Russian perspective this is war. As can be seen in the delineations in the table below:
Moreover, Russia considers the information domain to consist of two critical components: the technical side (which includes communications sabotage, electronic warfare, cyber attacks, and other C4ISR sabotage or degradation efforts), and the psychological side. That is demonstrated in the graphic below (from this publication at the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Federation):
The Russians aren’t making these distinctions, but they’re sure glad that Richard Haass who runs CFR is all over the US news, nat-sec and foreign policy sites, and Twitter muddying the water for them.
Reports are thescyber attacks were carried out by Russia. This is not an act of war or something unacceptable (unlike Russian attempts to undermine our democratic process) but espionage, which we & others do. Our bad for making it easy for them to succeed. https://t.co/DUIdKCZuyg
— Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) December 18, 2020
From the Russian doctrinal perspective this is part of what they call New Type War, which is how they doctrinally understand hybrid and unconventional warfare these days.
The second, and equally important point, is that it will take months, if not years to figure out everywhere and everything the SVR’s cyber-operators got into, what they actually did inside those systems, and what the actual ramifications are. Since we don’t have months or years, the strategic assumption to drive strategy and operations in response has to be “they got into everything, they’ve compromised everything they could, and we can expect anything and everything that can be controlled by computer code can and will go down at the least optimal time for the US and our allies and the most optimal time for the Russians”. Imagine what happens when the power grid goes down at 12:01 PM on 20 JAN 2020 just to make a point that Biden may now be President of the US, but Putin has control of the US. Or when he takes it down someplace that has a major winter weather event so people freeze to death. Or he has his people tamper with the emergency broadcast systems to cause chaos, injury, and death during a major weather event or other natural disaster – he did a dry run on this back in 2015 in Louisiana.
It’s great that Haass has the luxury from his home office to ponder whether this is a fish or if it is a fowl, but that luxury is a mirage. And I have serious doubts that anyone but GEN Nakasone is taking this seriously right now. Maybe Christopher Wray, but if he is, he’s going to continue to keep his head down and his mouth shut. Ratcliffe isn’t because that man is almost as dumb as Louis Gohmert. O’Brien and the Acting SecDef aren’t because that’s now what they’re being paid to do. From all the reporting Haspell is packing her office up as she knows she’s either getting fired between now and 20 JAN or on 20 JAN. We know the tennis player who is illegally acting as the DHS secretary isn’t. To use a Star Trek analogy: they’ve taken the shields down from inside the ship and have spent a lot of effort to make it look like they’re still up.
As for Trump downplaying it and trying to blame it on China, that also makes no sense. He and his people have spent so much time since 2017 trying to blame stuff on China that every Republican, every conservative, and everyone on conservative news from Fox to OANN to talk radio to Breitbart, and conservative social and digital media no longer call China China. Nor does Pompeo or any elected or appointed Republican official refer to it as either China or by its official name or acronym the People’s Republic of China/PRC. Now it is the Chinese Communist Party/CCP. Oogah Boogah!!! So if “the Chinese Communist Party” is so bad, then having the PRC responsible should be as bad, if not worse, than having Russia do it. And that is beside the point that if the PRC did it, given that they’re a lot more careful and subtle than the Russians, we still probably wouldn’t know about it.
I’ve been making the same point since early spring 2016: we are at war. With Russia. Not just cyberwar or information war, but war. And we’re at war not because we want to be at war with Russia or because it’s good that we’re at war with Russia, but because Russia has been stating for the better part of a decade that they are at war with the US and that the US is the aggressor and the cause of the war. When someone clearly and consistently tells you and demonstrates to you what it is they believe it is foolish to ignore it. My paper on this new, largely non-kinetic/non-lethal form of 21st century war and warfare that deemphasizes military power while leveraging and weaponizing all the other elements of national power was published this past July. It attempts to frame and contextualize the war and warfare that we’re seeing hostile state actors, peer competitors, and regional powers use as part of great power competition, Gray Zone conflict, and subversion. As well as how non-state actors such as violent extremists, ultra wealthy individuals, and corporations that have more financial resources than 90% of nation-state’s gross domestic product are leveraging their own non-state equivalents of national power to wage war for their own benefit and achieve their own objectives as well. The 21st century operating environment is as dangerous as the 20th century one, even as the character and characteristics of war seem to be becoming less kinetic.
Open thread!
germy
What do you make of this?
germy
I wonder what McConnell things about the China As The New Enemy playbook? I mean, his wife’s family business and all…
Adam L Silverman
@germy: They’re trying to hide something. What they’re trying to hide, I have no idea. But given it is time specific to the next two and half to three weeks – the amount of time they want to suspend transition interactions – my guess is that they have a highly classified op ready to get underway, that it is likely something the incoming Biden administration would not do and/or approve to be done, and they don’t want the Biden folks to find out about it.
Tom Levenson
@Adam L Silverman: And even though I’m confident the field grade people are competent, the decision makers emphatically are not, so, sure, everything will go fine.
Citizen Alan
I’ve been saying for years that future historians will say that World War III happened in the summer and fall of 2016, that it was fought entirely in cyberspace, and that the victory of the New Russian Empire was so absolute that Great Britain committed economic suicide while America meekly accepted the actions of Czar Putin’s chosen Viceroy to dismantle the nation from the inside out.
germy
@Adam L Silverman:
Sounds like a story that will be unfolding, as the journalists say.
UncleEbeneezer
It’s a good thing we don’t have a bunch of GOP Senators who spent July 4th in Russia…
Adam L Silverman
@Tom Levenson: The political appointees are the problem right now.
Adam L Silverman
@UncleEbeneezer: That’s just crazy talk…//
Adam L Silverman
@germy: Unfortunately.
West of the Rockies
Adam, I keep wondering, do you think we currently are or soon will respond in kind? Can we make sure there is some retribution for this behavior? It would be awesome to make about 20 billion Putin dollars disappear from his accounts.
rikyrah
@Adam L Silverman:
Yes…they are hiding something??
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@UncleEbeneezer: They should all burn for that. Unbelievable that the party that spent the entirety of my military career railing against Russia has embraced them in the name of white supremacy.
Mike in NC
We can expect a lot of underhanded and crazy shit to be coming down the pike in the next month, so it’s important to buckle up like Jake Tapper said.
Zelma
I’ve been waiting to hear your take on this. We are woefully unprepared for this kind of warfare. It seems to me that in Russia the most talented computer people are recruited into the service of the state while our best minds are busy figuring out ways to get more ad revenue for Google or Facebook. And both of these entities have, wittingly or not, become vectors for Russian propaganda.
The country is divided and 60 million Americans have been convinced that our election was fraudulent. 74 million Americans voted for in incompetent con man. Tens of millions are caught up in kookie conspiracy theories which have been propagated and spread by Russian bots. One of our political parties is committed to undermining the incoming administration. Our health system is about to be overwhelmed by people sick with the virus and yet millions refuse to take it seriously because our peerless leader and Russian stooge has told them not to wear masks.
We are a decadent society with in irresponsible ruling class. We have a hollowed out government led by a malevolent idiot. I could go on, but why bother? I’m an old lady who has enjoyed a pretty good life. If I didn’t have children and grandchildren, I’d just sit back and watch things fall apart. But I guess I’ll continue to do what little I can even if I don’t have much hope.
Mag
What will trigger the war into a shooting war? And, after that how long before it goes nuclear?
Sad to think we “fix” climate change by nuclear armageddon followed by nuclear winter.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
The problem is, this is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. It’s not just that Trump minions fail. The things they think are worth trying are often pathetically, “Why would anyone bother?!” stupid. They could be hiding high treason, a disastrous military campaign, a pull-out of troops meant to screw over Biden, a routine and meaningless military redeployment they have convinced themselves is important, a corrupt defense contract deal, or the fact that the instructions from the White House to the military for vaccine distribution are weeks late and the White House still doesn’t understand the forms. Or it could be obstructionism purely to make Trump happy. All of this is completely in-character for the Trump administration, with ‘military campaign’ being the least precedented and ‘obstructionism to pacify the whiny toddler-in-chief’ being most precedented.
mad citizen
It’s early so will wait for more facts, but I’m skeptical that the hacking got far (or at all) into systems in our electric grids. I was sitting here thinking about the statement that a grid is controlled by computer code. I concluded that is not true. The grids are controlled by system operators (humans) sitting in control rooms across the nation–most of them covered by Regional Transmission Operators, some still utility by utility (but these can be very large systems–TVA, Duke, Southern Company). Then these operators are communicating with each other, and seeing the others’ systems in their interconnection (east of Rockies, west of Rockies, Texas.)
Of course computers are used as tools. The energy markets use copious amounts of code to solve the markets, etc. Then signals are sent to resources (generators and demand resources) constantly to ramp them up and down, etc. Not worried about Putin shutting down any of the three grids [at least for now :) ]
JMG
Maggie Haberman of the Times said on Twitter she has “never heard her sources (in the White House) sound as scared as they do now.” Among her prime sources are, of course, Jared, Ivanka and Hope Hicks. Adam knows ever so much more about this than I do, but my guess is this country is at war with itself before it ever figures out it’s at war with Russia.
J R in WV
Visited with friends who live farther out in the country, took H a bottle of champagne for Xmas. The visit was safe, out in the cold breeze in the yard. The only real topic of discussion was our shared anxiety, how it made it hard to sleep well.
This whole thing just after the successful election is really hard to take. As you say, Adam, they’re up to something, something we don’t want them to be up to. Something we can’t possibly predict, because they’re both crazy and owned and operated by Putin. The friends I visited aren’t on the internet every day, aren’t political in the way the Jackalteriat is. They are progressive liberals, just not connected full time.
Yet H said “Did you see Trump come out of that meeting in Helsinki, all contracted and sunken, with Putin all chipper and happy?” And all of us were “Owned and operated by Putin!” So scary.
Cheryl Rofer
I’m gonna put a marker in to say I disagree. Russia can say they’re at war with us, good for them. They (some subset of all Russians in all the Russias) can carry out their cyber operations as we carry out ours, which we’ve been doing without the showy words.
About a million years ago, before anyone started talking about cyberwar, a publisher came to me and a colleague and asked us to write a book about how war would be conducted over the cybers. We set up a Google document, traded ideas and writeups for about a month, and came to the conclusion that the cybers could never become an alternative to bombs and that they have some serious limitations so that conventional ideas like deterrence simply don’t work. We told the publisher “No book there.”
I kind of wish we had written a hair on fire CYBERWAR IS COMING book for all the consulting and speechmaking it would have gotten us, but I still think we were right.
In the meanwhile, and in case I don’t get around to writing a post, here’s Jack Goldsmith saying some of the same things. Kind of a relief to see someone coming around to this after all these years.
craigie
@mad citizen:
They may not be controlled by code, but the people who do control them need computer access. Just denying them that would be a big, big problem.
And I think the grids probably are controlled in some sense, as moving power around in real time is probably done faster and better by (benign) computers.
jonas
@West of the Rockies: I’m looking forward to Adam’s take on what our options for fighting back really are. The problem as I see it — and I’m no foreign policy expert — is that bringing any kind of real pain to bear on Russia is hard because 1. it’s an authoritarian country with a nuclear deterrent and 2. Russian money, influence, and intelligence has weaseled its way into so many western countries that mounting a coordinated response like one might have done during the Cold War is hugely difficult.
Adam L Silverman
@West of the Rockies: I have no idea. As long as Trump is president, then the NSA and Cyber Command will do what they can and are allowed to do, which should be under the radar anyway. Anything more than that is unlikely to happen. What Biden will do, I do not know.
DCA
I would think the next step from Russia would be to do just enough to make it clear that “We own you” while too little to provoke a Pearl Harbor response.
As I said in another thread (apropos of public health, here for cyberdefense), this suggests a funding rebalance away from, for example, multiple carrier groups, to something more useful (not to pick on the Navy, I’m sure each service has an equivalent).
Adam L Silverman
@Mag: I don’t know.
One of the major complications is that Russia’s military doctrine is very clear that they will use tactical nuclear weapons in a conventional war/theater of operations if they are losing. What no one knows is whether this is a true, accurate, and honest description of how they would use nukes or whether this is PSYOP intended to influence how we and our allies would operate. Or a combination.
Adam L Silverman
@JMG: Her prime source is Trump himself.
Adam L Silverman
@mad citizen: All those computers that the system operators use are run on software. Which is code.
Frank Wilhoit
@mad citizen: The problem with the transmission grid is not at the system-operator level. It is at the state estimator level. The state estimator (state as in physics, not as in “Iowa”) is an algorithm in software that runs ~~once a minute and tries to identify potential problems that may arise imminently on that kind of timescale. It then tells the operators what to do, or look at more closely, basically with red lights on a stylized map. The operators are accustomed to trusting the indications of the state estimator. If its findings can be falsified, all bets are off.
Further, the Russians have analogous software of their own whose purpose is to identify the points within the grid most likely to cause cascading failures and/or permanent damage. At that point, the missing piece is the ability to inject commands into SCADA. In general, that capability has been amply demonstrated in the past (Stuxnet, etc.) Another attack surface (as you point out) is the real-time energy-trading systems, some (not all) of which are capable of automatic “dispatch” (connecting/disconnecting generation from the grid).
Utilities are aware of these risks, but their ability to mitigate them is constrained by the industry’s accounting rules. Yes, you read that right. Most of the mitigations are maintenance and therefore have to be paid for out of the operating budget, which is never adequate. Utilities make their money by negotiating with their regulators a guaranteed rate of return on capital expenditure, but the operating budget is a pure cost center. Some years it lasts through the summer; some years it runs out in February.
Gin & Tonic
@mad citizen: Read this.
Another Scott
I’m still not sure that “war” is the proper term for what’s going on. It’s a word that has all kinds of baggage attached to it.
E.g.
I think we all remember the War on Poverty and the War on Crime and the War on Drugs and the GWOT….
If we use the word “war”, what does it mean compare to what we’re doing now? What’s to keep people from saying, “If we’re at war, why aren’t we fighting to win? Why aren’t we turning <strike>Pyongyang<strike> <strike>Hanoi</strike> <strike>Moscow</strike> the Internet Research Agency to glass??”
Why are the benefits of using the word “war” greater than the down-sides?
Would it make more sense to give (ala Ron Paul) “letters of marque” to white-hat hackers (inside or outside the government) to break certain US laws to go after the bad guys with plausible deniability??
Thanks for putting in the work to make us aware of what’s going on. It’s appreciated.
Cheers,
Scott.
Frank Wilhoit
@craigie: There are not, and can never be, computers fast enough to control power flows in real time. The speed of light is a limit in both directions. There is a pipe dream out there called “transactive energy” that claims to run energy auctions faster than protective relays can trip. There is a paper out there, which you can find with a little Google-fu, that asserts without qualification that the 2003 outage could have been prevented by such means; and a lot of policymakers at various levels, none of whom evidently took high school physics, have been taken in by it. Maxwell’s equations would like a word.
trollhattan
@JMG:
Yeah, just read that. When Mags is catching the flip-out bug you can be pretty sure it’s armageddon time in Trumptown. Which makes things less comforting than usual. I’m sure he’s “got this” not-Russia thing under control.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Frank Wilhoit:
Where did this Maxwell fella go to B-School?
Mallard Filmore
@Frankensteinbeck:
As Adam has said here a few times, our military is stretched rather thin. Any significant military action, short of launching missiles or a pinprick air strike, will take troop movements that cannot be hidden and a long time to get them there.
Maybe Trump will try to crush Iran’s nuclear program with a few bombing runs. “Hey Biden, I’ve started a war! Try to fix THAT.”
Bill Arnold
Couple of things.
First, there is not, AFAIK, any public technical evidence justifying attribution to Russia/SVR. The several industry technical reports (a few quite detailed) do not name the actor(s). Obviously SVR is the prime suspect for various other reasons. Perhaps there is solid, classified evidence. Public statements suggest that it is still unclear. Elements of the press are going with a Russia attribution; again unclear why.
Second, it appears that the breach dates back to 2019, demonstrating a long game and a high and sustained level of discipline, and that the reason it was discovered was some apparent sloppiness with multi-factor authentication at FireEye that resulted in an investigation that found the SolarWinds code injection. (The full article[1] also says that the SolarWinds breach dated back to mid/late 2019, or earlier.) Some notes from elsewhere (a bit playful with the scenario graph :-):
The article presumes that this FireEye incident (triggering a MFA new device warning) involved the same hackers; this being 2020 perhaps not (heck, perhaps they had detected and were hijacking the existing compromise :-). Whether or not the same (Occam’s Razor suggests same), the new device warning exposed the SolarWinds based breach, and the Russians, whether they were responsible for the SolarWinds based breach or not, are seriously embarrassed (and might have to deal with sanctions, since they’re the obvious culprit), and the US has internal political maneuverings related to what appears (without solid attribution) to be a significant Russian/SVR espionage (at least) operation. That is, the effect of the new device warning was for FireEye to find the SolarWinds software that had been tampered with, and this discovery caused some significant subsequent political effects. Drunk Russians/unplanned, or planned? The year is 2020.. :-)
[1] Hackers last year conducted a ‘dry run’ of SolarWinds breach (Kim Zetter, December 18, 2020)
The hackers distributed malicious files from the SolarWinds network in October 2019, five months before previously reported files were sent to victims through the company’s software update servers. The October files, distributed to customers on Oct. 10, did not have a backdoor embedded in them, however, in the way that subsequent malicious files that victims downloaded in the spring of 2020 did, and these files went undetected until this month.
“We’re thinking they wanted to test whether or not it was going to work and whether it would be detected. So it was more or less a dry run,” a source familiar with the investigation told Yahoo News. “They took their time. They decided to not go out with an actual backdoor right away. That signifies that they’re a little bit more disciplined and deliberate.”
debbie
All I know is Trump just threw this country under the fucking bus once again for his paramour, Putin. What a monster.
Mallard Filmore
@mad citizen:
I am reassured by what you wrote, until remembering the damage we did to Iran’s centrifuges.
pamelabrown53
@Adam L Silverman:
What do you want Biden to do?
cain
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
Not just white supremacy but also the end times. There is some religious shit too – the conservatives in both countries hate LBGTQ and feminism – there is a lot in common there.
John Revolta
I’ve long felt that the 20th Century, and particularly 20th century warfare, didn’t start until WW1, which brought in such stuff as tanks, airplanes, poison gas and trench warfare. We may be seeing a remake in this century, complete with a global pandemic to really kick things off. Problem is, we’re still fighting with last century’s weapons and don’t appear to have caught on yet.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: We’re not actually having any of those conversations.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: He has a silver hammer if I’m recalling correctly.
debbie
@pamelabrown53:
I’m not Adam, but I want Joe to sanction Putin to hell and beyond. I’m sure plenty of other countries would be more than willing to assist.
Adam L Silverman
@pamelabrown53: Get inaugurated.
Adam L Silverman
@John Revolta: I deal with that in my paper at the link. Unfortunately it is behind a paywall.
cain
I think absolutely Trump has some military op – and honestly I hope someone will leak it so that at least they would have to delay it. Given all those meetings with the Saudis and Israel – we probably have something related to the middle east and most likely Iran.
These guys want a war with Iran and they want Biden to deal with it.
patrick II
@Adam L Silverman:
For or against the U.S.?
mad citizen
@Frank Wilhoit: Three of the RTOs are currently in the midst of a multi-year effort to move to entirely new software and hardware. I remember hearing one day that one of the grid’s state estimator model was 15 years old or something. The key for me to what you write is that the estimator gives information to the operators, it doesn’t automatically send dispatch signals. As soon as operators in one operator saw something suspicious, I’m sure they would be talking to neighboring system operators, etc. As you know, just the system frequency is a damn good indicator of how the system is doing.
As for Stuxnet and all that, I agree hackers can ruin A plant or piece of equipment, but taking down a grid is much much harder. The Ukrainian WIRED article is interesting, and that’s the way to do it, do some tripping on the transmission system and try to cause a cascading blackout. It’s very very hard to do. Bottom line for me is we’ve got thousands of people on our side gaming all this stuff out too.
The accounting argument is a new one. As a regulator that’s not the take I would have. Most everything (everything) in the cyber-world is passed through these days, no problem. CIP standards and whatnot. Transmission seems to be a focused profit center these days.
One of the operators is even proposing/implementing a program where they take care of possible critical infrastructure vulnerabilities in a non-public way before something happens.
Mary G
Thank you for this, Adam. Having no idea what I personally can do directly about this, and not liking the feeling of having no control, I donated another piece of my life savings to Rev. Warnock. They don’t call the current majority leader Moscow Mitch for nothing. I want Uncle Joe and Auntie Kamala to have the help, money, and lack of bullshit obstructive investigations like Benghazi on steroids to do the work that needs to be done to fight this war. And it is a war. One we are losing.
Another Scott
@Cheryl Rofer: Thanks for the pointer. Some of the argument makes me uncomfortable (the “the USA is worse” stuff), but he’s right that we have a lot to lose going down that road.
Also, the reporting often doesn’t distinguish between stuff that is outward facing and not terribly secure (MS Office and email) and stuff that is the opposite – networks with bomb designs…
Cheers,
Scott.
Cheryl Rofer
@Another Scott: Yes, some of it is a bit more “both sides” than I like, but the fact is that yes, gentlemen do read each other’s mail, updated for today’s electronic communications.
We don’t know how far the US has burrowed into the Russian government, but we can be sure that it’s there.
All this is why we need to be talking to the Russians, not sanctioning them. I’m not saying to randomly take the sanctions off, just to consider that we currently have so many sanctions that adding more doesn’t make much difference. Sanctions don’t mean much unless you make a reason for them explicit: Stop doing X, and we will remove sanction Y. And then do it. Our internal politics make it difficult to remove sanctions, but they don’t work unless you can remove them.
John Revolta
@Adam L Silverman: Do you have any ideas, Adam, about what can be done immediately to at least secure our power grid? I don’t suppose we can just switch around some passwords and be cool, but a)how long would it take to start bulwarking ourselves and b)are we doing it yet?
Adam L Silverman
@John Revolta: I don’t. The technical aspects of this stuff is well outside my areas of expertise.
billcinsd
@John Revolta: There are several books on the Long 19th Century (and other long centuries too).
Trench warfare was a feature of the US Civil War
Frank Wilhoit
@mad citizen: The state estimators cannot do automatic dispatch because the network models are not accurate enough. It is an iterative, time-boxed approximation.
Where the utilities’ internal accountants and auditors (it is not up to the regulators) declare that cybersecurity remediations add new business capability, they can be capitalized. “New business capabilities” usually means a new generation of hardware; bundled software is capital, but training is never capital.
The RTOs have different tradeoffs, but it is the utilities who deploy the telemetry and protection — sometimes to RTO and/or NERC/FERC mandates. I think when you use the word passthru you are talking about those kinds of mandates. It’s not a word I ever heard our accountants using. The word they mostly used was “no”.
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold:
Krebs:
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
@mad citizen: Unless the mechanism by which operators make changes to generation/distribution are electromechanical (that is, no computers), I fear you’re incorrect. Remember that destroyer that had to be towed back to port b/c its turbines were run by Windows machines, and they crashed and were unrecoverable? Maybe you know better, and that all the computers that control power generation/distribution are air-gapped (in which case coordinated attacks are unlikely, and we haven’t seen anything like Stuxnet).
A network-connected computer system that human operators use to control a large plant is still a network-connected computer system, and IIRC the Russians were known to have penetrated many, many power generation/distribution systems, including nuclear power plants, back in 2016-7. Long before this latest hack.
patrick II
@Cheryl Rofer:
I will disagree. (probably wrongly when I disagree with you.) Russia says they are at war with us, but not just us, but liberal democracies in general. And computer espionage is just one of their weapons. I look at Europe and particularly Britain and the U.S. and think that the combination of passive (intelligence gathering), aggressive ( propaganda thru face, book, twitter, etc) money influencing politics, blackmail, have had damaging effects. It’s the combination of espionage (stealing democratic emails), money and/or blackmail influencing one presidential candidate, propaganda that has been successful. Cyberwar exists as a part of a larger context that from where I sit looks fairly successful.
Frank Wilhoit
@patrick II: …and in the UK, at least, they are willing to do wetwork.
Chetan Murthy
@Cheryl Rofer:
Cheryl, with great respect, it’s a little late for that. The Russians have attacked democracies all over the West. All. Over. Sure, if we talk to them, they’re going to tell us that their entire “near abroad” (including Eastern Europe) is off-limits, that we need to let all those countries “return to Russian protection”. Is that a trade-off you’re willing to make?
Expropriate every single fucking Russian oligarch, every single fucking Russian company. Every. Fucking. One. Pay off our national debt with expropriation. And then open negotiations. It’s only what Fucking Putin would do.
Bill Arnold
@Cheryl Rofer:
Infosec twitter has also had a lot of sharp-edged discussion about vocabulary. The general position (not consensus) is that the SolarWinds driven breaches (probably by SVR but not proven) are certainly in support of (at least) espionage, and that there is no evidence (yet) of attacks, though obviously such breaches are necessary for attacks.
The details are triggering “this is weird” (and seriously competent and disciplined and with a long-game) warnings in me.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: Putin needs to learn that it’s OUR fucking financial system, and that membership is a privilege, not a right. And that if he doesn’t want to play by the rules of the Western World, he can go back to his cave and suck it. This is precisely the logic of all of his actions towards the entire West.
Bill Arnold
@Another Scott:
Yeah, saw that about VMware. Was not clear from the piece how related it was the the SolarWinds-based breach/operation.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: Rose and Valerie thought he should go free.
John Revolta
@Adam L Silverman: Well I’m sure our Dear Orange Leader has a plan and is working hard to keep us all safe!
Cheryl Rofer
@patrick II: We are at war with cancer, cigarette smoking, and all sorts of things. A more aggressive framing than we’ve done would put us at war with SARS-CoV-2, which I’ve seen, but not a lot.
Russia, except for its nukes, is a second-rate power with a nineteenth-century view of the world. The good part is that they are avoiding the nineteenth-century view of war, even though they use that word.
It’s huffing and puffing. Of course they gather intelligence. So does every other country. They are assassinating people, but for internal grudges.
They threw a bunch of propaganda into the US’s 2016 election campaign, but not as much into 2020. That’s one of the limitations of cyber operations that my colleague and I identified: You can do an operation, use a code weapon, once, but that use tells the adversary enough about what you’re doing that you can’t use it twice. Everyone knows what cruise missiles do, but you can use them over and over again to do similar damage.
Whatever the Russians like to call it, this is considerably less than war.
Bill Arnold
@Chetan Murthy:
For sure Putin has been way overconfident for years, and he and Russia are a lot more vulnerable than they believe (Though they are quite paranoid, with some justification.) Probably they are high on their own propaganda supply, to some extent.
Cheryl Rofer
@Chetan Murthy:
See, this is what’s wrong with the “war” framing. THEY WILL MAKE A DEMAND AND WE WILL HAVE TO SUBMIT.
I don’t have time or patience to go into all the things that are wrong with that, starting with that that’s probably not what they want in immediate actions. Sure, it makes a great slogan for the folks at home (although many are tired of it), but they know and we know that it’s not going to happen. That’s why you have to talk. Maybe they’ll start out with outrageous demands. Maybe we will. The only thing that will move us to a better place is talking.
ColoradoGuy
Adam, I have a question: what is the role of Rupert Murdoch in all this? Without Murdoch, neither Trump nor Brexit would have happened. The right-wing British press would have chased another shiny object, and no way could Trump have romped through the GOP primaries without Fox News. So Murdoch is absolutely pivotal in destabilizing the Atlantic Alliance. What is his connection to Russian war policy?
BroD
@Adam L Silverman: A very interesting (and alarming!) take.
Adam L Silverman
@ColoradoGuy: There are five anglosphere countries. Three of them – the US, Australia, and the UK – have significant portions of their news media owned and controlled by Murdoch. Two – NZ and Canada – do not. In the three that do, the conservative movement and the political party or parties that represent that movement are far, far, far, far more extreme. Murdoch’s own interest is solely in accumulating money to ensure he has access to senior decision makers. Part of the way he makes that money is by providing an information product he calls news. The primary purpose of this information product is to make nothing true so anything and everything is possible. Which significantly helps hostile foreign actors who come along and seek to manipulate the information space.
Chetan Murthy
@Cheryl Rofer:
And expropriating every dollar, every share, every deed of ownership, is not a an act of war, either. The fucker attacked the entire West thru our elections and press. He needs to pay. And *then* we can talk. But first he needs to know that these acts have consequences.
BroD
@Cheryl Rofer: Yeah, ok, but those are the conclusions of smart and presumably sane-ish people.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer:
No, this is the same conceptual error that is currently made in all of our national strategic documents. It is not war – in terms of the character and characteristics of what we called interstate war – as we understood it in the 20th century. It is, however, a change of what the character and characteristics of war are based on the recognition by all of the following that none of our near peer competitors, hostile nation-state challenger, regional powers, or non-state actors that they are able to successfully undertake conventional interstate war against the US.
The conceptual problem with “great power competition below the level of armed conflict” is that it misunderstands that war doesn’t have to be armed conflict. What we are seeing is war with other means. Specifically means other than military power or the non-state equivalent. It doesn’t make it not war. It does, however, require us to recognize what is actually going on and then adapt our understanding and frames of reference to develop effective ways and means to deal with it. These ways and means do not have to be kinetic. They don’t have to be lethal. But simply blowing this off with well Russia’s a second rater power, whose dictator has a 19th century world view, and it also has nukes misses that the threats and the challenges are not only coming from Russia.
I do completely agree that equating domestic policy responses to major societal, economic, and political challenges as conducting war is wrong, a poor use of terminology, and leads to nothing but trouble.
Bill Arnold
@Adam L Silverman:
This (by R Murdoch & Son) is not an intentional effect, if I’m reading you right?
(How does a society increase the cost of disinformation-based tactics enough to discourage their use?)
Frankensteinbeck
@Cheryl Rofer:
I agree. Putin is a hostile actor, certainly. He has generalized dreams of a reborn Soviet Empire, or at least a Putin Empire of that scope. Treating any of this as concrete and absolute is unhelpful. Putin daydreams of being a conqueror, but mostly he’s a saboteur. Solutions to this are not only not binary, they’re absurdly complex and way beyond a layman.
Chetan Murthy
@BroD: that Goldsmith article seems to focus on the “hack”. Not the systematic campaign to pervert elections all over the West. Not the perversion of Hungary, Poland, work-in-progress in the UK, etc. The idea that somehow it’s all about this “hack” …. that’s foolish. The thing for which we need payback is the attack on our elections. Putin and Russia need to know to *never* try that shit again.
Aleta
FWIW (I’m not capable of arguing for/against this distinction)
Dmitri Alperovitch @DAlperovitch
Adam L Silverman
@Bill Arnold: It is an intentional effect. The intention was to allow the Murdochs and the politicians they back to manipulate the information space. I don’t think it was intended to let anyone else do it, but given Murdoch’s long standing business with the PRC, it may have been.
Geminid
@Frankensteinbeck: If you are looking at precedents, the way trump backed off on a “kinetic” retaliation when the Iranians shot down that drone over the Persian Gulf tends to support the view that trump is all bluster and no action. The killing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander last January would be a counterexample, though. And with trump having failed at reelection- and at least contemplating desperate measures to overturn the result- I think all bets are off when it comes to the probability of military adventures.
MomSense
@Cheryl Rofer:
Well it seems to me that as a result of the successful cyber warfare campaign that Russia waged on our election in 2016, over 300,000 Americans are dead. That seems to be right up there with the damage bombs can do.
Chetan Murthy
@MomSense: @Cheryl Rofer: At the time, Adam S. called it a ‘decapitation strike’ on our entire government. And here we are, four years later, reckoning the cost. Not just covid, but still, also covid.
The idea that we go back to the negotiation table without first extracting payback, esp. when the most important form of payback, that that fucker would most rue, would be the easiest to extract: just expropriate everything he and his cronies own, in our systems.
Cheryl Rofer
@Adam L Silverman: War is the continuation of politics by other means, and within that definition, what you say is correct.
But two world wars on from Clausewitz, the word means something different and involves a great deal of physical force. Using that word mobilizes strong and often counterproductive reactions, as we see in this thread.
I agree with this,
but I differ in that I think that using the word “war”, with its centuries of accretion, makes it more difficult to adapt our understanding.
I’m not blowing anything off, just arguing for dealing with Russia in ways that look to me to be more productive than declaring (even rhetorically) war.
Citizen Alan
@ColoradoGuy: I remind you that Rupert Murdoch is the only living person to have explicitly been the basis of a bond villain. Specifically the guy from tomorrow never dies who tried to start an International war just sell newspapers.
Cheryl Rofer
@MomSense: When you can show me that Putin had that all gamed out, I’ll agree.
randy khan
It seems to me (as someone with exactly zero national security experience, or at least zero compared to Dr. Silverman) that one possibility here is that this was Russia sending a warning to the Biden Administration. On the one hand, that’s pretty bad. On the other hand, doing it before he takes office gives him more time to prepare a response once he’s President. (And, of course, it could be that and other things, too, with the warning shot not even being a primary objective.)
MomSense
@Cheryl Rofer:
Oh FFS. I’ll admit this has probably worked out better than Putin could have dreamed, but even if it hadn’t been a pandemic Trump has caused tremendous damage.
schrodingers_cat
@Cheryl Rofer: I agree with you. Also using the war framing plays into Putin’s hands.
If you were advising Biden what would you suggest he do?
Jeffro
There are two articles up right now on the WaPo: one is about Pompeo and trumpov publicly disagreeing about the Russian attack, which in any other reality (most especially, one with a Democratic president) would bring the entire US media to a screeching halt, focused on nothing else, until one or the other put up or shut up (or resigned); the other is about how trumpov’s complete surrender on Covid-19 this fall meant that the country was doomed to a very high level of unnecessary deaths and disease, which also should, in any other reality, be the end of his presidency by resignation or rocket-docket impeachment.
I know it has been a long year.
But now more than ever, Democrats need to ramp up their criticism of the orange moron and start to think about their responsibilities differently. For an insane, corrupt, toddler like trumpov, looking the other way on Russia is as bad as trumpov’s complicity; looking the other way on his Covid non-response is dereliction of duty.
Bring the bat and don’t let up. He is already huddled up with Flynn and Powell and Giuliani on how to institute martial law, seize voting machines, and cause as much chaos as possible. He knows EVERYTHING is going to come out just as soon as he leaves office, and it’s not possible to spin it all – the grift, the super-spreader/’herd immunity’ plans, the siphoning off of PPE, the shell corporations, the tax fraud, and on and on and on.
Think about impeaching him again and at least putting it (back) on the Republicans. Think about getting in front of cameras every day with the evidence. But Dems please don’t just do nothing and think we’re going to get to Inauguration Day by simply ignoring the Mango Menace and hoping he goes quietly.
Gin & Tonic
@Cheryl Rofer:
People in Donetsk might disagree.
schrodingers_cat
@MomSense: Putin could harm us because Republicans are who they are. Without Mitch mcconnell and other elected Rs none of this would have happened.
patrick II
@Cheryl Rofer:
I agree that it is considerably less than war. But I also think that stating how weak their economy is or civil society, in general, leads one to underestimate the damage they can do. It’s a stupid analogy I know, but I sometimes think of Putin as the kid who knocks over the blocks the other kid has built into a pyramid. He hasn’t the skill himself, and he is jealous of those who can — but he can still damage the accomplishments of others, dragging others down and not really knowing how to build his country up.
I am too wordy. Bottom line, it is much easier to wreck things than to build them and someone who is willing can do much damage.
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: BTW Thanks for your input on Telegram.
Cheryl Rofer
@Gin & Tonic: Fair point.
Gin & Tonic
@schrodingers_cat: Hope I didn’t scare you off.
debbie
I just don’t see this as a time for semantics.
hilts
To Adam, Cheryl, or anyone else,
What’s your best guess as to what Russia actually has on Trump that makes him act like Putin’s goddamn puppy dog? Does it simply come down to Russia having financed some of his golf courses or some other shitty properties?
patrick II
@debbie:
I do see it as a time for semantics. We have “war”, “not war”, but there need to be some words that categorize and describe new types of aggression so that laws and responses can be properly designed.
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: Nope. But I will take more precautions and be more careful. The people in India are at a far greater risk than I am. If anything they need to be wary of me. I belong to the demographic that heavily supports BJP (90 percent)
schrodingers_cat
@hilts: They are in ideological alignment. I don’t think it’s just kompromat.
Bill Arnold
One takeaway is that the US needs to take infosec a lot more seriously in the large.
E.g. SolarWinds was a SPoF (Single Point of Failure) in many different government and corporate network infrastructures. The breach was discovered, over a year after the test runs were done and 9 months after the actual SolarWinds code injection, because of a basic security measure where a new device registration (multi-factor authentication system of some sort) for a corporate user id sent an email to a few parties, including the employee and a corporate security team, and this was investigated with the attention that it deserved.
(The breaching software was quite (admirably) careful about hiding itself and source code was in the style of the existing code(as reported; haven’t looked), but it would have been vulnerable to some other measures if they had been used.)
MomSense
@schrodingers_cat:
I don’t think that is inconsistent with what I am saying.
Mike in NC
Hey, unless he delivers babies, the Wall Street Journal objects to that title!
WaterGirl
@Jeffro: If I were in charge of the Dems – and there’s a good reason why I’m not – I would hold my fire until the results of the Jan 5 election in Georgia, and only then would I bring impeachment proceedings if he is still actively trying to sabotage our country and the incoming administration.
I don’t think we can do anything to upset the applecart in Georgia. To me, winning in Georgia and taking the senate is EVERYTHING in terms of being able to accomplish the things we want to accomplish.
But after that, stop the orange evil one in his tracks.
Frank Wilhoit
@Cheryl Rofer: To say that “war is a continuation of politics by different means” is to acknowledge that the difference is a difference of methods, but not of purpose. By that yardstick, cyberwar is a peer of politics, another form of “war” that dare not speak its name. And if the word “war” has connotations, then so does the word “politics”, which, unqualified, connotes something domestic rather than something international.
Now to purpose. What is the purpose of war, or “war” ?
One of Nixon’s third-string henchmen, Fred Ikle (pronounced like “Fred E. Clay”), published his dissertation as a trade book, under the title “Every War Must End” (ISBN, if one must, 9780231136679).
What that title neglects is the fact that, in the post-Napoleonic era, no war ever has. With the arguable exception of a couple of adventures in the stile antico like the Prusso-Danish War, the wars of the 19th and 20th Centuries are all still in progress — by different means. The essence of modernism in statecraft (domestic or international) is that it is less profitable to end a conflict than to let it become permanent and use it to cast blame, to jockey for position, to appeal for support.
Today the purpose of war is not to win, but to “win”: and “winning” means transforming the conflict into one that is carried on by different means.
The only way to end a modern war would be to erase the loser from the Earth and from history. If this were the purpose, it would have been done. The means exist, and it has been advocated. But it is not the purpose.
Always remember the twin essences of modernity:
Cheryl Rofer
@schrodingers_cat:
Biden has made a relatively strong statement. But, under our “one president at a time” rule, he can’t go very far.
First thing he should do is make sure of the attribution of the operation. Then he should get some sense of how far-reaching it is and what kind of damage has been done.
Simultaneously, he should be strengthening diplomatic relations with Russia. Trump is closing down the last two US consulates there. They need to be opened back up. They give us eyes into what’s going on there. He also needs to evaluate other contacts with Russia. The New START Treaty lapses something like two weeks after the inauguration. Russia has wanted to continue it, but the Trumpies have been playing games with it. He should get back into it.
Already my recommendations on engagement have been taken in this thread as appeasement. It is possible to establish diplomatic relations and set up communication channels and work on issues of mutual safety without appeasement. Interaction is not doing other countries a favor.
What comes next depends on the outcome of those activities.
Cheryl Rofer
@hilts: LOL, I wish I knew.
I think that if we had the notes from his meeting with Putin in Helsinki we would know.
moops
@randy khan: I think the discovery was not intentional. If you want to send a big hack warning you don’t trip over your own shoelaces to intimidate someone. You make ever monitor in every system display “YOU’VE BEEN PWNED”, or you unleash a million ransomware attacks and encrypt the entire federal government’s hard drives and backups.
Frank Wilhoit
@schrodingers_cat: Trump has no ideology. Republican voters have nothing but ideology.
Cheryl Rofer
@Bill Arnold: You are reminding me of another answer to schrodingers_cat’s question:
If I were Biden, I would rebuild better the government’s cyberdefense capabilities.
JanieM
@Cheryl Rofer: That body language is amazing.
schrodingers_cat
@Frank Wilhoit: He is an authoritarian bigot who wants to strip anyone not like him of all rights while he enriches himself.
schrodingers_cat
@Cheryl Rofer: That would be a good start.
Barry
@germy: “I wonder what McConnell things about the China As The New Enemy playbook? I mean, his wife’s family business and all…”
There isn’t a GOP official who has a problem with cutting lucrative deals on the side while denouncing their partner in public.
SiubhanDuinne
@Cheryl Rofer:
As many times as I’ve seen that photo, I can never get over the contrast in body language and facial expressions between Putin and Trump.
debbie
@SiubhanDuinne:
Almost the same as when he came back from Tulsa.
Raven Onthill
One thing, BTW, that is crystal clear: government cybersecurity cannot be left to private agencies any more. It is a long-standing part of the NSA mandate to secure US information systems; this has apparently been overlooked in favor of SIGINT, but it needs to be brought back.
J R in WV
@Adam L Silverman:
If this is war, does that mean the crime defined in the Constitution as treason, as being required to be committed during a war, is in effect today?
Because I really want the Russo-Republicans to be guilty of treason as defined in the Constitution, having sworn my oath to defend the Constitution some 50+ years ago. Just my current fetish, but it is mine own, and I want it so hard!
zhena gogolia
@Cheryl Rofer:
Yeah, that is shocking. Donnie’s just been in a one-on-one with a cold-hearted killer.
zhena gogolia
@Cheryl Rofer:
Yes. And those consulates have to be reopened.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: He looks pathetic and beaten.
JDM
Well Adam, that was a comforting read.
Lapassionara
@Jeffro: My Twitter thread is full of flashing red lights about Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the election by any means possible. I know he has been inept so far, but I have to say, I cannot rest until Jan. 20, noon, when he is out of office.
Lapassionara
@J R in WV: unfortunately, that takes a Congressional declaration of war. Sedition is the crime you are looking for, I think.
Mallard Filmore
@JanieM:
Cut Trump a little slack. Don’t you see that little —err— big step he has to climb?
Frank Wilhoit
@schrodingers_cat: You’re calling him a conservative…! The foullest insult in the dictionary; and while I relish the invective qua invective, my point was that he does not even have that much agency or conscious purpose. Trump is the prime example of a feral human: infantile, therefore sadistic, therefore dishonest [, …therefore many other things, but those are the big ones].
Frank Wilhoit
@Raven Onthill: So much for the Internet of Things, then….
Frank Wilhoit
@Lapassionara: After 1950, there will never again be a Congressional declaration of war.
debbie
@Lapassionara:
I’m just as worried about Republicans’ sabotaging the government to fuck with Biden’s chances for succeeding. Joe needs to call them out and point out that hurting his administration is hurting America.
Aleta
When it comes to modern cyber attacks, should military generals be leaders of organizations like the NSA that have power to analyze, interpret, define, respond?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Lapassionara: As I said earlier, I’m pretty confident the military and the state authorities will tell him to pound sand if he gets too explicit about the martial law fantasy. As for the rest of it: appointing Sidney Powell as a “special counsel” or seizing (seizing!) voting machines, it all sounds like the Underpants Gnome Theory of Coups
Lapassionara
@Frank Wilhoit: I agree.
J R in WV
@Lapassionara:
Well, the last congressional declaration of war was right after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy. So how did the Rosenbergs get executed for passing trivial nuclear secrets to the Comintern?
Just asking. I guess treason isn’t the only crime with the death penalty on the books. I will settle for any crime with the death penalty for these rat bastards. And a jury pool from the District of Columbia.
Lapassionara
@debbie: Unfortunately, they don’t care. The other side thinks Biden is going to change the US into a socialist hell hole. Facts will not reach them.
Lapassionara
@J R in WV: That is an interesting question. I will try to find out the answer.
hilts
@schrodingers_cat:
@Cheryl Rofer:
If I believed in God, I’d be praying every day that Trump dies in a prison cell.
Cheryl, wonderful photo of Trump with his master.
Never in my worst nightmares could I have ever imagined we’d have a President so incredibly stupid, corrupt, and evil. I can’t wait till this monster gets the justice he deserves.
hilts
@JanieM:
@SiubhanDuinne:
@Mallard Filmore:
The first thought I had upon seeing this photo was that Putin must have a shock collar or bracelet attached to Trump to inflict severe pain were he to ever step out of line.
Viva BrisVegas
@germy: China’s oligarchs have much more in common with American oligarchs than they do with their respective governments. Russia is a special case in that it is government of, by and for oligarchs.
So tensions between these states only operates so long as it is either supporting or not affecting the interests of these oligarchs.
Which is why Trump would seemingly “punish” Russia while at the same time trying to open up access to the US for Russian oligarchs. Why he “punishes” China while seeking special deals from them for himself and his family.
We are moving out of the era of superpowers into an era of the super rich exercising their ever increasing economic and political muscle, leveraging it through whichever flavor of nationalism works best in each nation.
As F. Scott FitzGerald said, the rich are different. We are only now finding out just how far their thought processes and objectives have diverged from the rest of us.
It’s going to make the Gilded Age look like enlightened socialism.
SiubhanDuinne
@debbie:
@schrodingers_cat:
I think Putin, in that meeting, gave graphic and explicit descriptions of the physical torture they were prepared to inflict upon Trump and Ivanka if he strayed too far from his instructions. He can bluff his way through other kinds of Russian extortion — compromising sex videos, even financial shenanigans — but I believe the prospect of experiencing deliberate physical pain is something he could not and cannot bear. Sorry if this is too sordid an image, but to me it explains the looks on both men’s faces and their respective postures more than any other scenario.
ETA: Or what hilts said at #138.
randy khan
@moops:
I won’t argue with that. You start getting into 11-dimensional chess if you posit that they made it look clumsy on purpose.
Frank Wilhoit
@Viva BrisVegas: “…We are only now finding out just how far their thought processes and objectives have diverged from the rest of us….”
The key is understanding that there is no such thing as greed, except as a secondary manifestation of sadism. No one wants anything for themselves, only to harm others.
Jim Appleton
@debbie:
Agree.
Also relay a comment on the hack from a certified penetration engineer.
Several layers of risk.
Software backdoors. These are relatively easy to patch, depending on detection.
Hardware backdoors. Very hard to detect or patch.
Supply chain disruption may already be one of the first tactical consequences.
Echo the alarm about intrusion. Open source products are a particularly vulnerable point of entry.
Solutions exist, and resources are well positioned to tame the dragon.
Frank Wilhoit
@SiubhanDuinne: Who owned the facility? Is it credible that there were no listening devices?
Cheryl Rofer
@Frank Wilhoit: It was in, I think, the Finnish Foreign Ministry. I am told that the Swedish Embassy is right on the other side of the meeting room wall. Hard to believe they both don’t have recordings.
Aleta
@Jim Appleton:
SiubhanDuinne
@Frank Wilhoit:
It was held in the Finnish Presidential Palace. I would always assume there are listening devices, whether the host nation is friendly, antagonistic, or neutral.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Palace,_Helsinki
Bill Arnold
@Raven Onthill:
Who are the Shadow Brokers, who raided the NSA’s attack tools collection and released them on the open internet? (Where they’ve been used for attacks ever since.)
Anoniminous
Found that Nigerian yellow cake yet?
How’s the hunt for Saddam Hussein’s Mobile Biological Labs Saddam going?
It’s been known to anybody with any experience US computer network’s security resembles Swiss Cheese what with weekly announcements in the Tech Press of Yet Another Hole.
Oh, and look at this:
We’re not saying this is how SolarWinds was backdoored, but its FTP password ‘leaked on GitHub in plaintext’
Yep. Takes real sneaky secret government funded cyberskills to read GitHub.
But then I’ve only got 50+ years experience with programming, computer architecture design, telecommunication system design, and AI/AL system research and development so I’m obviously a doofus.
Citizen_X
Very interesting point. I’m not sure I agree completely, but…I’m having a hard time thinking up greedy people who are not also sadistic.
WaterGirl
@Cheryl Rofer: Is there any hope/chance that those might come out after Jan 21?
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
I disagree on Murdoch’s actual goals. I also believe that money is one of his key goals but not the only one. He is a very, very conservative human and he wants liberals to be gone so that the world looks like he thinks it should, IOW a very conservative place. He’s used his “news” organizations in the 3 countries you mention to very much influence the people who watch/read them. He has a style that looks unharmful because it started out slowly and is a good a propaganda source as has ever been seen. His style is low and slow, never over the top, and always consistently the same message. It took about 20 yrs to be a real force for a change of perception of political ideals, something that most governments have not had the time to do in the same manner.
Ruckus
@Frank Wilhoit:
trump has an ideology. It isn’t in any way a traditional ideology because he’s trump and that comes with 74 yrs of very heavy and irrational baggage. His ideology is not political, it is not governmental, it is not religious. It is 100% personal because of his extreme narcissism. He wants his social dick sucked by an entire nation, world actually. He wants this done in every interaction that happens anywhere near him. trump is about 2 things, his overwhelming superiority – that’s his view and seemingly few others, and his wallet. But he’s no where near smart enough to get anywhere near close enough to that goal. The picture Cheryl posted with him walking with vlad shows far more about him than most do, his submissiveness to a father figure being the most obvious.
Another Scott
@Frank Wilhoit: You have a well-earned reputation for the turn of a phrase, as you demonstrate in this thread. And you make a good case, as always.
But I must push back on your argument in this case.
To say that no wars have ended anymore is to make the term meaningless, IMHO. Even the pithy “war is politics by other means” devalues what the term “war” actually means. War (in this context) is “a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state.” Those states of armed conflict do, eventually, end. “War is politics”, but it is much, much more. Politics decides how wars start and end, but war decides who lives and dies in an armed conflict.
I agree that it’s clear that we have to be prepared better for cyber stuff, and be willing to take actions to counter attacks upon us and our systems. (I’m not actually sure what damage was done in this case so I don’t want to be railroaded into rash responses, myself.) But I’m still not convinced that “war” is the right term… Even “cyberwar” or something similar has too much baggage, IMHO.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tehanu
Adam, I clicked that link but didn’t see where it says we’re “the aggressor and the cause.” Not disagreeing with you, just wondering what specifically it means.
karensky
@Zelma: Me too.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
Until we figure out a better term it is warfare. The weapons are different than they were 50 yrs ago but then so is life in general rather different. War does not have to have explosives to be war or be very effective. We think of war as being very destructive and deadly because that’s been the wars we’ve seen over the last 75 to maybe the last 150 yrs. But the weapons have changed significantly over the last 50, with technology. And the next 50 yrs they can and very likely will change significantly as technology seems to have the ability to accelerate change.
karensky
@Zelma: Me too.
@Adam L Silverman: brilliant. The Uber capitalists are scarier to me than Putin on all levels except for nuclear weapons.
Ruckus
@Ruckus:
Addendum.
Also warfare will change with that technology from having battlefields and battle lines and the tactics that can be seen because of the physical limits of the type of war history has shown us.
The biggest change is that with the war of electronics, if you will, the battlefield is wherever someone takes it. Traditional weapons are relatively heavy and visible along with being destructive. Future weapons will be able to bring warfare to places and people that normally might never otherwise see them. Right now the total number of vets is about 7% of the population and their age is about mid 20s to mid 90 yrs old and in our history of the last 75 yrs, that’s the majority of people in the US who’ve seen warfare up close and personal. Think how different that is from a cyberattack.
Gin & Tonic
@Ruckus: Manuel de Landa’s War In The Age Of Intelligent Machines is nearly 30 years old, but remains a very interesting read. Not just on 20th Century issues, he goes back to the Mongol conquest of Europe.
Another Scott
@Ruckus: You make good points, as always, Ruckus. Thanks.
I would counter that when people believe their “way of life” is at stake, they will often do anything to fight back. AK-47s and explosives are cheap and plentiful and would be employed against invaders, etc. The “war” might start with Siri and Alexa taking over the power grid and people’s bank accounts, but it won’t end that way. People will fight.
Let’s hope that smart people think about all these issues before they become even more of a reality!
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
dww44
@Mike in NC: when did Tapper say that?
Cheryl Rofer
@WaterGirl: Hard to know what will come out after January 21. The Southern District of New York seems to have a head start on everyone else in terms of bringing Trump to some sort of reckoning.
The Russian connection remains mysterious. We know about much of Trump’s financial and electoral dealings with Russia, but nothing indicates an agent-like connection.
What I mean is that while a circumstantial case can be made, starting with Trump’s refusal to state what his intelligence services tell him and going much further, nobody has turned up evidence of payments or communications beyond the publicly known interactions during formal meetings.
Again, the circumstantial case notes that Trump refuses to make notes of those meetings available, as a normal president would.
But all that can be explained simply by an abnormal admiration Trump harbors for Putin and his desire to be one of the big-boy dictators.
Will additional evidence come out? Is destroying this evidence the reason the Defense Department won’t work with the Biden transition team? What would the Biden administration do if they found evidence that Trump was, indeed, an agent?
Stay tuned.
Adam L Silverman
@Tehanu: The we’re the aggressor and the cause is something Russian senior nat-sec leadership close to Putin has been saying since 2014. I didn’t check to see if that was included at that link and I wanted to get the post done so I didn’t go looking for the link/links that indicate the whole thing. I just wanted a link that delineated that the Russians have been stating that they are at war with us.
Ruckus
@Cheryl Rofer:
What if the suppositions about where the loans that trump has gotten from Deutsche Bank were actually from is true, those suppositions being they are from Russia? What if that’s true and vlad has made it very clear to trump about that? What if that’s what he looks so scared about in the picture you posted? Now all of the above is WAG but think about the implications that he’s been borrowing money for a long time and now that he’s losing a lot of money and has really very little way to pay it back, to the guy who has shown that he can pretty much get to anyone, perhaps not the president of the US but the ex president might not be nearly so difficult. The money that he’s been collecting, the 1.2 billion that his asininely stupid supporters have been giving him that he’s hiding half of in a shell corp, suppose that’s for the DB loans, which then go to the man he’s most scarred of?
I’m not a brainiac and the above may be absolutely nothing but pure bullshit, but what if it’s not? What else is he going to do in the next 31 days to protect his ass, it’s certainly not that he’s doing anything to protect or help anyone else’s asses. He’s not even trying to get the vaccines distributed, is he going to try to profit on that? And would that surprise anyone?
Cheryl Rofer
@Ruckus: From what we know, the evidence points to a financial issue as being what Russia has on him. And it’s not just the debt, but there are indications of money laundering as well. Adam Davidson had an article in the New Yorker that he feels definitively shows money laundering for Iran’s IRGC. Money laundering is difficult to prove, and I’m no accountant, so I can’t judge that one beyond that nobody else has taken it up.
One month to go. He seems more obsessed with proving the election was crooked than anything else, which limits his ability to do damage, but who knows. January 20.
Chris Johnson
I’m not sure that’s a safe assumption. One thing these guys are good at is reimagining the way things like war can work. I think we’re all missing a big thing here.
It’s not MY financial system. For most of my life I’ve barely had anything, I’ve been the leftist railing against the oligarchy, I’ve not had $1000 to put together. Putin could conquer me but what does he get? Nothing. He does not CARE about me. A recent Shaun video about Hiroshima and Nagasaki (he found them unnecessary) pointed out that you cannot threaten authoritarian dictators by killing their common people. That’s their day job. Totally ineffective.
By the same token Putin thinks nothing of killing all the QAnons by feeding them bullshit information and getting them to spread covid, but it’s not to the end of RULING them. He does not care, any more than Trump does. The people do not matter, not to this type of ruler.
What else runs on computers? The banks, the financial system. That, not ‘ruling the peoples of the earth’, is the prize. I would be a lot less interested in control of the power grid (except as a weapon) and more interested in Russia seizing control/operation of the international finance system, because that’s the only thing they really care about. The people (either theirs, or ours) do not matter and they’d happily kill them all. Finance matters and everything else is merely an end to that.