IS RUSSIA AN EVIL EMPIRE YES OR NO

greenwald is braindead

i'm just callin' you Howard Dean from now on

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/811613450426286080

believing the intercept is funded by russia gives greenwald more credit than he deserves. i don't think he's a subversive agent. i think he's a moron, and if my opinion of you wasn't already as low as an opinion could possibly be your enjoyment of his dumbass twitter snark would lower it even further. he's like dennis perrin with a following. you're like dennis perrin but w/out even a solitary morbius to appreciate you.

thanks!

https://twitter.com/DennisThePerrin/status/810499040437817345

What's the point of this nuke nonsense we don't all have enough already?

Obviously it's a bad development but Kremlin shit stirring is barely news at this point in the year

"all our communication channels with the US are frozen!" lol climate change amirite

It's just so dumb that we are still doing this nuke proliferation dumbassery surely there are more up to date ways to saber rattle?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM01v_vVnbg

Surely a hardmanning Putin is like catnip to Trump, he'll want to top it.

yeah he already did http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/us/politics/trump-says-us-should-expand-its-nuclear-capability.html?_r=0

well idk top it but obv they're both enjoying themselves very much

I assume that the Putin comments on upgrading the nuclear arsenal to ensure that it's future-proofed against missile defence systems is partly because Israel has just announced that it's selling Iron Dome to Azerbaijan and Czechia. Whether they'll actually bother to do it, given that all three countries are friendly atm and only one has nuclear weapons, i don't know.

The Iron Dome afaik has no capability to stop nuclear weapons - it's a C-RAM system for things like rockets and mortars. There are other systems in testing for more sophisticated ballistic weapons like the Arrow or David's Sling.

That might still bother Putin especially if he wants to keep the option open of using less sophisticated equipment in an engagement (esp if he's conducting an action through proxies) but developing his nuclear arsenal would have nothing to do with the Iron Dome sale itself.

xp this is off topic, but is "Czechia" actually caching on now? (i.e. as an alternative to "czech republic"

if i were going to do putin apologetics on this the tact i'd take is that MAD only works if both parties are able to inflict nuclear damage on each other and therefore the US development of anti-ballastic missile systems w/ Israel inherently undermines world stability and Putin's attempts to refine his arsenal to bypass current technology is returning the world to a state of equilibrium and peace. i mean i doubt i could say it with a straight face but here it's free for the taking.

Iron Dome can't stop nuclear missiles but the technology is improving and Israel is developing excellent arms trade relationships with countries in Russia's orbit. Any upgrades would be years away, by which time other systems (Magic Wand?) might be up for grabs. I don't think it's a stretch to think that public comments made about negating missile defence systems made 48 hours after two neighbours bought missile defence systems might have been made with the sale in mind.

In practice, Russia already has far more nuclear weapons than it could ever practically use or any missile defence system could ever stop so, as with Trump, it's likely to be more for public consumption than a major policy shift.

xp, i don't know but my Polish colleagues have started saying it so i kind of feel i should give it a go for a while to see if it sticks.

www.nytimes.com/2016/12/27/sports/olympics/russia-doping.html

But even as he and other officials signaled their acceptance of the fundamental findings of Mr. McLaren’s investigation, they were largely unconciliatory, suggesting that cheating to benefit Russia had served to offset what they perceived as preferential treatment for Western nations by global sports authorities.

“Have you seen the Fancy Bear records?” Mr. Smirnov said, invoking medical records hacked by a cyberespionage group believed to be associated with G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence agency suspected of hacking computers at the Democratic National Committee. The medical records revealed that hundreds of Western athletes had been given special medical permission to take banned drugs for legitimate therapeutic reasons.

“Russia never had the opportunities that were given to other countries,” Mr. Smirnov said.

“The general feeling in Russia is that we didn’t have a chance,” he added, acknowledging that anabolic steroids like those taken by Russian athletes have never been deemed medically excusable by regulators.

The supposedly tamper-proof bottles that held Russian athletes’ doping samples in Sochi were manipulated — enabling officials to switch out their steroid-laced urine. Mr. Smirnov and his advisers suggested that the same thing had happened at other Olympics.

“It’s lucky that the WADA had Rodchenkov,” said Victor Berezov, a lawyer for Russia’s Olympic Committee. “Maybe in China, London and everywhere — maybe the same things could happen. Because the system is broken.”

Was in a bar in Edinburgh last night when a fight broke out - well, one guy took a swing at another guy and broke his glasses - the aggressor standing up and saying to the other guy, "Right, ya Putin bastard, ootside noo!" before being bundled out.

So, yes, definitely evil.

lol!

David Neiwert certainly seems to think so, re: thread question

More on the Burlington Electric nonsense:

https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/01/03/the-russians-are-coming-the-russians-are-oops-no-russians/

As federal officials investigate suspicious Internet activity found last week on a Vermont utility computer, they are finding evidence that the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility, according to experts and officials close to the investigation.

An employee at Burlington Electric Department was checking his Yahoo email account Friday and triggered an alert indicating that his computer had connected to a suspicious IP address associated by authorities with the Russian hacking operation that infiltrated the Democratic Party. Officials told the company that traffic with this particular address is found elsewhere in the country and is not unique to Burlington Electric, suggesting the company wasn’t being targeted by the Russians. Indeed, officials say it is possible that the traffic is benign, since this particular IP address is not always connected to malicious activity.

Afaict, the problem is that the White House report on hacking used as evidence a set of IP addresses not specific to Russia and not used exclusively for malicious purposes - along with details of a malware tool that is widely used, freely available and, ironically, Ukrainian in origin.

https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/12/russia-malware-ip-hack/

Cross reference the IP addresses and the tools against suspicious activity and you will get countless hits - including the IP the Burlington worker connected to. Using this as evidence of state hacking seems bizarre.

http://www.robertmlee.org/critiques-of-the-dhsfbis-grizzly-steppe-report/

The White House’s response and combined messaging from the government agencies is well done and the technical attribution provided by private sector companies has been solid for quite some time. However, the DHS/FBI GRIZZLY STEPPE report does not meet its stated intent of helping network defenders and instead choose to focus on a confusing assortment of attribution, non-descriptive indicators, and re-hashed tradecraft. Additionally, the bulk of the report (8 of the 13 pages) is general high level recommendations not descriptive of the RIS threats mentioned and with no linking to what activity would help with what aspect of the technical data covered. It simply serves as an advertisement of documents and programs the DHS is trying to support. One recommendation for Whitelisting Applications might as well read “whitelisting is good mm’kay?” If that recommendation would have been overlaid with what it would have stopped in this campaign specifically and how defenders could then leverage that information going forward it would at least have been descriptive and useful. Instead it reads like a copy/paste of DHS’ most recent documents – at least in a vendor report you usually only get 1 page of marketing instead of 8.

This ultimately seems like a very rushed report put together by multiple teams working different data sets and motivations. It is my opinion and speculation that there were some really good government analysts and operators contributing to this data and then report reviews, leadership approval processes, and sanitation processes stripped out most of the value and left behind a very confusing report trying to cover too much while saying too little.

We must do better as a community. This report is a good example of how a really strong strategic message (POTUS statement) and really good data (government and private sector combination) can be opened to critique due to poor report writing.

@jeremyscahill
Interesting comment from President Obama on Wikileaks and Russia:

https://twitter.com/jeremyscahill/status/821829756236787717

https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-set-move-closer-decriminalize-domestic-violence-071739318.html

Danish media reports a cyberattack on Sweden, on a program the military currently uses to plan a big NATO military exercise.

I had a dream last night where I was at an informal hush-hush meeting with Putin and my whole family was there and we were at like a cabin in the woods, and I realized nobody had gotten out little water bottles for all the people at the meeting so I went in the garage and got some. I forgot what we all talked about but at one point Putin was like, if the USA was utterly destroyed, that would make me happy. What if my country was utterly destroyed, how would that make you feel? And I was like "I DGAF about Russia dude I've never even been there"

Are there any good Russian-language news sources that aren't government-owned/slanted? I'm not concerned about whether they're from the country of Russia. Just Russian-language and reliable.

Dozhd is pretty good: https://tvrain.ru/

Meduza is worth a look. Not entirely reliable but presents an independent take: https://meduza.io/articles

Novaya Gazeta as well, I guess:

www.novayagazeta.ru

Thanks!

7 theories of Putin

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/22/vladimir-putin-killer-genius-kleptocrat-spy-myths

Definitely one of the better pieces about him.

https://mobile.twitter.com/hannahgais/status/835178401963126784/photo/1

lol, Louise Mensch softly floating the theory that Russia bumped off Andrew Breitbart.

I feel like cocaine 'bumped' off andrew breitbart

someone sassed on Twitter that "Putin" is Brit for coke

another Putin critic murdered in Ukraine, I see

Russia and China both tried to hack my Instagram.

hunting for compromising WDYLLs

Russia hacked the US and made them bomb that school in Syria

Putin must be annoyed they hadn't bombed that one yet.

This is great

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-russian-journalists-think-of-how-american-reporters-cover-putin-and-trump

I completely agree that the mental model most western intelligence agencies have of the Russian cyber apparatus is probably shit. We project our own capabilities & force structure onto our adversaries - which worked / works when we talk about the Chinese PLA - but when you apply it to a state so alien to Western institutional structure as Russia, it's kind of dumb and has tons of blind spots. That is not to say at all that I don't think their various shops deliberately and, in their own way, systematically, fucked with the election and will proceed to do the same to every other similar event they think they might be able to influence in their favor, I just think the journalists in this article are on point that Russia's not that good at stuff - echoing, sort of, what ShariVari has frequently argued on this thread and elsewhere. But not being "good" in the sense of professionally managed, focused, trained, etc. doesn't mean you can't accomplish the goal.

^ last sentence is urgent & key

Yep, it's a very good article.

To expand on that wrt hacking, the article echoes what I've always heard about Russian methods:

Still, Turovsky is suspicious of the level of specificity in U.S. reporting on Russian hackers. For example, the way that the terms “Fancy Bear” and “Cozy Bear”—nicknames for hacking units linked to Russian intelligence services—entered the American journalistic lexicon gave him pause. “As I understand, there aren’t really groups, just a lot of different people who do this work; it’s pure conjecture to think they form into discrete, particular squads that you could call this or that,”

Also, aiui, a lot of state-linked hacking is more or less outsourced to commercial hackers - which is also the idea behind the arrests of Nikulin and Belen and the placing of non-state actors on the hacking-specific sanctions list. This isn't done just to maintain plausible deniability, it's because the commercial hackers are better - which is why there is a lot of scepticism when newspapers say X, Y or Z is 'so sophisticated it could only have been a state attack', or w/e. In terms of attribution, there is a theory you're better off relying on traditional human intelligence rather than trying to work it out from the kind of tools used. Given the reluctance to publicly outline human intel, it also makes it harder to give everyone slam-dunk evidence, which is why a lot of analysts were underwhelmed by the US reports released ahead of the sanctions.

The last sentence is nonsense. Most analysts believed Russia did it from the start, though not because of US reports.

don't say things are nonsense before you're sure you've understood them properly, fred