Cyber Firm at Center of Russian Hacking Charges Misread Data
Still, some cybersecurity experts are skeptical that the election and purported Ukraine hacks are connected. Among them is Jeffrey Carr, a cyberwarfare consultant who has lectured at the U.S. Army War College, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other government agencies.
In a January post on LinkedIn, Carr called CrowdStrike’s evidence in the Ukraine “flimsy.” He told VOA in an interview that CrowdStrike mistakenly assumed that the X-Agent malware employed in the hacks was a reliable fingerprint for Russian actors.
“We now know that’s false,” he said, “and that the source code has been obtained by others outside of Russia.”
The key point: attribution of hacks is difficult. Circumstantial evidence often is misleading as is arguing from motive or capability.
Cyberwarfare and information warfare are where all of this analysis becomes a hall of mirrors that can prompt self-defeating shows of strength. Or self-defeating comfort and complacency.
The Putin-scare analysis of media drags world public opinion into this hall of mirrors and distracts from doing the local and state politics that reclaims power for the grassroots.
It is not Russia and Putin but Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, …and the Republicans legislatures and political operatives of those state that the battle in opposition to Trump should be against. The effort should be to move Trump out of the position of having the powers of a war President. It will be a slow grinding act of political organization at the local and state levels in which the political establishment will not want to do what is required for popular policy victories.
But politics will not be the main arena of opposition to Trump and his policies. Local and state programs to do what needs to be done in spite of the Federal capture by the billionaire oligarchs will be how it plays out. Involvement of local people in citizen science projects counting and photographing the baseline and changing environment is one, but not the only form of grassroots organizing. Providing locally generated support for continuing Meals-On-Wheels programs and local support for mitigating action for all of the cuts that the oligarchs intend.
It might just take people sacrificing an income-producing job, which in turn, will put pressure on wages and salaries if done on a wide scale.
That means that a lot of people will likely have to make the choice of cutting their expenditures dramatically now rather than waiting for the Trump effects to do it for them.
What will be required is diminishing of politics as sport, partisanship as culture, and focus on the minutia of what is actually happening in the organs of government and on the ground instead on in the information war of all against all.
It is not clear the role of political blogs in this strategy of opposition; maybe more solid facts, less analysis, much less opinion. (And here I am ignoring this in this post.)
I think the current fixation on Trump (and Putin) has become a huge distraction to what needs to be done in opposition to the closing down of oligarchic fascist rule. And all of that is in the very local that the internet often provides too much of an escape from.
So organize to win back or increase sympathetic majorities in your state legislature in 2018. And your local governments in any upcoming election. And ensure that the candidates understand and can explain to voters exactly how they are an alternative to the oligarchy.
I think you will know resistance is real when the Delaware and Nevada legislatures take up a bill repealing their corporation laws altogether, and that measure has a good chance of passage. Because corporation law is the source of Republican power and the Republican base.
And then we can stop discussing the kerning of the 2016 election.