Putin & Wikileaks

You all have probably seen the news about the stolen Democratic National Committee emails

You know what concerns me more than politics as usual is the fact that the Russian government is trying to influence our elections. The Russians released their stolen documents timed for the Democratic convention and it tells you a lot about who Putin is backing.

The Washington Post had this to say on Friday about the stolen emails,

Friday's digital document dump follows a report last month by The Washington Post that Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee, gaining access to an entire database of opposition research. DNC and Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for comment Friday as reporters and campaign staff began to assess the situation.

CBS News reported,

Clinton campaign manager says pro-Trump Russia behind DNC email leak
July 24, 2016

Hillary Clinton's campaign manager accused Russia on Sunday of leaking emails on purpose from the Democratic National Committee to help Republican Donald Trump in the presidential election.
[…]
The hackers were all kicked out of the DNC computer system shortly after they were discovered. A spokesperson for the Russian Embassy said at the time they had no knowledge of the operation. No financial information was stolen, which indicates that the breach was not the work of criminal hackers.

Putin has complimented Trump in the past and Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's campaign chairman, has worked with Kremlin-linked figures abroad.

The New York Times had this to said about Putin's involvement in our politics,

 WASHINGTON — An unusual question is capturing the attention of cyberspecialists, Russia experts and Democratic Party leaders in Philadelphia: Is Vladimir V. Putin trying to meddle in the American presidential election?

Until Friday, that charge, with its eerie suggestion of a Kremlin conspiracy to aid Donald J. Trump, has been only whispered.

But the release on Friday of some 20,000 stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers, many of them embarrassing to Democratic leaders, has intensified discussion of the role of Russian intelligence agencies in disrupting the 2016 campaign.
[...]
Proving the source of a cyberattack is notoriously difficult. But researchers have concluded that the national committee was breached by two Russian intelligence agencies, which were the same attackers behind previous Russian cyberoperations at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year. And metadata from the released emails suggests that the documents passed through Russian computers. Though a hacker claimed responsibility for giving the emails to WikiLeaks, the same agencies are the prime suspects. Whether the thefts were ordered by Mr. Putin, or just carried out by apparatchiks who thought they might please him, is anyone’s guess.

On Sunday morning, the issue erupted, as Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, argued on ABC’s “This Week” that the emails were leaked “by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump” citing “experts” but offering no other evidence. Mr. Mook also suggested that the Russians might have good reason to support Mr. Trump: The Republican nominee indicated in an interview with The New York Times last week that he might not back NATO nations if they came under attack from Russia — unless he was first convinced that the countries had made sufficient contributions to the Atlantic alliance. It was a remarkable moment: Even at the height of the Cold War, it was hard to find a presidential campaign willing to charge that its rival was essentially secretly doing the bidding of a key American adversary. But the accusation is emerging as a theme of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, as part of an attempt to portray Mr. Trump not only as an isolationist, but also as one who would go soft on confronting Russia as it threatens nations that have shown too much independence from Moscow or, in the case of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, joined NATO.

And Defense One was even more to the point,

How Putin Weaponized Wikileaks to Influence the Election of an American President
By Patrick Tucker
July 24, 2016

Evidence suggests that a Russian intelligence group was the source of the most recent Wikileaks intel dump, which was aimed to influence the U.S. election.

Close your eyes and imagine that a hacking group backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin broke into the email system of a major U.S. political party. The group stole thousands of sensitive messages and then published them through an obliging third party in a way that was strategically timed to influence the United States presidential election. Now open your eyes because that’s what just happened.

On Friday, Wikileaks published 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. They reveal, among other things, thuggish infighting, a push by a top DNC official to use Bernie Sanders’ religious convictions against him in the South, and attempts to strong-arm media outlets. In other words, they reveal the Washington campaign monster for what it is.

But leave aside the purported content of the Wikileaks data dump (to which numerous other outlets have devoted considerable attention) and consider the source. Considerable evidence shows that the Wikileaks dump was an orchestrated act by the Russian government, working through proxies, to undermine Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign.
[…]
“This has all the hallmarks of tradecraft. The only rationale to release such data from the Russian bulletproof host was to empower one candidate against another. The Cold War is alive and well,” Tom Kellermann, the CEO of Strategic Cyber Ventures told Defense One.
[…]
The use of Wikileaks as the publishing platform served to legitimize the information dump, which also contains a large amount of personal information related to democratic donors such as social security and credit card numbers. This suggests that Wikileaks didn’t perform a thorough analysis of the documents before they released them, or simply didn’t care.

And Defense One summed it up nicely…

The evidence so far suggests it’s a weapon that Putin used to great effect last week.

I know many people are criticizing the DNC, but people this is the nature of U.S. politics for better or worse and I sure would like to see the Republicans emails about them trying to block Trump for the nomination. Do you actually think that the Republicans didn’t write similar emails about Trump?

This should be a major concern that a foreign power is trying to control our elections. Does anyone else not like foreign governments and organizations butting in to our elections?