Where was this outrage when Sony Pictures was hacked by North Korea because of the movie, "The Interview" about Kim Jong un?
Or when the Federal Employee database containing my 20 page security file with my life history was stolen by the Chinese??? Along with MILLIONS of other sensitive Govt employees ??
Where were the snarly investigations and sanctions and demonization then??
You know what - those are very good questions. But you are approaching it from the wrong end.
There WAS outrage and anger. The Sony hack was big time in the news.
The question to ask is: where were all the outraged claims demanding EVIDENCE before doing anything? We ACCEPTED what the intelligence agencies determined, and we allowed our president to react.
And keep in mind two additional things:
- the reaction, this time, was not the first time the White House has reacted to Russia's hacking, Russia has been warned several times, leading to this - not a knee jerk reaction, but a measured response after we have had an intelligence consensus on it.
- secondly, it targeted our electoral process, I think the timing of the released information ( compared to when the hack occurred) supports this - the motivations (ie - wanting a Trump win) maybe be less supported, but claiming it had nothing to do with our elections is weak. Shouldn't we be outraged that a foreign entity is so blatently attempting to disrupt our elections? Regardless of which candidate was the target I find it mindboggling that people are not angry about it. the same people who are denanding stringent voter ID laws, pass this off - excuse it - demand more "proof". I simply don't understand it.
Where were the visible sanctions on the CHinese for stealing the life data of damn near every Federal employee or security contractor for decades? I musta missed them. No demonizing of the ChiComs for that act.
The most recent hacking represents an ongoing escalation in state-sponsored hacking, which is something the administration was concerned about in how to respond to the Chinese and the North Koreans and now the Russians.
Response isn't a "one size fits all" solution. The visible sanctions and public response to Russia were enacted after other attempts to halt it
proved ineffective. We retaliated against NK, but the same response wouldn't work against China or Russia, as outlined in the article below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/01/world/asia/us-decides-to-retaliate-against-chinas-hacking.html
But over recent days, both Mr. Clapper and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, director of the National Security Agency and commander of the military’s Cyber Command, have hinted at the internal debate by noting that unless the United States finds a way to respond to the attacks, they are bound to escalate.
Mr. Clapper predicted that the number and sophistication of hacking aimed at the United States would worsen “until such time as we create both the substance and psychology of deterrence.”
Admiral Rogers made clear in a public presentation to the meeting of the Aspen Security Forum last week that he had advised President Obama to strike back against North Korea for the earlier attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment. Since then, evidence that hackers associated with the Chinese government were responsible for the Office of Personnel Management theft has been gathered by personnel under Admiral Rogers’s command, officials said.
Admiral Rogers stressed the need for “creating costs” for attackers responsible for the intrusion, although he acknowledged that it differed in important ways from the Sony case. In the Sony attack, the theft of emails was secondary to the destruction of much of the company’s computer systems, part of an effort to intimidate the studio to keep it from releasing a comedy that portrayed the assassination of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.
According to officials involved in the internal debates over responses to the personnel office attack, Mr. Obama’s aides explored applying economic sanctions against China, based on the precedent of sanctions the president approved against North Korea in January.
“The analogy simply didn’t work,” said one senior economic official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations. North Korea is so isolated that there was no risk it could retaliate in kind. But in considering sanctions against China, officials from the Commerce Department and the Treasury offered a long list of countersanctions the Chinese could impose against American firms that are already struggling to deal with China.
So sanctions would be less effective with China (and more likely to damage us) but that is not the case with Russia, there isn't much Russia can sanction us for that would do much damage. However the Obama administration applied a different approach with China that HAS caused a decline in Chinese hacking attacks:
Obama Curbed Chinese Hacking, But Russia Won’t Be So Easy
That decline was achieved through two major moves by the US government since 2014. First, the US Department of Justice identified five Chinese men by name—all members of China’s People’s Liberation Army—and accused them of taking part in a series of intrusions of American companies, going so far as to issue criminal charges against them in absentia. Additionally, after the US threatened new trade sanctions against China for its hacking activities in 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Obama signed an agreement in that September in which both countries agreed not to hack the other’s private sector targets. With a few exceptions, China has since abided by that agreement, Alperovitch says.
No demonizing? They were openly and publically identified, and an agreement was reached after threatening trade sanctions.
But Russia is not China. from the same article I quoted above:
A Russian Puzzle
...Despite that intelligence community concurrence, no course of action has been publicly set. While the White House is rumored to have considered economic sanctions, that measure may not work as well in Russia’s case, says FireEye’s Director of Global Intelligence Laura Galante. The US recently sanctioned Russia following its invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea, and needs to preserve what relationship it has left to work toward peace in Syria, limitings its ability to play the sanctions card again. And unlike the case of China’s economic espionage, financial sanctions would be seen as an “asymmetric” financial response to a fundamentally political crime, Galante says. “For China, it made sense to say,’you’re stealing our IP so you can’t sell in our market,'” she says. “With Russia, sanctions don’t align with the actual activity taking place now.”
Obama himself told reporters Friday that additional sanctions may not be the answer. “We already have enormous numbers of sanctions against Russia,” he said. “How we approach an appropriate response that increases costs for them for behavior like this in the future but doesn’t create problems for us is worth taking the time to think through and figure out.”
Naming and indicting individual culprits, as the US Justice Department did with Chinese hackers in 2014, may not be the right approach to Russia either, Galante says. “The Russians are less affected by shame,” she says. “The Chinese felt incredibly demeaned by what happened with the indictment and that made it powerful. The Russians will just see it as continued Russophobia.”
The article does suggest that highly targeted sanctions might work with Russia:
Applying the China model to Russia can still work, says Georgetown professor and ex-CIA counsel Catherine Lotrionte, in the sense that the US needs to find the legal and diplomatic buttons it can push to reach Russia’s leadership. “You have to make their lives unpleasant in some way,” she says. “You have to do something to show them this is not worth it.”
Lotrionte suggests highly targeted sanctions designed to hurt not the Russian economy but Putin himself, or his direct associates. And targeted trade sanctions could be combined with freezing Russian assets in American banks and denying travel to Putin’s inner circle. “Targeted sanctions can have positive results,” she says. “You’re not targeting companies. You’re targeting individuals. It could be people in government, it could be CEOs of companies…We have the legal authority to freeze assets and prohibit travel.”
And that is basically what Obama did along with the public throwing out of spies. Is that demonizing and if so, how is it any more demonizing than publically accusing (and shaming) Chinese officials behind the Chinese hacks? The only difference is the context of the debate - a context that involves a highly irregular election season, and allegations of electoral interference. The contextual difference is that like the NK hack, like the Chinese hack, these Russian hacks have taken place on Obama's watch and it's his responsibility to find the best way to deal with them in a way that will hopefully decrease or end them. Unlike with China, he doesn't have years to put pressure on and negotiate for a solution. Softer diplomatic approaches have utterly failed with Russia. What was needed was an appropriate response, that made a strong point and did not leave us looking weak. Pretending that there is no "proof" (which we did not demand for the Chinese) - pretending that we want warm and fuzzy relations with Russia so we'll let bygones be bygones and ignore the latest in an escelating series of hacks isn't a wise solution either.
In these 3 "election" cases you have arrogant people IGNORING security protocols and alerts and then whining about being compromised. The DNC had a VERY hard time accepting the FBI advice to tighten up. They are complicit in the result. And Ms Clinton is DEFINITELY guilty of circumventing all the REQUIRED secure communications channels in favor of her convenience. And Podesta? Who the hell knows. I heard he LOST a phone prior to all this news. And THAT very well might have made it extremely easy by itself.
In those cases - Mrs. Clinton may or may not have been hacked (no proof either way) - but that is not the material that was leaked to wikileaks. There is no way of verifying anything about Podesta's phone. I think those two things should be left out of the occassion. It IS known that the DNC was hacked, and yes they were stupid about security, but to use an analogy - does that mean a scantily dressed girl in a rough bar is complicit in the crime if she is raped and, does that mean that we should not go after her attacker decisively?
And here's the problem I have. The media and the partisan whiners are conflating Russia with THE Russian govt. The traces that were found on the DNC snoop job were described as having been analyzed by an Independent company. (Because the DNC didn't TRUST the Intel people to determine ?) And that public report traces the entries back to KNOWN Russian hackers (Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear) but there is NOTHING that connects these outside guys to Russian intelligence in this particular case.
The intelligence agencies have been saying that a hack of this scope and nature, not to mention the carefully timed releases a year later....indicate involvement at a state level. Now we can choose to believe or disbelieve our own agencies. But if we choose to disbelieve them, then I have to ask why we chose to believe that the Chinese hacks were orchestrated at a state level (no "direct" evidence there either and no one whining about the need for it)? Same with North Korea I think.
So WHY are some insisting Russia be treated as more innocent then China? I think that is a good question to ask.
If Cozy and Fancy ARE contractors to the Kremlin -- then WHY would the Kremlin release information that would burn these valuable assets? That's NOT the way it's done. Protecting assets and methods is ALWAYS #1 consideration in the spy biz. Sounds more like the leak was a "Snowden type".. Or the "bears" themselves SELLING the information. In that case, Russians did the hacking, but NOT the Kremlin, who is probably also mad at the fall-out and is largely innocent.
I can't answer that because I am not involved in intelligence, and don't know the ins and outs of the Russians, nor do I as a private citizen have access to the information they do - so I do trust our agencies in this regard - particularly when more than one are drawing the same conclusions.
Out of ALL of these 3 attacks -- only the DNC hack has been publicly analyzed. And THAT ONE -- had very little to do with "influencing" the general election. It was Podesta's phone and the katty comments about controlling and managing Clinton's temperament and message that was the damaging stuff. And I for one, am gonna look at EACH CASE individually, with a priority on the Podesta phone to determine whether this is a big poo flinging expedition or whether that phone has traces of the RUSSIAN
GOVT (or others) on it.
Know what else I think? I think after this that Trump is a moron if he refuses to put down his tweeter. Or at least they pry it out of his tiny hands and force him to dictate tweets for someone else to send out. He's giving up information every time he types a brainfart. And I also believe that the Dems are fishing to see who BOUGHT that Podesta information --
IF it went up for sale. Might turn out that the Kremlin didn't turn it over to Wikileaks, but some big GOP donor might have.
HOW and by WHOM it got released is the question. Not just who hacked it.
The Trump and the Tweet shalt not be parted. No parteth sayeth the Lord for the Tweet shall be the message and the Tweeter shall be the Messenger.
Holy cow.. If you knew how good these folks were at accessing the HARD targets, Hillary's server, the DNC and Podesta's phone would be child's play.. Any of THOUSANDS of hackers who happened to use Russian malware and tools (not Russian Intel Agency tools) could have done this on a lark. These devices were WIDE open. Commercial spyhunter s/w protection doesn't even bother them with the type of phishing attacks that Podesta's phone was. In fact, the spear-fishing attack that opened up his phone was discussed publicly. He inquired to IT as to a memo that SEEMED to come from them. But in the reply, (the story goes), The IT person said that his "spell-checker" changed a word that told Podesta (or assistant) that it was OK to open the malicious file.
That's not a PayPal type deal.. 
