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by Grizzly » Fri Apr 01, 2016 12:12 am
by Nordic » Fri Apr 01, 2016 1:46 am
Sorry Bernie Bros, Your Candidate Just Doesn’t Have The Foreign Policy Experience Necessary To Prop Up A Pro-Western Dictatorship
Marie Schade
Blogger
All election long, I’ve seen post after post from rabid “Bernie Bros” ecstatically trumpeting the enlightened policies of Senator Bernie Sanders. You can find them in every corner of the internet spewing impassioned diatribes against anybody who dares criticize their presidential candidate. Well, I’m sorry, Bernie Bros; it’s not working on me. Bernie has a couple nice economic pipe dreams, but he simply does not have the foreign policy experience necessary to prop up a pro-Western dictatorship.
Argue all you want, but the bottom line is that Sanders has repeatedly failed to demonstrate the deep grasp of international affairs that a president needs to install politically expedient totalitarian regimes abroad.
Sure, he can speak abstractly about international relations, but enabling the rise of the next Pinochet requires a lot more than abstractions. For that, you need actual diplomatic chops and hands-on experience supporting tyrannical despots, and that’s where Sanders would be way out of his depth.
I’m just being pragmatic here. Even the most fanatical Bernie Bro has to admit their hero knows nothing about the real-life challenges a president faces when undermining established foreign governments. The tough truth is that no amount of high-minded rambling about free college tuition can put machine guns into the hands of juntas sympathetic to U.S. strategic goals.
I suppose this is about the time when Bernie’s army piles on me for blaspheming against the almighty Sanders’ ability to support U.S.–friendly fascist regimes in strategically important nations. Before you take to your Twitter soapboxes, though, tell me this: Do you honestly believe that a single-issue candidate like Sanders understands the geopolitical complexities involved in turning a blind eye to the human rights abuses of the Saudi monarchy in exchange for economic and military advantages?
The tough truth is that no amount of high-minded rambling about free college tuition can put machine guns into the hands of juntas sympathetic to U.S. strategic goals.
I admire your dedication, Bernie Bros. I really do. But it’s time to admit that Sanders is a foreign policy flyweight who couldn’t facilitate a strategically convenient military coup for his life.
So again, I ask you: When it’s time to assassinate a democratically elected head of state who’s threatening American economic assets, is Bernie the guy you want in the Situation Room?
Look, at the end of the day, I understand where the Bernie Bros are coming from, and I agree with much of what Sanders has to say. But when all he does is harp on the economy without adding anything about abetting dictators in order to systematically crush all resistance to American influence, it really makes you wonder if he’s cut out for the job.
Whoever our next president is, they’ll have to strike a balance between addressing issues here at home and maintaining close ties with strategic dictatorships abroad. I don’t think Bernie Sanders has the foreign policy insight to strike that balance, and that’s why he’ll never have my vote, no matter how many of his supporters want to yell at me online.
by kool maudit » Fri Apr 01, 2016 7:04 am
by NeonLX » Fri Apr 01, 2016 11:47 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Fri Apr 01, 2016 11:56 am
NeonLX » Fri Apr 01, 2016 10:47 am wrote:Jesus Christ. I have spent so much time arguing with $shillary droids on Facebook about Her Highness's propensity for warfare and neoliberal economic policies. It's like arguing with an answering machine. And it's infuriating.
by Grizzly » Fri Apr 01, 2016 4:57 pm
by Project Willow » Fri Apr 01, 2016 10:27 pm
NeonLX » 01 Apr 2016 07:47 wrote:Jesus Christ. I have spent so much time arguing with $shillary droids on Facebook about Her Highness's propensity for warfare and neoliberal economic policies. It's like arguing with an answering machine. And it's infuriating.
by Nordic » Fri Apr 01, 2016 11:02 pm
How to Hack an Election
Andrés Sepúlveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade. He tells his story for the first time.
By Jordan Robertson, Michael Riley, and Andrew Willis | March 31, 2016
It was just before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star. He beamed as he was showered with red, green, and white confetti at the Mexico City headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had ruled for more than 70 years before being forced out in 2000. Returning the party to power on that night in July 2012, Peña Nieto vowed to tame drug violence, fight corruption, and open a more transparent era in Mexican politics.
Two thousand miles away, in an apartment in Bogotá’s upscale Chicó Navarra neighborhood, Andrés Sepúlveda sat before six computer screens. Sepúlveda is Colombian, bricklike, with a shaved head, goatee, and a tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his head. On his nape are the words “</head>” and “<body>” stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. He was watching a live feed of Peña Nieto’s victory party, waiting for an official declaration of the results.
When Peña Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in flash drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a microwave, then broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.
For eight years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging major political campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Peña Nieto job was by far his most complex. He led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory. On that July night, he cracked bottle after bottle of Colón Negra beer in celebration. As usual on election night, he was alone.
Sepúlveda’s career began in 2005, and his first jobs were small—mostly defacing campaign websites and breaking into opponents’ donor databases. Within a few years he was assembling teams that spied, stole, and smeared on behalf of presidential campaigns across Latin America. He wasn’t cheap, but his services were extensive. For $12,000 a month, a customer hired a crew that could hack smartphones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package, at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and defense. The jobs were carefully laundered through layers of middlemen and consultants. Sepúlveda says many of the candidates he helped might not even have known about his role; he says he met only a few.
His teams worked on presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Campaigns mentioned in this story were contacted through former and current spokespeople; none but Mexico’s PRI and the campaign of Guatemala’s National Advancement Party would comment.
As a child, he witnessed the violence of Colombia’s Marxist guerrillas. As an adult, he allied with a right wing emerging across Latin America. He believed his hacking was no more diabolical than the tactics of those he opposed, such as Hugo Chávez and Daniel Ortega.
Many of Sepúlveda’s efforts were unsuccessful, but he has enough wins that he might be able to claim as much influence over the political direction of modern Latin America as anyone in the 21st century. “My job was to do actions of dirty war and psychological operations, black propaganda, rumors—the whole dark side of politics that nobody knows exists but everyone can see,” he says in Spanish, while sitting at a small plastic table in an outdoor courtyard deep within the heavily fortified offices of Colombia’s attorney general’s office. He’s serving 10 years in prison for charges including use of malicious software, conspiracy to commit crime, violation of personal data, and espionage, related to hacking during Colombia’s 2014 presidential election. He has agreed to tell his full story for the first time, hoping to convince the public that he’s rehabilitated—and gather support for a reduced sentence.
Usually, he says, he was on the payroll of Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based political consultant who’s been called the Karl Rove of Latin America. Rendón denies using Sepúlveda for anything illegal, and categorically disputes the account Sepúlveda gave Bloomberg Businessweek of their relationship, but admits knowing him and using him to do website design. “If I talked to him maybe once or twice, it was in a group session about that, about the Web,” he says. “I don’t do illegal stuff at all. There is negative campaigning. They don’t like it—OK. But if it’s legal, I’m gonna do it. I’m not a saint, but I’m not a criminal.” While Sepúlveda’s policy was to destroy all data at the completion of a job, he left some documents with members of his hacking teams and other trusted third parties as a secret “insurance policy.”
Sepúlveda provided Bloomberg Businessweek with what he says are e-mails showing conversations between him, Rendón, and Rendón’s consulting firm concerning hacking and the progress of campaign-related cyber attacks. Rendón says the e-mails are fake. An analysis by an independent computer security firm said a sample of the e-mails they examined appeared authentic. Some of Sepúlveda’s descriptions of his actions match published accounts of events during various election campaigns, but other details couldn’t be independently verified. One person working on the campaign in Mexico, who asked not to be identified out of fear for his safety, substantially confirmed Sepúlveda’s accounts of his and Rendón’s roles in that election.
Sepúlveda says he was offered several political jobs in Spain, which he says he turned down because he was too busy. On the question of whether the U.S. presidential campaign is being tampered with, he is unequivocal. “I’m 100 percent sure it is,” he says.
As for Sepúlveda, his insight was to understand that voters trusted what they thought were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media more than they did experts on television and in newspapers. He knew that accounts could be faked and social media trends fabricated, all relatively cheaply. He wrote a software program, now called Social Media Predator, to manage and direct a virtual army of fake Twitter accounts. The software let him quickly change names, profile pictures, and biographies to fit any need. Eventually, he discovered, he could manipulate the public debate as easily as moving pieces on a chessboard—or, as he puts it, “When I realized that people believe what the Internet says more than reality, I discovered that I had the power to make people believe almost anything.”
by Nordic » Sat Apr 02, 2016 4:08 am
REPORT: 41 Percent of Hillary Clinton’s Twitter Followers Are FAKE
Jim Hoft Nov 10th, 2015 7:48 am 24 Comments
Guest post by Aleister
Hillary Twitter
Hillary Clinton and her advisers are always struggling to make her seem real but she usually comes off as fake. Now we learn that almost half of her followers on Twitter are fake too.
The Washington Examiner reports:
Clinton has highest percentage of fake followers
An audit of Hillary Clinton’s main Twitter feed, @HillaryClinton, shows that 41 percent of her followers are not real people, a far higher percentage of fake followers than all other Republican or Democratic candidates.
The audit was done by running Clinton’s Twitter address through TwitterAudit, which quickly measures how many real people are following, and how many fake accounts are following.
According to TwitterAudit, most Twitter accounts have some fake followers, and anything with 60 percent or more real followers is considered “real.” Clinton’s falls just short of that threshold, as 59 percent of her followers are real.
Anyone surprised?
by 82_28 » Sat Apr 02, 2016 4:23 am
by RocketMan » Wed Apr 06, 2016 2:58 am
A CNN host brought proceedings to a quick halt Tuesday morning when a conservative guest went on a rant about Hillary Clinton — including her participation in a 1975 child abuse court case.
by Rory » Wed Apr 06, 2016 5:59 pm
by coffin_dodger » Wed Apr 06, 2016 6:06 pm
by NeonLX » Thu Apr 07, 2016 3:44 pm
coffin_dodger » Wed Apr 06, 2016 5:06 pm wrote:^^ It's looking increasingly like 'Hillary Clinton is Seriously Fucked'
by Wombaticus Rex » Thu Apr 07, 2016 4:22 pm
82_28 » Sat Apr 02, 2016 3:23 am wrote:Here is what I think. We are being forced into a bi-polar net.
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