Discussion: Nielsen: 'I Haven't Seen Evidence' That Russians Hacked Election To Help Trump (VIDEO)

You are completely missing what the Cambridge Analytica data is all about. It didn’t say Joe BillyBob in Precinct XYZ, county ABC, state DEF is going to vote for A, so you need to go into that county’s voting systems and change his vote to B. It said Joe BillyBob has network connections, profile data, viewing and like history, etc., that suggest he belongs to a demographic where exposure to messaging that says, say, white male coal miners that look like him at the nearby BigDig coal mine will benefit from Trump and hurt from Clinton, will be effective making him more likely to be influenced to vote for Trump and drive him, in turn, to likewise influence his connections.

Remember that the Cambridge Analytica data came from a platform designed and precisely engineered for exactly one purpose: generating data useful to more precisely and effectively direct the herd. It’s called advertising and what Facebook and Google and all the rest do is enable it to be vastly more selective, strategically targeted, and effective.

The regular customers for this data don’t use it to manipulate what Amazon and WalMart report selling or think they sold. They use it to manipulate what customers actually come to buy.

Inferring from lack of evidence the Russians manipulated the count that they had no impact on the election outcome ignores the effectiveness of the advertising model and its social engineering component. Countless billions of dollars are spent each year betting on that model’s persuasive effectiveness. Maybe it failed to shift any votes. I’m betting it shifted a lot more votes than were necessary without breaking into a single voting or vote tabulation system. It’s easier doing it this way and an already proven method.

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Remember, Kirstjen Nielsen was in charge of emergency coordination during Hurricane Katrina. She got the desperate calls from New Orleans when the levees burst. She did nothing. This year she oversaw the concentration camps for children. She’s not exactly a paragon of competence or virtue.

The 2016 election was illegitimate. The vote count was rigged in at least 39 states. A skanky Russian puppet was installed in a rigged election.

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The midterms are all smaller scope elections than the national presidential election. I already said that the security issues with voting and vote tabulation systems presented a much greater threat/vulnerability to a change of outcome in these local scope elections.

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Once you know, rather precisely, how a portion of a herd is going to vote and you have the registration data and ( speculatively) access to the polling books to know who in fact turned out ( polling data on the day might also tell you this), you are going to have a reasonably accurate estimate of how many votes would be needed to swing a particular state.

Yes, the basic work was done by voter suppression and precisely targeted manipulative advertising but putting in place a fail safe mechanism for swinging specific states would not be hard.

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When you have a country that puts millions of illegal dollars of resources into a campaign, as Trump received courtesy of Putin and Russia, not much is added by other election violations, whatever the scale or action. Incidentally, Russians work cheap, thanks to Putin’s shortcomings when it comes to the Russian economy. Trump’s campaign donors would have had to pay much more to equal what organized Russian trolls, as just one example, were able to do.

It appears the total money and resources Russia devoted to Trump is still being added, with the Russian woman involved in the NRA being yet another source of election funding that Trump received from Russia. There’s also the amount of money Putin devoted to troll shops in Eastern Europe. Although I’m not sure yet whether it’s been proven beyond a doubt, there’s also strong suggestive evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. I fully expect we will still be learning more for months to come. There are also hints for us news junkies that the U.S. government is still collecting evidence on active Russians and colluders (for example, the investigators are probably learning things from Russian assets that have not yet been arrested, or Russians too difficult to reach except by computer.)

One by one, as things are proven or not proven, we’ll be learning much more. But the largely proven, even if not taken to court yet, is very substantial.

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Did Michael Cohen tell her that?

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Sure. It could all be going on. My point was, remains, that the social engineering method is easiest, uses totally legal and proven effective methods, and creates the desired social discord and political chaos, regardless of the final vote outcome. And there’s lot of evidence they did just that, and for that reason, and precious little evidence they “hacked” systems to get to a specific vote count regardless of the votes actually cast.

It’s also the simplest explanation for what actually happened.

Changing how you think seems like a better thing in the long term than changing how your vote was counted this one time.

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Didn’t last Friday’s news include the bombshell that the Russian Military had purchased second hand voting machines?

I take your point that Micro targeting voters was very effective and sowing division and chaos is an important goal of Putin’s ( so I think it’s entirely possible that Putin might throw trump under the bus if he can’t deliver on lifting sanctions),

But the evidence is mounting that Putin launched a both/and interference campaign in 2016 and will probably do so again in 2018

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Or maybe they took some number of voters who didn’t appear and enters votes on their behalf - harder to trace and a more direct effect on the outcome…

So which homeland is she securing?

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I know this is late in the day, and I haven’t gone through the 184 earlier posts, but what do we do with this:

“I haven’t seen any evidence that the attempts to interfere in our election infrastructure was to favor a particular political party,” she said at the Aspen Institute’s Security Forum in Colorado.

and

“It was in an effort to attack certain political parties that we know about more than others, so we’ll continue to look and see what that means and be prepared for the next time,” she said.

So, what was it Ms Nielsen?

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[quote=“godwit, post:184, topic:75038, full:true”]
Didn’t last Friday’s news include the bombshell that the Russian Military had purchased second hand voting machines?[/quote]

Are they getting the firmware updates for them? Do they know what other voting jurisdictions still use that version of that machine? Again, these systems are surely vulnerable. But that attack is, on a national level, an order of magnitude harder and much less productive than just influencing the voters, or the non-voters, as the case may be.

Maybe the DNC should abandon persuading voters and just hire more 400 lb guys living in their parents’ basements to rig the count?

Edit to add: and if convincing people the counting is rigged helps drive the herd, we’ve just come full circle, again without having to change one cast vote.

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This is absolutely correct. Facebook isn’t off the hook just cause the GRU was also attempting more direct methods.

For one thing, the social media strategy can be deployed continually- not just every two to four years

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And we, collectively, are not off the hook for buying into the Facebook etc. model and for, say, blindly accepting stupid Facebook GIF memes as fact and passing them on to influence our network without thoughtful consideration.

I’m not a Facebook or Twitter or any of rest. TPM Hive is about as close as I get to Internet Social Networking.

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geez. do any of these people speak English as a first language?

Bimbo

Good. She’ll get to go down with the ship.

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She’ll get another cushy k-street job - but nobody gets rich working for 45* 's family - nobody.

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I’m sure Mueller’s just sitting around twiddling his thumbs and is probably clueless about how to tackle this. He has so little experience with RICO (cough Gambino crime family bust cough) , I bet he’s just scratching his head wondering what to do!

Can you find any fault with how the indictments or guilty pleas have been rolling in so far? Maybe he knows a little bit more about this than the rest of us.

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Fuck Mencken, the people voted for Clinton by 3 million votes. Trump sits in the White House because of the Electoral College which exists because of exactly that sort of elitist distrust of the people.

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