Obama and Hackers

After 8 years of doing nothing about serious hacks or real threats to national security, suddenly Obama does his most aggressive foreign policy move (throwing out 35 Russian diplomats), just weeks before he left office, because of the possibility that they might have hacked the DNC and leaked the truth to the public.

A more cynical view, is that Obama was trying to sabotage relations for the incoming administration, and make it harder for him to do his job. I can't tell you what was in the mind of our ex-president, I can just note that if you were trying to sabotage him, doing things like this, and lowering the standards for who gets secret information (to increase leaks), and the other last minute actions, would be consistent with that type of partisan asshattery (putting party above nation). And no one has offered a better explanation for why Obama did them.

Hillary using a private email security in violation of the law (and that was likely hacked according to the FBI), wasn’t a problem for the media/Obama (despite secret, top secret and super-duper top-secret stuff being on there): nothing on it mattered. But her underlings, Podesta gets hacked and releases truths about the Democrat campaign (and how they were corrupting an election) and not anything vaguely related to national security, and that's a threat to national security? Are they that stupid, or that partisan? Do they get the irony/hypocrisy in the position?

Remember the Obama administration and government hadn’t even bothered to define what is an official cyber attack, but they were sure the Russians had done it. And thus we could commit acts of pre-war like throwing out diplomats, and the media wasn't calling him on it?

Other hacks

Here's a few other hacks and events that got no response from Obama:

• April 2009 - Hacked the U.S. electrical grid
• April 2009 - Hacked Pentagon's Joint Strike Fighter project
• March 2012 - NASA was hacked (as they were in 2011) - had control of NASA computers
• February 2013 - DOE (Dept of Energy) was hacked - 14,000 employee records stolen
• December 2013 - China Hacked Federal Election Commission
• March 2014: Russian invaded and annexed Crimea
• March 2014: Russian destabilized and invaded other parts of Ukraine (Russia violated multiple treaties, Obama breaks our promise to defend Ukraine)
• September 2014 - Hacked U.S. Postal Service - 800,000 employee records
• September 2014 - China Hacked National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• September 2014: Draws Red line in Syria over WMD’s (chemical weapons), then walks away when it’s violated
• October 2014 - White House Website was hacked
• November 2014: State Department was hacked
• April 2015: Dept. of Defense was hacked
• May 2015: IRS was hacked - getting 300,000 tax returns
• June 2015: Office of Personnel Management

None of those were worthy of official response from the Obama administration. But scant evidence that the Russians may have helped get the truth out about criminal and immoral acts done by the Hillary campaign: that put the Obama admin on a war footing.

The strongest foreign policy signal he sent to the world was: never, ever, tell the truth about Democrat corruption and abuse of power.

Conclusion

If it was a hack, then the following applies:

1. the proper responses is not to attack the Russians by throwing out diplomats, but by fixing our security: http://reason.com/blog/2016/12/12/lets-say-russia-did-hack-the-dems-what-w
2. if it was worthy of a response this aggressive, then it shows how utterly clueless Obama was in 2012 (for criticizing Romney for having concerns about Russia: before they annexed Crimea, Ukraine, and committed these hacks). And Obama and the Democrats openly mocked Romney for "trying to restart the cold war." What does that say about all those Democrats?
3. Real Journalists would look into (the moral consistency of the Obama administrations wrt Russia): http://www.hoover.org/research/obamas-legacy-deceit
4. Ian Bremmer comments on how ineffective Obama has been in all this: https://charlierose.com/videos/29658

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