There is a distinction to be made between someone being held on a string, and someone who isn't on a string, but behaves all the same.

But anyone not healthily alarmed by Russia's fingerprints on some major cyber assaults is foolishly naive.

How An Entire Nation Became Russia's Test Lab for Cyberwar - Wired

Looking at the attackers' methods, Lee began to form a notion of who he was up against. He was struck by similarities between the blackout hackers' tactics and those of a group that had recently gained some notoriety in the cybersecurity world--a group known as Sandworm. In 2014 the security firm FireEye had issued warnings about a team of hackers that was planting BlackEnergy malware on targets that included Polish energy firms and Ukrainian government agencies; the group seemed to be developing methods to target the specialized computer architectures that are used for remotely managing physical industrial equipment. The group's name came from references to Dune found buried in its code, terms like Harkonnen and Arrakis, an arid planet in the novel where massive sandworms roam the deserts.

No one knew much about the group's intentions. But all signs indicated that the hackers were Russian: FireEye had traced one of Sandworm's distinctive intrusion techniques to a presentation at a Russian hacker conference. And when FireEye's engineers managed to access one of Sandworm's unsecured command-and-control servers, they found instructions for how to use BlackEnergy written in Russian, along with other Russian-language files.

Most disturbing of all for American analysts, Sandworm's targets extended across the Atlantic. Earlier in 2014, the US government reported that hackers had planted BlackEnergy on the networks of American power and water utilities. Working from the government's findings, FireEye had been able to pin those intrusions, too, on Sandworm.

We've complained about the super villain narrative in other contexts before. People like to think they're being bested by enemies with superhuman powers, otherwise it would mean that they're just useless.

Why should anyone care about the particulars of the American legal system? If a Voice of America journalist social engineers a procurement bill for air defence missiles for the Ukrainian separatists, signed by Vladimir personally, out of some Russian functionaries who wouldn't call it journalism?

Criminal conduct is explicitly identified by U.S. federal and state code, chapter [18] and verse [1961], with plenty exceptions and exemptions and mitigating circumstances &tc ("loopholes"). Any conduct that is NOT indentifed by U.S. federal and state code ("on the books") as criminal is lawful. It is lawful even if civi litigation finds tortious harms, or liability, subject to penalty or compensatory damages ("cost of doing business"). This vaccuum of commonsense is where all unscrupulous people ply their trade "with impugnity".

Mueller's public brief is programmed to fail.

"Meddling and interference" in "democracy" or "election process" is no where codified by U.S. Code or states' statutes. But it sure is  "click bait" --the transaction  that produces revenue for the person supplying publishing services to an advertiser ("content creator"). Gah bless Free Trade.

"Collusion" and "conspiracy" are not crimes, because people collude and conspire every. fucking. day. They collude or conspire to realized some group, enterprise, corporate, company, organization purpose. Gah bless Trade Secrets.

Collusion or conspiracy to commit a crime [LISTED] is defined. But meddle and interfere in democracy and election process is undefined by USC. Since Mueller has been unable as yet to pin even one of the [LIST] to any foreign or domestic, would you have him invent criminal conduct?

Or would you prefer he discover evidence of criminal conduct?


Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

The largest Democratic Congress since FDR, I think, in '74 and Ford lost to Carter in '76. But billionaire money and owned media overwhelmed that tide in '80.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Watergate convinced the Ueberklass it needed to implement the Powell Memo ASAP, and everything since has flowed from that.