A Brief Guide to Russian Hacking of the US Election

Over at RCP, Charles Lipson provides a useful summary of the issue and makes a reasonable suggestion for how to proceed.

He summarizes what we know, including the fact that no credible source gives any evidence for the idea that Trump didn't win, and then states that this is a matter of election integrity which everyone should be concerned about. He proposes something like the 9/11 commission to investigate and highlight areas of vulnerability.

Overall, I think he's on the right track. One problem for me is that I increasingly don't trust any part of the US government to conduct a reasonable, non-partisan investigation. The failure to indict Clinton was a big blow to that confidence.

Is there any part of the government we can really trust to do the right thing anymore? Or am I being uncharitable?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is no part of the government that we can trust to do the right thing, consistently.

Our government is made of flawed people, and on any given day, any position can be held by an inept or corrupt person. Our solution to this problem is imbedded in the Constitution as a distribution of different types of power to different persons, at different levels and across different locations.

And yet, our election process just withstood a deliberate destabilizing attack from a well-funded propaganda network. That happened in part because the Internet matured to the point that anonymous people could gather, receive, analyze and publish a pile leaked documents, overnight.

I am certain our Founding Fathers did not foresee the Internet, but they were well familiar with corruption of the type exhibited by George Soros. They did not make it impossible for our government to be taken over by people of ill will, just very, very complicated.

Valerie

Grim said...

I mean, I think the Post Office has been doing pretty well recently. But it's now a QANGO.

The military functions pretty well at its lower levels of organization. It suffers from its size at higher levels that are trying to make decisions with larger (and thus more ossified) bureaucracies, further removed from the direct information on the field. (It's the Economic Calculation Problem, as applied to the military instead of to a Centrally Planned Economy.)

Valerie hits some good notes, too.

Ymar Sakar said...

DC is already controlled by evil. They don't need to hack or crack it to make it evil.

And the Founding Fathers did not have the power of a god to consecrate a capital to make sure no evil came to it. They didn't have the power to rewire human nature or free will.