KeepTalking
Code Monkey
Please stop with the intentional distractions with your pet whataboutism and try to engage in meaningful discussion.
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RussiaGate
- Thread starter Don2 (Don1 Revised)
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Please stop with the intentional distractions with your pet whataboutism and try to engage in meaningful discussion.
barbos
Contributor
That's rich. It was your side who brought Alfa Bank story and now refuse to have meaningful discussion about it.
KeepTalking
Code Monkey
Please inform me as to which "side" is mine. As far as I know I am on the side that does not give one shit about the minor footnote that is the Alfa Bank story.
Also, the last time anyone brought up Alfa Bank in this thread other than you was in 2017. And that was more along the lines of bickering over whether or not the story was a lie, or just someone being and idiot about DNS, and not anyone defending the Alfa Bank story as having any merit in the RussiaGate scandal.
Speaking of "Gate" scandals, what's the deal with people using the "-gate" suffix when the issue has nothing to do with political scandals. It is a pretty idiotic suffix to use in the first place, but when it is added to a word like Capitalism, it is utterly cringe-worthy. If I were someone arguing against a Putin clone, that would be my go to whataboutism in the future.
KeepTalking
Code Monkey
Just like your side that likes to throw out phrases like Capitalismgate to see if it will stick to the wall so they can pretend that Putin and Russian helping Trump never happened.
barbos
Contributor
It's not my side, it's just me. And I explained why I called the thread the way I called.
KeepTalking
Code Monkey
Your side includes you and I explained why it is an idiotic phrase.
barbos
Contributor
Whataboutism much?
fromderinside
Mazzie Daius
Nope. Not that again-ism.
KeepTalking
Code Monkey
How is it possible to show that much lack of awareness of what I was doing there?
barbos
Contributor
You are refusing to discuss Alfa Bank Trump conspiracy by whatabouting another thread title.
KeepTalking
Code Monkey
You are refusing to discuss CapitalismGate idiocy by whatabouting Alfa Bank.
Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
Barbos brought Alfa Bank back because it helped change the subject away from the discussion on the connections between Russia-based organized crime and Russian intelligence agencies, a connection that he found difficult to refute, other than with bald assertions that it was basically crap. So he needed a distraction.
However, the Alfa Bank issue is directly relevant to the original topic of this very long thread, so it is not out of bounds to discuss it again (and again and again). Originally, it was nothing more than a brief footnote to the Russiagate scandal of puzzling secret communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank. The original breaking story was published by Slate: Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?. After a flurry of press activity, nothing was ever proven, so it died down. The Mueller Report looked at the issue but never really used it in its litany of evidence to establish a clear connection between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. That connection was well-established and never really much in question. From Mueller's perspective, the only question was whether the Trump-Russia cooperation rose to the level of an indictable offense, but the Report itself refused to address that conclusion on the grounds that Trump could not be indicted until he was out of office. Nevertheless, Trump, Republicans, and their supporters have repeated the false claim ever since that the Mueller Report actually concluded that there was no collusion and not even an attempt to obstruct justice, of which Mueller had documented at least eleven instances of.
The evidence of the Alfa Bank communication was uncovered by some Georgia Tech researchers and eventually made its way into the hands of a lawyer, Michael Sussman, who received it from a client, Rodney Joffe, an executive at a cybersecurity firm. Fast forward to recent history, and we find that John Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration to investigate the "fake" Russia-Trump connection, ended his inconclusive investigation with an indictment of Michael Sussman for misleading the FBI about his clients. The allegation is that he failed to disclose that the Clinton campaign was ALSO one of his clients. The charge is really flimsy and will probably go nowhere, but Durham was pretty desperate to come up with something to show that he had done what he was hired to do.
So this Durham indictment has been touted by US right wingers and Russian propaganda outlets as proof that the Alfa Bank story was part of a conspiracy to discredit Trump and bash Russia, even though nobody has ever yet established what all of that communication activity between the Trump campaign and Alfa Bank was all about. The communications were apparently carried out on a Russian-made smartphone that was used both in the White House and Trump Tower. Again, nothing was ever proven one way or the other, since the contents of those communications remains a mystery.
For those interested in refreshing their memory about the scandal, see Business Insiders' October 1 article: We still don't know why a Trump server has mysterious connections to a Russian bank, despite a DOJ indictment.
barbos
Contributor
For the million's time, I perfectly fine discussing everything. Microsoft report and Alfa Bank.
The reason I recalled Alfa Bank is to illustrate that reports and claims from companies which are clearly not independent means nothing.
Mictosoft is not an independent cyber security company. In fact, it's not even cyber security company.
I demonstrated that their report is utter shit. It does not include cyber attacks from Israel and US, both of which fucking admitted involvement in state-backed cyber attacks.
The reason I recalled Alfa Bank is to illustrate that reports and claims from companies which are clearly not independent means nothing.
Mictosoft is not an independent cyber security company. In fact, it's not even cyber security company.
I demonstrated that their report is utter shit. It does not include cyber attacks from Israel and US, both of which fucking admitted involvement in state-backed cyber attacks.
I am hearing all of this for the first time.
KeepTalking
Code Monkey
You made no such illustration, you just said "Whatabout Alfa Bank?!" (paraphrasing).
Microsoft is a software company, but they are massive and have a cyber security division: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/cdoc
So, your hair-splitting means nothing.
I doubt it, but I guess it is possible that happened some time over the last 300+ pages. Given that you generally only make assertions that you never back up, I will ask you to prove the above.
How is any of that relevant to RussiaGate?
How does this new information change your perspective of the Alfa Bank story?
barbos
Contributor
It does not change it.
It is not less relevant than Microsoft statistics. In other words, Microsoft statistics is not relevant to the RussiaGate.
I would not put too much stock in that division considering how shitty security of their OS is.
KeepTalking
Code Monkey
Are you just going to ignore it then, and let ignorance be your guide with regard to the story?
Then why did you bring it up? The post to which you were replying made not mention of Microsoft.
So what? The things you would put stock in have no relevance to this discussion. Microsoft could have the shittiest OS in existence, and their cyber security division could still be the best in the world. Please note, I am not saying that either of those things is the case.
barbos
Contributor
I am not ignoring it, it just does not change the other facts. But if you insist. OK it reinforces my view that that the whole thing is a lie.
Russia does not make smartphones, nor does it produce operating systems.
These are all chinese made phones which are marketed as russian. Some had interesting design but they are all made in China. And this stress on word "russian" is indication of made up BS, same as DNS BS. Anyone who understands issue would know that phone maker is irrelevant. In fact. I think they could be flat out lying about russian smartphone. Even if they don't and there was in fact "russian" smartphone in White House and in Trump Tower, they are still lying about significance of that fact. Yeah, some fucker in Trump organization/administration had a russian smarthphone and moved between trump Tower and White House, so what? Did Muller say anything about it in his report?
None of that change facts about Alfa Bank DNS logs.
Exactly, why bring up Microsoft statistics when it's irrelevant?
KeepTalking
Code Monkey
Copernicus was paraphrasing information he had obviously sourced elsewhere. Why not ask him for his source, and examine what it had to say, rather than just throwing out accusations about lies on a story you admit to not having heard about before?
How do you know, when you have not examined the source, and admitted to knowing nothing about the story until Copernicus mentioned it?
The last time Copernicus said anything about it was when he posted the following:
Which stops well short of a full throated endorsement of the article, yet here you are several pages, and a week and a half later, bringing it up as if those you are arguing against think it is a silver bullet. And you only did so when you were backed into a corner on another topic. We can see what you are doing. When you don't have an answer, or the topic becomes uncomfortable for you for whatever reason, you reach into to your "whataboutism" bag, and about the only thing you have in there is Alfa bank.
Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
China is the main source of most smartphone hardware, but manufacturing in the modern world is distributed across international supply chains. I don't know anything about the
mobile phone industry in Russia, but it is obvious that you don't either. Read the Wikipedia page, which starts with: "The mobile phone industry in Russia has expanded rapidly to become one of the largest in the world. In terms of number of smartphone users, Russia is the 4th biggest smartphone market in the world sitting behind only China, India, and USA." It turns out that the particular phone in question was a Yotaphone, which was mentioned in a recent NY Times article, Trump Server Mystery Produces Fresh Conflict. I cited a shorter Business Insider source, which looks to me like it was a condensed version of the October 1 Times article. The significance of "Russian made" was that the phone is rare in the US and obviously came from Russia, where Yotaphones were designed and customized. The "fucker" in the Trump Organization who used that phone was almost certainly using it quite a bit for communications with Russia, so it would naturally be of interest to investigators in the US. Whether the Mueller report mentioned the Russian made phone is irrelevant to this story, which never ended up being used as proof of collaboration between the Russian government and Trump. The evidence for "Russiagate" is massive and well-documented. Alfa Bank was just a historical footnote that keeps being only a footnote.The statistics had to do with criminal cyberattacks that were in the news, not necessarily just espionage attacks, and the Microsoft study merely established that more of those kinds of attacks have originated from Russian servers rather than those in other countries. That was why I brought up the well-known connection between Russian based organized crime and Russian intelligence services, which was a separate issue from the so-called Microsoft statistics. There is a good deal of suspicion in the US that some of the ransomware attacks have been coordinated with, if not directed by, Russian intelligence groups like the FSB and GRU. Using criminal organizations to do their dirty work gives them a certain amount of separation and plausible deniability, but the consensus view outside of Russia is that the Russian government monitors these activities closely and could easily shut them down. That it continues to let them operate with impunity gets the message across to the rest of the world. This is a weapon.