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Does the situation in Ukraine worry you?

You worried?

  • Yes

    Votes: 40 49.4%
  • No

    Votes: 36 44.4%
  • I'm buying my marshmallows

    Votes: 5 6.2%

  • Total voters
    81
Putting took nothing and those troops can leave as quickly as they came in.
You sound like GW Bush. Saying "bring it on" is not brave it is stupid. Thankfully we don't have a dunce in the Whitehouse anymore.

I am not saying "bring it on," Putin is. He, by invading Ukraine, did not allow room for negotiation or diplomacy. He took Crimea by military force.
 
That's nice. :) Any country can take care of itself. Hooray. Civilization and order are natural, instead of fragile, artificial creations.

Why the prejudice that Ukrainians cannot take care of their own country? Do you know them? Have you been there or so?
 
I was just reading about this.

The treaty that withdrew all nukes from the Ukraine had a stipulation in it that Ukraine would never be attacked by the signers - the West and Russia. That treaty is broken- or on the verge of it.

This is concerning because of future treaties that could be devised with nuclear disarmament.

Exactly. By invading Ukranian Crimea, Putin himself broke the treaty. Standing idle communicates cowardness and non-commitment.

I think Putin did that in purpose while trying to present us as weak to the rest of the world. This cannot stand. Nor will Ukraine stand. I keep saying this, but they can fight and are well armed!
 
Exactly. By invading Ukranian Crimea, Putin himself broke the treaty. Standing idle communicates cowardness and non-commitment.

I think Putin did that in purpose while trying to present us as weak to the rest of the world. This cannot stand. Nor will Ukraine stand. I keep saying this, but they can fight and are well armed!

i think russia has proven itself to be weak.
 
One of the beauties of Cyber Attacks is the relative ease with which you can make them either non-attributable, or impossible to prove attribution (the Russians are particularly good at that trick). Which is one reason why governments do, in fact, initiate Cyber Attacks. For other exceptions where this has gone public check out China (who seems to be quite busy in this realm) and Israel. Iran joins the club as a proud member, having outed herself (as did we). Even Hermit Kingdom North Korea has gotten into the game, although it seems they got at least an initial boost there from China.
Your references are all filled with "supposed", "alleged", "believe to have", and other words and phrases that plainly show there is little to no actual evidence of any government's involvement in cyber warfare (except the ones I mentioned). I'm not saying it doesn't happen but what little evidence is available is circumstantial at best. Nowhere is there enough evidence to warrant mild trade sanctions, let alone war.

And believing anything that comes out of Tehran is being naive. Iran has lied so much about so many different topics their credibility is less than zero - they'd have to work just to get to the break-even point again. Iran would claim responsibility for bringing down a drone if the drone was plainly shown on satellite to have been hit by a sand storm.
 
:raises eyebrow: we outed ourselves. The Administration wanted to have some good "Foreign Policy" chest-thumping before the election and so they leaked it to the New York Times, and outed our Israeli allies as well (who must have collectively hit the ceiling, thereby further eroding trust with a key ally in the region).
Only after there was enough to evidence for a guilty verdict in California. Once the cat's out of the bag you may as well use it for all it's worth and just admit you had the cat all along.
 
Actually he does. I would direct you to pages 15 and 16, where he states that either A) the state did it or B) hackers that are trained and supported by the state in organized crime did it, and points out that C) it doesn't really matter which one it is, since both are instruments of Russian Foreign Policy. To translate that into American terms, the hackers were either employees of the NSA, or employees of Lockheed Martin, working on contract for the NSA, and either way, it was the US.
That information is not on those pages. Going for the shotgun effect, are we? Multiple, including some false, claims to take up my time hoping I'll just drop it?

I'd happily cut and paste both pages but I'm pretty sure it's against DP policy to c&p that much data. Try again, quote at least one paragraph, and be sure to include the correct page number.
 
Elaborate please. It seems the contrary at this point. Well it seemed the contrary prior to Kerry and Rasmussen doing their job to be exact.

You may find this interesting.

How Should The West Respond? « The Dish

The argument that Russia is showing its weakness is based upon the fact that they cant influence a nation on its own border with strong ethnic ties by anything but a show of force. Thats weakness.
 
Richard Clarke was the guy who spent years trying to convince both the Clinton and Bush Administrations that this oddball group called "Al-Qaeda" was going to try to launch attacks inside of the Continental United States. He was the Cyber Czar for the Bush Administration. I realize that mockery is the last resort of those who have no argument, but it falls flat here.
Yes, I'm well aware of who he was as well as the fact that he quit government employment in 2003, as I previously noted. That means he his zero actual data on those attacks except what the government released, which was not the source code - the raw programming actually needed to determine where a program originated. As far as Estonia goes, he's Mr Buy-My-Book and I'm sure sensationalizing events like Estonia netted him a few more $10,000's.


The UN? I could give a fig about the UN, that worthless, useless body in which Russia enjoys a veto anyway. What we should have done is what we pledged to do for NATO countries - offer them our tools to defend themselves if they come under attack.
I believe Britain and other EU nations covered that in 2008. That's was my previous *.pdf link's main topic - defending the EU (including Estonia) from cyber attack.


No, the same tactics as in utilizing DDOS attacks to neutralize financial servers while impersonating those servers and sending thousands of fraudulent claims to Central and Western European Financial Centers, triggering automatic lockdowns ensuring that, even as the host nation loses the ability to serve it's deposit holders, it also loses the ability to borrow from outside sources in order to replace its temporarily frozen capital.
Thousands of hackers all over the planet use DDOS attacks and a huge portion of those hackers are not connected to any government. Trying to pin that kind of common attack on a government is like saying "The perpetrator was driving a black SUV so it must have been a secret government job." Next thing you'll be talking black helicopters. :lol:


Russia is a police state that exercises control over its' hacking community, and is extremely skilled at cyber operations. The likelihood that this was random "patriotic Russians" (which is what - laughably - Putin's spokesman tried to insist that it must be) pulled this off without state support, awareness, and approval is about as likely as someone in the United States compiling a division of tanks and using them to invade Mexico without the government's knowledge. It is a ridiculous claim on it's face.
Exercises control over it's hacking community??? :lamo
Police state or not (and last I looked Russia wasn't), no government exercises control over it's hacking community. However, considering the circumstances, I doubt the Russian government would have stopped the hackers had they know about the attacks - but that's a long way from originating the attacks.

When tanks come down to a $10,000 price tag you let me know and I might start getting worried.
Your continued comparison of cheap, store-shelf computers to high-dollar (and restricted) government/military hardware continues to amuse.


....you really have no idea how difficult and costly it is to develop, build, employ, and then attempt to reattribute complex cyber weapons, do you?

...You really do think it's like in the movies, where the cool music plays, and the guy looks at 5 different screens at one time, and some one's and zero's flash by in a montage, or you see a little "loading" bar, and then he's hacked the CIA or something.

No, dude. Cyber introduces asymmetries, to be sure, but nothing as extreme as the alternative you are positing - else our systems would be constantly going down from attacks by Al Qaeda or some similarly disapproving group, and Anonymous would be extremely successful instead of a nuisance. You still require pretty hefty resources to have these kinds of effects. There is a reason why Live Free or Die Hard is a hollywood movie rather than our reality - it's not like there aren't plenty of actors out there who would do it, if all it took was a $1500 laptop.
Anonymous has been successful - several times - at stealing both private and government data ... and sometimes releasing that data to the public. And this is the US government we're talking about. We're one of the best if not THE best at this game. Imagine what Anonymous could do to, say, Estonia if they put their resources into it. Russia's (private) hackers are just as good if not better than Anonymous.


If Cyber isn't a war, then what's your worry? We aren't "going to war".
I didn't say cyber wasn't war, I said I didn't want to go to war without some REAL evidence we've been attacked by another government. Bush already got us into one protracted war over nothing but poor information and rumors, which became painfully obvious after we'd invaded another country. I think countries should only get one mistake like that per century and we've already used ours.


On the contrary - we know that it was Russia that did this, and Russia did everything but admit it - jokingly claiming that maybe it was just patriots and refusing to allow any investigation into the points of origin. An attack was launched on a NATO ally and we did... nothing. I imagine it was fairly instructive for Putin.
We know nothing of the sort. You have repeatedly failed to produce evidence that Russia was responsible for the 2007 Estonia cyber attack. All you've shown is rumor and innuendo, which is only considered evidence in US conservative circles and on Conspiracy Theory websites (is there really a difference?). The rest of the world requires something a little more substantial.
 
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cpwill said:
I would direct you to pages 15 and 16, where he states that either A) the state did it or B) hackers that are trained and supported by the state in organized crime did it, and points out that C) it doesn't really matter which one it is, since both are instruments of Russian Foreign Policy. To translate that into American terms, the hackers were either employees of the NSA, or employees of Lockheed Martin, working on contract for the NSA, and either way, it was the US.

That information is not on those pages. Going for the shotgun effect, are we? Multiple, including some false, claims to take up my time hoping I'll just drop it?

Dude I pulled the book off my shelf and am sitting with it physically here in front of me.

I'd happily cut and paste both pages but I'm pretty sure it's against DP policy to c&p that much data. Try again, quote at least one paragraph, and be sure to include the
correct page number.

Sure. From Cyber War: The Next Threat To National Security, and What To Do About It, by Richard A Clarke and Robert K Knake. Copyright 2010, HarperCollins publishers, New York.

Page 15:

"The Russian Government indignantly denied that it was engaged in cyber war against Estonia. It also refused Estonia's formal diplomatic request for assistance in tracing the attackers, although a standing bilateral agreement required Moscow to cooperate. Informed that the attacks had been traced back to Russia, some government officials admitted that it was possible perhaps that patriotic

Page 16:
Russians incensed at what Estonia had done, were taking matters into their own hands. Perhaps. But even if the "patriotic Russian" theory were to be believed, it left unanswered the question of why the Russian government would not move to stop such vigilantism. No one doubted for a minute that the KGB's successors had the ability to find the culprits and block the traffic. Others, more familiar with modern Russia, suggested that what was at work was far more than a passive Russian police turning a blind eye to the hooliganism of overly nationalistic youth. The most adept hacker in Russia, apart from those who are actual government employees, are usually in the service of organized crime. Organized crime is allowed to flourish because of its unacknowledged connection to the security services. Indeed, the distinction between organized criminal networks and the security services that control most Russian ministries and local governments is often blurry. Many close observers of Russia think that some senior government officials permit organized crime activity for a slice of the profits or, as in the case of Estonia, for help with messy tasks...

...Did the Russian government security ministries engage in cyber attacks on Estonia? ...that is not the right question. Did they suggest the attacks, facilitate them, refuse to investigate or punish them? And, in the end, does the distinction really matter when you are an Estonian unable to get your money out of a Hansapank ATM?




So, yeah. Pretty much it does say that :).

The "many close observers" line is also a standard for people who have access to classified information to be able to write competently to a subject without directly stating intelligence assessments or collections' methods. Books like this have to get run through an SSO office before they can be released not least in order to insure that that level of obfuscation has taken place.
 
Your references are all filled with "supposed", "alleged", "believe to have", and other words and phrases that plainly show there is little to no actual evidence of any government's involvement in cyber warfare (except the ones I mentioned)

I can only assume that you did not read them? In China and Israel, for example, the units involved are named (we outed Israel, too), and in China's case an IT Security Firm named Mandiant (hilariously) even posted a video of a live-capture of a Chinese Military Hacker attempting to invade their networks to YouTube:



Furthermore, think about your own argument for a minute - you are simultaneously claiming that states do not engage in cyber attacks all that much outside of the US/Iran Russia/Georgia example, and then you are claiming that the attribution of such attacks is beyond our capability.

But if it was impossible or even extremely difficult to attribute cyber attacks, then that would give nation-states a massive incentive to use them.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen but what little evidence is publicly available is circumstantial at best. Nowhere is there enough evidence to warrant mild trade sanctions, let alone war.

fixed that to more accurately mean what I think you are getting at. If not, let me know.

And believing anything that comes out of Tehran is being naive. Iran has lied so much about so many different topics their credibility is less than zero - they'd have to work just to get to the break-even point again. Iran would claim responsibility for bringing down a drone if the drone was plainly shown on satellite to have been hit by a sand storm.

Someone managed to capture a drone from our satellite, a drone whose existence, flight path, mission, and capabilities were, until that time, secret. That entity would have required impressive cyber resources - like the kind that a state can bring to bear - to defeat US military networks and hack CIA encryption. That entity then chose to fly the drone to Iran, so that it's capabilities could be studied by Iranians, so that Iran could protect itself from observation by that kind of collection in the future, and so that any reverse engineering that Iran was capable of doing, it could do.

So what - you think Thomas Gabriel did that with a $1500 laptop?
 
I am not familiar with the particular events surrounding Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. But I do now know about the deep divisions within Ukraine:

_73094671_ukraine_divide_2.gif

Crimea is the peninsula that looks like an island to the southeast.

Thankfully it appears that the pro-West/pro-Russia divide is a pretty clean one, unlike the complete cluster**** in Syria.
The Ukraine is not going to give up it's seaports over this. Odessa is as much (or more) of a commercial port than Sevastopol.

The Crimea was barely included in the Ukraine as it was. It has a special designation compared to other regions and is relatively independent of the Ukrainian government.
 
The Ukraine is not going to give up it's seaports over this. Odessa is as much (or more) of a commercial port than Sevastopol.

The Crimea was barely included in the Ukraine as it was. It has a special designation compared to other regions and is relatively independent of the Ukrainian government.

I'm guessing Crimea will declare independence and Russia will protect it. Ukraine won't attack, Russia won't invade the rest of Ukraine.

Sanctions on Russia will occur, Ukraine will move closer to the west for protection, and Russia will lose another ally.
 
Dude I pulled the book off my shelf and am sitting with it physically here in front of me.

Sure. From Cyber War: The Next Threat To National Security, and What To Do About It, by Richard A Clarke and Robert K Knake. Copyright 2010, HarperCollins publishers, New York.

The "many close observers" line is also a standard for people who have access to classified information to be able to write competently to a subject without directly stating intelligence assessments or collections' methods. Books like this have to get run through an SSO office before they can be released not least in order to insure that that level of obfuscation has taken place.
Dude, you neither said it was from his book nor did you link the book. What you did do was quote my link to the House Of Lords report
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200910/ldselect/ldeucom/68/68.pdf,
HOUSE OF LORDS, European Union Committee, 5th Report of Session 2009–10: Protecting Europe Against Large-scale Cyber-attacks)
which clearly shows there is no proof.


Page 15:

"The Russian Government indignantly denied that it was engaged in cyber war against Estonia. It also refused Estonia's formal diplomatic request for assistance in tracing the attackers, although a standing bilateral agreement required Moscow to cooperate.
I already said that much. Russia refused to help Estonia. So what? We wouldn't do any different even if it was China or Russia whining at us, let alone someone like Castro.

Castro: Someone in the US hacked my banks using a DDOS attack! I want you guys to do something about it!
NSA: OK, Fidel, we'll get right on that!
:lamo


So, yeah. Pretty much it does say that :).
No it doesn't.
But even if the "patriotic Russian" theory were to be believed, it left unanswered the question of why the Russian government would not move to stop such vigilantism
Uh, maybe because they agreed with the hackers? Maybe because Russian/Estonian relations were pretty much in the dirt by that time? Again, we wouldn't do any different even if it was China or Russia whining at us, let alone someone like Castro.


Others, more familiar with modern Russia, suggested that what was at work was far more than a passive Russian police turning a blind eye to the hooliganism of overly nationalistic youth.
Yeah --- They "suggested" but failed to provide proof of any kind. :lol:



Like I said, what you've got is a bunch of rumors and innuendos - and I might add, from someone who has good monetary reason to continue promoting said rumors and innuendos. You have nothing substantial at all so quit wasting my time with this nonsense.
 
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I can only assume that you did not read them? In China and Israel, for example, the units involved are named (we outed Israel, too), and in China's case an IT Security Firm named Mandiant (hilariously) even posted a video of a live-capture of a Chinese Military Hacker attempting to invade their networks to YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7nZt7WCobY
I saw no evidence of Chinese military involvement.

Is someone in Shanghai doing some most likely illegal things in the US? Apparently.
Is it a member of the Chinese government? Unknown.


Furthermore, think about your own argument for a minute - you are simultaneously claiming that states do not engage in cyber attacks all that much outside of the US/Iran Russia/Georgia example, and then you are claiming that the attribution of such attacks is beyond our capability.

But if it was impossible or even extremely difficult to attribute cyber attacks, then that would give nation-states a massive incentive to use them.
It doesn't matter how good the motivation, what matters is evidence and there isn't any except those I've already noted. I like to see solid evidence to guide our actions as a nation, not rumor and innuendo as we used to invade Iraq the second time.


fixed that to more accurately mean what I think you are getting at. If not, let me know.
Anyone can take that line of argument (that the government knows but won't release the info) with anything at all. Are you going to profess belief in the aliens at Area 51, now? The people who believe that sad story use the exact same line, "The government knows about (the aliens) but it won't tell anyone!" :lol:

Could the government have proof it's being hacked by a foreign government? Almost anything is possible, even unicorns. Does the government have proof that it's not sharing? All we can argue here is the evidence we have available. Rumor, innuendo, and Conspiracy Theories of a government cover up or secrecy just don't cut it.


So what - you think Thomas Gabriel did that with a $1500 laptop?
Anonymous has pulled off some pretty big events using nothing more than a few laptops and/or desktops. That's how several of them eventually ended up in US and British jails. Anonymous and it's actions are a fact, not Hollywood, and you should get used to it. It doesn't take a multi-million dollar operation to make a lot of trouble and cost people a lot of money. All it takes is a few smart hackers, some relatively cheap computers, and an Internet connection. Anonymous has proved that more than once.
 
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Dude, you neither said it was from his book

Post 189:

cpwill said:
MoSurveyor said:
Even Mr Buy-My-Book doesn't say the Russians did it
Actually he does. I would direct you to pages 15 and 16, where he states that either A) the state did it or B) hackers that are trained and supported by the state in organized crime did it, and points out that C) it doesn't really matter which one it is, since both are instruments of Russian Foreign Policy. To translate that into American terms, the hackers were either employees of the NSA, or employees of Lockheed Martin, working on contract for the NSA, and either way, it was the US.

So yeah, in fact, I did.

nor did you link the book.

Unless it's loaded onto google books or some academic site that allows unrestricted open access, I'm not sure how to link an entire book. What I linked to you was the Washington Post Book Review in post 129.

I already said that much. Russia refused to help Estonia. So what? We wouldn't do any different even if it was China or Russia whining at us

Te difference of course, being that we do not have a legally binding treaty obligating us to do so.

No it doesn't.

...yes, it does. I don't know how to make that more blatant than block-quoting it for you, unless you want me to break up my discussion in chunks and block-quote the book below each claim?

Uh, maybe because they agreed with the hackers?

Of course they did. The hackers were an instrument of foreign policy.

They "suggested" but failed to provide proof of any kind.

:dohDid you read that part about necessary ambiguity when discussing Intelligence Community Assessments?

Like I said, what you've got is a bunch of rumors and innuendos - and I might add, from someone who has good monetary reason to continue promoting said rumors

Richard Clarke spent years trying to convince Administrations of both parties that Al Qaeda was coming, and found himself beating up against a similar wall with the Bush Administration on Cyber. It's not a surprise to me he went public - in his shoes, I would be tempted to do so as well.

:lol: But you deny that he even said what I am pointing out to you that he did. You deny that states use cyber attacks and then go to great length to defend a position that would make it almost irresistibly tempting for them to do so. You skip over or dismiss the testimony of those who know the subject far better than you, and to what purpose? Because you don't want to admit that NATO is basically useless for much of 21st Century Warfare?
 
Elaborate please. It seems the contrary at this point. Well it seemed the contrary prior to Kerry and Rasmussen doing their job to be exact.

invasion is a tool of the desperate, used only when other cost effective methods are no longer available.
 
Someone managed to capture a drone from our satellite, a drone whose existence, flight path, mission, and capabilities were, until that time, secret. That entity would have required impressive cyber resources - like the kind that a state can bring to bear - to defeat US military networks and hack CIA encryption. That entity then chose to fly the drone to Iran, so that it's capabilities could be studied by Iranians, so that Iran could protect itself from observation by that kind of collection in the future, and so that any reverse engineering that Iran was capable of doing, it could do.
More non-evidence? :lol:


Don't bother linking that Iranian engineer's interview or anything else out of Iran. Iran has shown the world time and again that it blatantly lies through it's teeth, especially when it comes to the US.
 
I'm guessing Crimea will declare independence and Russia will protect it. Ukraine won't attack, Russia won't invade the rest of Ukraine.

Sanctions on Russia will occur, Ukraine will move closer to the west for protection, and Russia will lose another ally.
That's a very likely scenario. I'm still not sure how Sevastopol will play out in all this. The Ukraine has most of it's navy stationed there - alongside the Russian fleet. I'm sure that makes the Russians very nervous, having their fleet isolated like that, and it may be the whole reason for this incident.
 
Any time there's a war, or potential for a war, it worries me. Wars can often be contained, but their very nature is chaotic. They can overspill their intended borders very quickly. World War I started out as a squabble between a few Eastern European countries...
 
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