Friday, March 10, 2017

Thanks for clarifying

From Segundo de Chomón, Voyage sur Jupiter (1909). Via rebloggy.
Have you been bemused by this new preoccupation on the part of the Trumpies and the WikiLeaks and some of the irredentist Berners, zooming in on the CIA's apparent ability, as revealed in the latest document dump, to make an electronic intrusion into your digital porn stash look as if you were being intruded upon by Russians?

Not that I doubt the CIA might well be able to do something like that for some particular purpose, but I think these guys are telling a story they don't quite mean to tell about the 2016 election.

Where it was actually CIA spooks who stole all those emails from the Democratic National Committee and turned them over to the WikiLeaks, making it look—not necessarily to the savvy hands of WikiLeaks, but to some future American investigators, I guess—as if they were agents of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, so that when Hillary Clinton inevitably lost the election, the CIA and the other 16 intelligence agencies trying to understand what had happened would think the Russians were to blame! Instead of figuring out that they'd done it themselves.

Of course they wouldn't suspect themselves, because they had no idea they were determined to defeat Hillary Clinton and put Donald Trump into the White House—everybody kept telling them it was the other way around. Nurse, they're having a narratological emergency on the fifth floor, for God's sake get me some continuity!

I'm glad Trump and WikiLeaks have been able to straighten us out on this, though, and expose the CIA for the terrible thing that they've done, if that's what happened, or I would be glad, if I felt a little more straightened out than I do.

More on the CIA dump in this useful piece from Zeynep Tufekci (the revelations aren't that big, and the main thing techies learn is that Signal and WhatsApp are rather stronger against hacking than was realized).

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