Sunday, January 01, 2017

Hysteria Accelerates

The New York Times had an article, behind a pay wall, which headlined that the government had now “revealed the details” of the Russian hacking which caused Hillary Clinton to lose the election, but the details it revealed were all qualified with phrases such as “believed to be” and “likely connected to.”

Based on that we expelled 35 Russian diplomats and their families and expected that Russia would do likewise. Several papers actually reported that Russia had done likewise, in fact, before Russia revealed that it is governed by adults.

Then we get much hyperventilating about the Russians hacking a Vermont power company, along with a great deal of “I told you so” rhetoric about the vulnerability of our power systems to Russian cyberwarfare. Because Vermont is such a critical state to our economy. Why bother disabling New York, when you can do so much more economic damage to the nation by damaging Vermont?

Except that the “hacking” consisted of one piece of malware in a laptop which was not connected to the power company’s network, and was not used and had never been used to control the company’s power distribution system. It was, to boot, an obsolete version of a commercially available hacker’s program which could be bought by anyone pretty much anywhere, and thus was in no way attributable to the Russians.

It’s embarrassing. Why does anyone pay attention to anything American any more? We have become buffoons.

Update: Oh yes, and we put Ohio State in the FBS playoffs.

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