Kremlingate part 2

NDPP wrote:

Russiagate and American Narcissism

https://mondoweiss.net/2020/08/russiagate-and-american-narcissism/

• "...Russiagate is an excuse to ramp up a new Cold War. That's why so many national security types love it. Antiwar types should see this as an internecine fight between different factions of warmongers.
• If we want to talk about foreign influence, then be serious. Israel and the Saudis do it far more and with more consequences
• Russiagate was used to gloss over what the emails sent to Wikileaks actually revealed: The inner workings of the Democrats..."

I agree with all of these points, and have from the beginning of the matter. Where I disagree with NDPP is that I think the (relatively unimportant) DNC network breach actually did happen, and was most likely the work of Russian intelligence agencies.

Michael Moriarity wrote:

contrarianna wrote:

Direct access to the actual computers is the first requirement — the more so when an intrusion is termed “an act of war” and blamed on a nuclear-armed foreign government (the words used by the late Sen. John McCain and other senior officials). In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017, former FBI Director James Comey admitted that he did not insist on physical access to the DNC computers even though, as he conceded, “best practices” dictate direct access....

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/03/13/vips-muellers-forensics-free-findi...

In short, the contrary arguments could both be true:
The DNC servers could have been compromised by persons and/or states, including Russia.
The data Wikileaks actually received could have been downloaded from a server by a disgruntled employee.  
 

I agree with your last observation that both versions could be true. Regarding the question of physical access to "the server", this is a complete canard. It is dismantled here by Kevin Poulsen.

tldr is that it was a network of "140 servers, most of them cloud-based". Cloud based means that they are virtual machines, running in the vast datacenters of Amazon, Google or Microsoft. No one knows or cares which of tens of thousands of rack-mounted servers actually hosts the virtual servers the DNC was using.

If that isn't enough for you, the gist:

Kevin Poulsen wrote:

The “server” Trump is obsessed with is actually 140 servers, most of them cloud-based, which the DNC was forced to decommission in June 2016 while trying to rid its network of the Russian GRU officers working to help Trump win the election, according to the figures in the DNC’s civil lawsuit against Russia and the Trump campaign. Another 180 desktop and laptop computers were also swapped out as the DNC raced to get the organization back on its feet and free of Putin’s surveillance.

But despite Trump’s repeated feverish claims to the contrary, no machines are actually missing.

It’s true that the FBI doesn’t have the DNC’s computer hardware. Agents didn’t sweep into DNC headquarters, load up all the equipment and leave Democrats standing stunned beside empty desks and dangling cables. There’s a reason for that, and it has nothing to do with a deep state conspiracy to frame Putin.

Trump and his allies are capitalizing on a basic misapprehension of how computer intrusion investigations work. Investigating a virtual crime isn’t a like investigating a murder. The Russians didn’t leave DNA evidence on the server racks and fingerprints on the keyboards. All the evidence of their comings and goings was on the computer hard drives, and in memory, and in the ephemeral network transmissions to and from the GRU’s command-and-control servers.

When cyber investigators respond to an incident, they capture that evidence in a process called “imaging.” They make an exact byte-for-byte copy of the hard drives. They do the same for the machine’s memory, capturing evidence that would otherwise be lost at the next reboot, and they monitor and store the traffic passing through the victim’s network. This has been standard procedure in computer intrusion investigations for decades. The images, not the computer’s hardware, provide the evidence.

Both the DNC and the security firm Crowdstrike, hired to respond to the breach, have said repeatedly over the years that they gave the FBI a copy of all the DNC images back in 2016. The DNC reiterated that Monday in a statement to the Daily Beast.

Sorry for the much delayed response, I've been busy.

Before addressing your objection, I'll say that I don't agree with the supposed "slam dunk" of the VIPS memo concluding there was no Russian hack of the DNC servers. There were in fact also dissenters from within VIPS itself. I would not be surprised if Russia wanted to embarass the neocon warmonger Clinton who promised direct confrontation with Russia in Syria. This would be consistent with the cyberhacking practices of any major state which saw a major threat looming. In particular, the VIPS claim that the metadata indicated the transfer speed was too  fast to be for the internet at that time and must have been downloaded to a thumb drive seems very shaky at best to my limited understanding. Scott Ritter, also a VIPS, expressed similar doubts over that memo's conclusion here:'

The analysis contained in the VIPS memorandum contradicts such an assertion [that there was a remote hack]. Unfortunately, this conclusion is not supported by the data. I reached out to the forensic analysts who conducted the analysis of the metadata in question. They have stated that there is no way to use the available metadata to determine where the copying of the data was done. In short, one cannot state that this data proves Guccifer 2.0 had direct access to the DNC server or that the data was located in the DNC when it was copied on July 5, 2016. These same analysts also note that the July 5 date that is pervasive on the metadata probably overwrote all prior modification times, meaning it is impossible to ascertain if there were any prior copy operations....

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/time-to-reassess-the-roles-played-by-g...

I have seen no adequate counter to that and I'd guess that those VIPS memo writers who have had long experience with the US state war propaganda system first hand are wearing the blinders of confirmation bias on this.

And yet, neither have t seen any "slam dunk" in the Russian hacking narrative.

Poulsen I had issues with even before he made Russiagate his bread and butter, but I'll just address his story:

Trump’s ‘Missing DNC Server’ Is Neither Missing Nor a Server
The president can spout conspiracy theories all he wants. But the DNC turned over all its key data to the FBI after it got hacked. And that info wasn’t stored on a single server....

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-missing-dnc-server-is-neither-missi...

Introducing Trump and his cyberpeasant backers becomes a kind of handy strawman for Poulsin, and Poulsen's "gotcha" that Republican's have also hired Crowdstrike is meaningless unless one buys into the absurd partisan notion that the two parties embody diametrically opposed values.

My reference to "the server" was imprecise, yet in my limited experience referring to "the server" is often used as shorthand for a server system, whether it is a desktop setup, on a local rack and/or remote array (cloud). Using such shorthand is apparently not restricted to non-professionals as shown by Comey's comments on the much smaller setup than the DNC system in the Clinton basement:

July 5, 2016
Statement by FBI Director James B. Comey on the Investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Use of a Personal E-Mail System
....
I have so far used the singular term, “e-mail server,” in describing the referral that began our investigation. It turns out to have been more complicated than that. Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various ways. Piecing all of that back together—to gain as full an understanding as possible of the ways in which personal e-mail was used for government work—has been a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort....

For that clusterf**k see also:

The FBI report on Hillary Clinton’s private email server, explained
Here’s what we learned from the FBI’s 58-page report on Clinton’s email server.
By Jeff Stein Sep 6, 2016, 9:50am EDT

https://www.vox.com/2016/9/6/12774948/fbi-hillary-clinton-report

Much of the malfeasanse and embarrisment exposed by FBI direct observation of Clinton's hardware (without its missing elements) could have been avoided if some Clinton cybersecurity company got to select imaging data of selected drives of their choosing as the complete story.

Fundemental to computer forensics is making sure the images correspond to the original state of the drives imaged, since data and metadata could be easily be altered prior the supplied image:

Hashing tools compare original hard disks to copies. The tools analyze data and assign it a unique number. If the hash numbers on an original and a copy match, the copy is a perfect replica of the original....

https://computer.howstuffworks.com/computer-forensic.htm

There are of course substantial differences between the Clinton basement setup and the much larger DNC setup which included cloud storage, yet the basic pitfalls of lack of direct access obtain. Poulsen essentially argues that forensic access to the the physical server array is irrelevent if the images are supplied by someone (in this case the DNC employee Crowdstrike).

Poulsin's attempt to make the question of FBI direct access irrelevent is undermined in his own article with the FBI direct access to the criminal hack of the more massive Google server complex:

It’s also consistent with the Department of Justice’s electronic evidence manual, which recommends capturing images when practical even when the FBI is executing a search warrant against a uncooperative suspect. When the computers belong to a cooperating victim, seizing the machines is pretty much out of the question, said James Harris, a former FBI cybercrime agent who worked on a 2009 breach at Google that’s been linked to the Chinese government.

“In most cases you don’t even ask, you just assume you’re going to make forensic copies,” said Harris, now vice president of engineering at PFP Cyber. “For example when the Google breach happened back in 2009, agents were sent out with express instructions that you image what they allow you to image, because they’re the victim, you don’t have a search warrant, and you don’t want to disrupt their business.”...[emphasis mine]

For FBI practises there are two distinct lines of treatment posited here for the systems of "suspects" and "victims" though the divide is actually less precise in some situations. The DNC is portrayed as pure victim  with nothing to hide and no vested interest in shaping the the narrative of the alleged breach. Given the political and international implications, that Obama's FBI did not gain immediate direct access, even a discrete and minimilly disruptive one, should give serious pause.

The DNC is posited by Poulsen to fulfill the roll as pure victim with no ax to grind, but here the employees of the victim go beyond what they "allow" to agents to image, they actually did the imaging themselves and supplied that data to the FBI.

Besides Comey admitting under oath that best practises would have included direct FBI access, we have the rather self-contradicting explanation of Crowdstrike itself :

CrowdStrike is a leader in protecting customers around the world from cyber threats. It is common for organizations to hire third-party industry experts, like CrowdStrike, to investigate and remediate cyber attacks when they suspect a breach even if they are collaborating with law enforcement. As John Carlin, former Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division at The Department of Justice, testified before the House Intelligence Committee (cited from page 21 of his testimony):

“A lot of — outside of any political organization,[emphasis mine] companies, most corporations, they often would use these third party contractors, who they hired through their own counsel, and maximize the control from the point of view of the victim.”...

https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-nation...

Especially in a conspiracy to overthrow a president. (All in the noble cause of reinstalling the Dems, of course.) Much other essential evidence gone 'missing' besides this in the failed 3-year RussiaGate regime-change operation.

A Republican couldn't have repeated this lie any better.  But not a lot of difference between them and a Putin apologist.

That must be it.

Oh I see we're back to the but, but emails days.  What investigative information would be kept on cell phones.  And what relevance to anything would they have?  And what are they supposed to have obstructed?  This is nothing but a diversion and a sideshow.  While Trump has obstructed and refused to cooperate not only with investigations but congressional committees.  And yet you attempt to equate the two.

I love reading about spies telling us what the truth is. Spies are spies all over the world and they all share one important trait and that is they will lie.

Lawyers representing the United States at Julian Assange’s extradition trial in Britain have accepted the claim that the WikiLeaks founder was offered a presidential pardon by a Congressman on the condition that he would help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emailsfrom the Democratic National Committee.

. . . .

The claim itself is not new—Assange’s lawyers previewed the allegation in a pre-trial hearing in February—but this is the first time Robinson’s testimony has been heard in full. The WikiLeaks lawyer said Rohrabacher offered Assange the deal a year after emails that damaged Hillary Clinton in the presidential race had been published, when the Russia investigation was gathering pace. The stolen DNC emails posted by WikiLeaks were hacked by Russian operatives.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-admits-that-putins-favorite-congressman-offered-pardon-to-assange-if-he-covered-up-russia-links?source=twitter&via=desktop

DNI Letter Supports Allegation that Hillary Clinton Created 'Russiagate'

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/09/dni-letter-supports-allegation-tha...

"...The claims made in the Ratcliffe letter fit the timeline of the scandal as it developed. They support the assertion that the Clinton campaign made up 'Russiagate' from whole cloth. It was supported in that by a myriad of media and dozens of high level anti-Trump activists in the FBI and CIA..."

Taibbi: The Bombshell Memory Hole

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1310974511270031362

"Having snuck past the usual gatekeepers to the White House, Trump appropriated the reality-distorting power the political establishment reserved for itself. 'You don't get to lie to the public, that's our job!' Hence the venom... professional jealousy."

Intel chief releases Russian disinfo on Hillary Clinton that was rejected by bipartisan Senate panel

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified a Russian intelligence assessment that was previously rejected by Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee as having no factual basis,

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/29/john-ratcliffe-hillary-clinton-russia-423022

How the DNC Hired CrowdStrike To Frame Russia For the Hack

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/how-dnc-hired-crowdstrike-frame-russ...

"On March 19, 2016, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, surrendered his emails to an unknown entity in a 'spear-phishing' scam. This has been called a 'hack,' but it was not. Instead, it was the sort of flim-flam hustle that happens to gullible dupes on the internet. The content of the emails was beyond embarrassing. They showed election fraud and coordination with the media against the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. The DNC and the Clinton campaign needed a cover story.

Blaming Russia would be a handy way to deal with the Podesta emails. There was already an existing Russia operation that could easily be retrofitted to this purpose. The DNC retained a company that called itself 'CrowdStrike' to provide assistance. CrowdStrike's Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Dimitri Alperovitch, is an anti-Putin Russian expat and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. With the Atlantic Council in 2016, all roads lead to Ukraine..."

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-house-toronto...

WaPo Publishes Paranoid Screed Cautioning Readers Not to Let Russia Make Them Paranoid

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1312936343434002432

"Russia and other adversaries may not need to hack the election if they can hack something else: our minds,' wrote the Washington Post editorial board. False conspiracy theories about Russia have been an extremely common mainstay within literally all mainstream media outlets in [North] America, especially those which take an oppositional posture toward Trump, and ever since it became publicly acceptable to charge without evidence that Vladimir Putin has taken control of the highest levels of the US government. People are paranoid about Russsian influence operations because the [North] American media have made them that way...."

And here comes one now....

From Politico:

Kyle Cheney wrote:

Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough.

Trump twice amplified supporters’ criticisms of Attorney General William Barr, including one featuring a meme calling on him to “arrest somebody!” He wondered aloud why his rivals, like President Barack Obama, Democratic nominee Joe Biden and former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton hadn’t been imprisoned for launching a “coup” against his administration.

“Where are all of the arrests?” Trump said, after several dozen tweets on the subject over the past 24 hours. “Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!”

By early afternoon, Trump was letting loose his frustrations in an all-caps missive that seemed aimed at nobody in particular.

“DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN - GOT CAUGHT!!!” Trump tweeted.

The day-long run of tweets and retweets marked the most frantic stretch of Trump’s public activity since he left the presidential suite at Walter Reed Medical Center and returned to treatment at the White House. They also underscored the degree to which Trump remains fixated on his grievances over the Russia probe, and often on obscure aspects of that investigation that are unintelligible to all but its most careful followers.

Hmm, somehow these insane ravings sound oddly familiar.

“Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election” between Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, according to a U.S. intelligence community report released Jan. 6, 2017. Russian intelligence services gained access to the computer network of Democratic Party officials and released the hacked material to WikiLeaks and others “to help President-elect Trump’s election chances,” the IC said in its report.

The Internet Research Agency, a Russian online propaganda operation, also conducted a social media campaign “to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015,” the IC report said.

. . . .

The special counsel’s investigation “established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government,” according to redacted report released by Attorney General William P. Barr on April 18, 2019.

https://www.factcheck.org/2017/06/timeline-russia-investigation/

"He's Putin's puppy" - Biden

"Russia had bounties on the heads of American soldiers but Trump said nothing to Putin" - Harris

  The simple truth is the same one we've hashed over since 2016. Recent document disclosures only confirm it. Blaming Russia for Trump's election was a false and cynical operation devised by Clinton, Obama, and the DNC with assistance from US intelligence agencies. It remains a criminal enterprise whether Biden wins and they get away with it or not. It is also dangerously destabilizing to US-Russian relations.  Most of the world now regards all this as a distinctly American form of collective insanity and lost interest in it long ago. It will probably have no impact on the upcoming election as even most Americans have much more pressing matters based in actual reality to deal with. But serious crimes were committed nonetheless by highly placed conspirators for which they should be made to answer. Whether you believe it or not BlueAnon.

Spy Chief Releases Docs on Claim Hillary Clinton Cooked Up Russia Scandal Became Facts Overnight.

https://nypost.com/2020/10/06/spy-chief-releases-docs-on-claim-hillary-c...

"...The newly released notes from [CIA Chief, John] Brennan, who is now a fiery anti-Trump commentator, indicate that Brennan briefed Obama on 'alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 28 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services...The investigative referral from the CIA to the FBI, meanwhile, contains the previously disclosed passage noting an allegation about 'Clinton's approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hacking US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server..."

In 'Russian Bounty' Story Evidence Free Claims from Nameless Spies Became Fact Overnight

https://twitter.com/krystalball/status/1314023348888887296

"The Russian bounty story was bullshit."

NDPP wrote:

  The simple truth is the same one we've hashed over since 2016. Recent document disclosures only confirm it. Blaming Russia for Trump's election was a false and cynical operation devised by Clinton, Obama, and the DNC with assistance from US intelligence agencies.

You are conflating 2 quite different issues here. Obviously, many causes contributed to Clinton's loss in 2016, and Russian interference is a fairly minor one. Trying to make it look as if that were the predominant cause of the loss is false, and we agree on that.

Whether Russian interference actually happened is an entirely different question, and one on which all the serious evidence says that it did happen. I have gone through it in detail years ago, and I have no appetite to do it again, because you simply ignored my points last time, and I'm sure you will again.

NDPP wrote:

Spy Chief Releases Docs on Claim Hillary Clinton Cooked Up Russia Scandal Became Facts Overnight.

https://nypost.com/2020/10/06/spy-chief-releases-docs-on-claim-hillary-c...

"...The newly released notes from [CIA Chief, John] Brennan, who is now a fiery anti-Trump commentator, indicate that Brennan briefed Obama on 'alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 28 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services...The investigative referral from the CIA to the FBI, meanwhile, contains the previously disclosed passage noting an allegation about 'Clinton's approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hacking US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server..."

The Russian hack of the dnc was reported in the WaPo on June 14. Anything that happened on July 28 is irrelevant.

Old dried up drivel long discredited and debunked Yanqui. Now only good for laughs...

"Aaron Mate discusses Russia troll farms' dangerous Jesus masturbation memes that allegedly won Donald Trump the election."

https://twitter.com/kthalps/status/1262448119406637057

What I still don't understand is why Russia trying to interfere in the US election using fake FB accounts is any big deal compared to the US interference and regime change plans that Canada helps facilitates in places like Bolivia and Venezuela.

The Orange Herring is doing his job. Both Democrats and Republicans voted for the largest military spending in the history of humanity but the ongoing news story is Russiagate not US imperialism and how that relates to BLM and that there can be no justice without peace.

NDPP wrote:

How the DNC Hired CrowdStrike To Frame Russia For the Hack

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/how-dnc-hired-crowdstrike-frame-russ...

"On March 19, 2016, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, surrendered his emails to an unknown entity in a 'spear-phishing' scam. This has been called a 'hack,' but it was not. Instead, it was the sort of flim-flam hustle that happens to gullible dupes on the internet. The content of the emails was beyond embarrassing. They showed election fraud and coordination with the media against the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. The DNC and the Clinton campaign needed a cover story....

The article is a re-post from elsewhere.
Regardless, that quote itself is accurate.  

The spear phishing of Podesta's emails could have been done by Russia, or anyone given the lack of sophistication involved.

Wikileaks published the phishing email, (an image of it appears here: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-phishing-email-that-hacked-the-account-... ) and clearly it would have raised alarm bells in the minds of any minimally aware person who received it.

And it did in fact raise suspicions, and was referred to a Clinton IT guy who catastrophically (for the  DNC), said it was "legitimate" by way of a claimed typo:

But a front-page New York Times article published Tuesday gave the story an almost incredible twist. The Times quotes Delavan as saying that he actually recognized that the email was a hoax—but mistakenly typed the word legitimate when he meant to type illegitimate. The implication was that the Clinton campaign was compromised not by incompetence, but by a slip of the fingers. The anecdote triggered headlines around the web: “A Typo Might Have Cost Clinton the Election,” gushed the Week.
...
If Delavan had meant to type illegitimate rather than legitimate, why did he preface it with the article a rather than an? Was that a typo, too? Moreover, if Delavan’s goal had been to warn Podesta that the email was a scam, you’d think he would have told Podesta not to follow its instructions and not to click on the “change password” link therein. Instead, he followed his assertion that the email was “legitimate” by reiterating to Podesta the instructions contained in the email itself, almost to the word. The phishing email told Podesta, “You should change your password immediately”—which is exactly what Delavan told him. So Delavan not only called the email “legitimate,” he practically ordered Podesta to do what it said.

All of which led me immediately to suspect something rather uncharitable of Delavan: that he not only fell for the phishing scheme but that he subsequently lied about it to the New York Times, perhaps trying to pass it off as a typo because he was too embarrassed to admit the truth...

https://slate.com/technology/2016/12/an-interview-with-charles-delavan-t...

The basis of the claim that it was the Russian GRU "Fancy Bear" was that that the phisher used a bitly account which these masters of deception simply "forgot" to set Bitly to the Private option (that the click-link was hidden by bitly is itself a givaway), let alone use other means of hiding their digital tracks. If true, the incompetence of this Russian "sophisticated" GRU team must be a great consolation to US/Israel that produced the incredibly sophisticated Stuxnet attack on Iran, etc.

This is not proof that Russia didn't do it, it's just that sophisticated cyber spy states that make attacks and don't as a  matter of procedure sufficiently hide their tracks or inject code which leads to dead ends --or false flags --must be in the minority these days.

None of the facts about the idiot-level phishing ploy prevents the howling absurd claims of the Russiagate industry embodied by such statements as:

(CNN)A phishing email sent to Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta may have been so sophisticated that it fooled the campaign's own IT staffers, who at one point advised him it was a legitimate warning to change his password....

bekayne wrote:

Michael Moriarity wrote:

The Russian hack of the dnc was reported in the WaPo on June 14. Anything that happened on July 28 is irrelevant.

Some say June 14 was before July 28. Some say it was after. Who can really say?

New Docs Shoot Steele Dossier Down in Flames (and vid)

https://www.rt.com/shows/news-views-hughes/503770-new-docs-shoot-steele-...

 Docs show FBI used reports seeded by British spy in Russiagate probe. Canadian journalist Alex Mihailovich brings us the latest revelations in the unraveling 'Russiagate' media frenzy. @ 11:30

Facebook and Twitter's Intervention Highlights Dangerous New Double Standard

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1317483078336630785

"While Facebook says the New York Post story must be kept out of sight until verified, the standard for the Steele dossier was opposite..."

'Fool me once, shame on you. Food me twice, shame on me:' Proverb

Facebook, a Trump supporting corporation, wants to keep the NY Fake News Post article out of the media - what does that tell you about how fake it is, eh!

More peddling of Republican propaganda 

It's frightening the lengths some people will go to deny Russia's efforts to elect Trump in 2016, and to elect him in 2020.  About time Facebook, one of the leading carriers of right-wing disinformation, started cracking down.

It's state-sponsored election disinformation that is at issue.  And until those companies are declared a public utility, as they should be, they're free to make their own rules.