In this exact moment, USA is hacking Brazillian elections. Meta is shadowbanning one of the candidates. People don't know what is happening. A small filter in Meta AI blocking image generation for one of the candidates is now generating an uproar.
American Big Tech is a menace for all democracies around the world.
After 4 vomitous years of "Russia hacked our elections" eventually boiling down to basically $10k spent on facebook ads I'm not sure I can handle more of this.
There are real ways to secure our elections but the end result is that it's insecure by design. The states who run the elections seem perfectly happen to run them with the current level of (in)security.
As a Canadian, it's pretty mental to see this kind of hijinks from over the border. Nobody's ever had any concerns about the security of our elections. Paper ballots and volunteers and it all just works. Why do you need machines? Why is there so much drama? It's not rocket surgery, it's literally counting, it's barely math. Photocopied forms and a sharpie.
The Supreme Court decided our President in 2000. I think the secret is that Alphabet agencies don't actually care about elections - otherwise it would have not reached the Supreme Court. If I was an Alphabet agency, instead of choosing a predetermined fate and faking things, I would admit I was weak if I could not handle any outcome. That is the joke I think the Alphabet agencies pull. They could force things to go their way, but that would breed weakness in themselves for being unable to handle events that do not, and they know it.
I think the strongest point out of this was that the US populace is a dangerous vector for our adversaries.
In 5th gen warfare, the battlefield can be kinetic or information, and might be all around us and omnipresent.
What we're guessing at without this decade's version of a Snowden leak is what the equities of the US military are in this. Are we playing defense, offense, and where? Is the answer just, "yes"?
What about our adversaries, or more importantly, _who_ are our adversaries?
Consider just the usual 3 who are in the news: Russia, China, and Israel:
There's so little that's public about these wars and so little traction in the mindshare of the electorate, you'd wonder if it was real if you just talked to random people.
Social media? It’s clear to me it’s been all media for a long time. The right and conservative media have sane washed so much egregious behavior since 2016 it is literally unbelievable. Try to go back to 2015 mindset and consider anything that’s occurred since.
And the left? They’ve been driving over cliff after cliff. Left and right cable news are on the take, they have to be. Individuals obviously, not the networks.
And it also conveniently omits the monstrosity that was the Russian intervention in the 2016 election that precipitated all this and instead claims "the Trump admin never substantiated..." Like yeah, that's part of the original problem!
Where was this guy when cybercom destroyed the Internet Agency's computers and sent them personalized text messages in a highly publicized attack?
Of course he did not 1:1 predict Trump, but things such as "flood the zone with shit" is exactly what Yuri spoke about, just using different words e. g. informational overload or the corresponding russian words. And what he also didn't expand on enough, IMO, is corruption. Putin bets a LOT on corruption. Imagine if Trump were not corrupt - Yuri's prediction would not come to fruition. You need a rotting egg for leverage, and who knows what kompromat exists on the orange, clueless man.
1. Republicans win in midterms. Trump: "I defended democracy!"
2. Republicans lose in midterms. Trump: "The election was rigged by the evil Democrats!"
Recall that the whole basis of the Jan 6 insurrection was that he made the same "rigged" claim. He's already laying the foundation to claim "rigged" this time too, unless it conveniently benefits his party.
And many years later ex-democrat operatives are releasing evidence of fake votes, vote rescans, copy-machine votes and the mainstream media refuses to air any of it. Doesn't fit the established narrative.
it’s a lot harder to do a third term or a “coup” when you don’t have a majority support. i don’t have faith in many republican officials but i would bet many would not tie themselves 59 the sinking ship of trumpism, especially absent a heir apparent
Ideally, a patriotic, nonpartisan, civilian group would monitor large social media networks and outlets for evidence of direct funding from foreign sources, or parroting of information from known foreign propaganda networks. Then at the least, have a public database of (public) accounts and sites known to be under this influence.
It seems naive to think that there aren't massive information warfare campaigns targeting all political wings in the United States, and that no looking should be done to uncover it.
The military and CIA can muck with explicitly foreign actors, but they shouldn't be doing any kind of domestic law enforcement. Really bad precedent.
X has made UI changes and API restrictions that make it much harder and slower to see just how many accounts commenting under a tweet are bots. It is not in X's commercial interest for the public to know that. You can still efficiently track bot accounts through Nitter, for instance, but that is a workaround that X itself does not authorize. Any monitoring org faces an uphill battle.
I don't know how many people read the article there are concerning things in there but there is also significant discussion of regular old CyberCom activities such as malware research and what not.
What we need to understand is that cyberspace has opened up another theater of Operation and one that the nations enemies actively use against it, because of our free and open culture of speech.
I'll also point out that throughout the article it points how the operation was authorized by Obama, appealed for bt democratic senators trying to stop "disinformation" and prevent election "interference" as well as Republican presidents.
The fact of the matter is almost everything you see or read on the Internet is not organic but is parroting a prepared position for someone trying to influence you. Benignly to buy things, less benignly can be foreign actors attempting to distablize or so discontent amongst a potential geo-political rival. And this isn't new either, all the way back in in WW1 Germany was supporting and supplying Irish rebels. This is how the great game is played unfortunately.
The solution will be found by building bridges, getting to know people in the real world and reducing the influence of cyberspace on your life.
> I'll also point out that throughout the article it points how the operation was authorized by Obama, appealed for bt democratic senators trying to stop "disinformation" and prevent election "interference" as well as Republican presidents.
This is a culmination of everything post-9/11. The lesson for administrations is to not create institutions that will be weaponized by future administrations — against your party too, if you won't think about the citizens. Decentralization has been our saving grace.
If they disturb the election then the USA is de-facto a military junta.
Which in a way they are since Big Tech is calling the shots. Pretty
interesting to see how easy it was to overthrow the US system. It's
a lesson for other democracies too - build a resilient system. Many
years ago people said "nah, Putin does not destabilize democracies".
Well, guess you know see how deep corruption is. It's a bit like in
the movie Invasion of the Body Snatcher (both the first two movies
are great; the first one was more with commie-vibes, and more disturbing
in that way, whereas the second was a bit more with horror-vibes and
an epic end scene with Donald Sutherland).
In what way is trump worse for russia or china? Trump does everything Putin asks, and as for China, he is helping more accidentally by sending our allies running to the only other reliable trade partner available.
No. He has been nicer to Putin than usual lately, out of desperation to somehow mitigate the fallout from his monumentally stupid and destructive war on Iran, but this should not be confused with actual subservience. A President who actually "did everything Putin asks" would have stopped arming Ukraine and lifted all sanctions on Russia. Trump did not do either of those things during either of his terms, to the contrary he has overall been quite hawkish against Russia and mostly intensified the pressure against them.
the US Government and particularly the military cannot keep secrets the more people are involved
even classified stuff gets out because people brag
I'm not saying this isn't a possible scheme, I'm saying the press will find out very quickly
Plus every state is different system, mostly
What we should be talking about is the clear and documented fact the current administration has outright ignored 250 court orders, including deporting one person three times despite being ordered not to and then ordered to return them
Because after the election, that's when they go scorched-earth and ignoring court orders like cutting down nearly 500 trees in a single day rush before they are caught, well that's nightmare fuel
The title is clickbait. This is important to point out because this, at the minimum, it severely degrades public's perception of how smart, intelligent, qualified the individuals at CYBERCOM are.
I am unaware of who Klippenstein is and whether he's left or right leaning. This article via HN is my first exposure to him, but without any context at all, just by reading the article, I can figure out he's very left leaning.
Why does that matter?
It matters because journalism in 2026 has turned from reporting facts into appealing to a certain spectrum of an audience. It's no longer about providing facts of the matter but about leading an audience to a conclusion that they already had in their minds and re-enforcing it. This is the same echo chamber loop journalists accuse social media of but they are guilty of the very same.
---
First, Klippenstein (seems to) imply that it was the Trump administration that began claims of Russian intelligence interference.
Not so. In October 7, 2016 - the Obama administration, via both Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, publicly attributed compromises of political organizations’ emails to the Russian government, connecting the subsequent disclosures to Russian-directed efforts. This was a government intelligence attribution and not merely a statement from the Democratic Party or Clinton campaign
Next, Klippenstein (seems to) imply that CYBERCOM is running the show here. That's not how INT works - CYBERCOM complements, and doesn't replaces FBI/DHS, while CIA is itself foreign focused. CYBERCOM’s role also includes disrupting foreign cyber operations, not just merely investigating them.
Now a very noble interpretation of Klippenstein is he's describing a bipartisan willingness to restrict speech in the name of election security - that his central objection is to the government’s intervention in political expression, not exclusively to which party controls it.
This is a fair argument but if there's foreign intelligence interference, that brainwashes the American public, making them draw conclusions that are factually invalid, whose responsibility is to atleast point that out?
The DoW has, at its disposal, incredibly advanced intelligence dissemination tools (as a requirement for INT operations) that are a great fit for this usecase. Should not the American public, who pay for all of it, not make use of it?
bias does not imply incorrect or factually inaccurate. "trump assassinated world leaders and triggered a full blown war in iran" is not bias. its factually accurate. That it breaks with someones worldview is not bias. And we need to stop pretending that adhering to objectivity is "bias".
By that definition, all medical science is "biased". And until the current administration, it wasnt. Requiring people making claims to demonstrate it with repeatable methods is not "bias".
If the claims in the article are true, military assets are taking direct action, not merely backing up domestic law enforcement.
>whose responsibility is to at least point that out?
Not the military. I agree that work needs done but when you dance close to taking down sites or possibly removing actual human Americans' posts surreptitiously, it should be done with civilian mechanisms and with oversight.
Pre-emptive dismantling any defense of that behavior:
If it were really a good idea; if it were really supported by Congress and people really needed it, the ruling party with Present + Congress wouldn't condition it on them winning more elections.
Any comparison to policies like "elect me and get free education and free healthcare" are statements based on policy positions, and usually coming from people who don't have the power to make that happen alone. Trump and GOP have the power right now to try to do what he said, but they won't.
When Biden was elected, actual laws were suspended, like ballot harvesting and signature verification, by judges in multiple states. Mail-in voting combined with these two things allowed what was essentially legalized cheating in the election.
There was much more than this as well and it was well documented in a Rolling Stone article after the election.
Now that someone you don't like might use these same tactics, you want to stop the 'cheating'.
Get in line with the Republicans and others that lost their jobs and livelihood over having this opinion.
I will echo the statement of the security community during that time that our elections are the most safe and secure in the history of the United States.
Want evidence? ................... (this is what we got after Biden won, along with massive bannings and shutdown of online speech). I stopped taking many in the security community seriously after this when they can be swayed so easily by public opinion.
They are nothing more than political hacks with no integrity.
American Big Tech is a menace for all democracies around the world.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50087140
There are real ways to secure our elections but the end result is that it's insecure by design. The states who run the elections seem perfectly happen to run them with the current level of (in)security.
In 5th gen warfare, the battlefield can be kinetic or information, and might be all around us and omnipresent.
What we're guessing at without this decade's version of a Snowden leak is what the equities of the US military are in this. Are we playing defense, offense, and where? Is the answer just, "yes"?
What about our adversaries, or more importantly, _who_ are our adversaries?
Consider just the usual 3 who are in the news: Russia, China, and Israel:
Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation#Against...
China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_interference_in_the_20...
Israel: https://quincyinst.org/research/the-eighth-front-inside-isra...
Mailers going out in Iowa, reportedly: https://x.com/DMRegister/status/2110328563211567310
There's so little that's public about these wars and so little traction in the mindshare of the electorate, you'd wonder if it was real if you just talked to random people.
And the left? They’ve been driving over cliff after cliff. Left and right cable news are on the take, they have to be. Individuals obviously, not the networks.
Where was this guy when cybercom destroyed the Internet Agency's computers and sent them personalized text messages in a highly publicized attack?
It is to me shocking how few have listened to Yuri:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErKTVdETpw
Of course he did not 1:1 predict Trump, but things such as "flood the zone with shit" is exactly what Yuri spoke about, just using different words e. g. informational overload or the corresponding russian words. And what he also didn't expand on enough, IMO, is corruption. Putin bets a LOT on corruption. Imagine if Trump were not corrupt - Yuri's prediction would not come to fruition. You need a rotting egg for leverage, and who knows what kompromat exists on the orange, clueless man.
It's good that we now have a recorded timeline for history...
1. Republicans win in midterms. Trump: "I defended democracy!"
2. Republicans lose in midterms. Trump: "The election was rigged by the evil Democrats!"
Recall that the whole basis of the Jan 6 insurrection was that he made the same "rigged" claim. He's already laying the foundation to claim "rigged" this time too, unless it conveniently benefits his party.
At the very least I expect riots and some attempt at a January 6th repeat. People will die, police or rioters or both.
This is what people voted for (including all the ones who didn't vote for various dumb reasons), so I'm just getting popcorn.
It seems naive to think that there aren't massive information warfare campaigns targeting all political wings in the United States, and that no looking should be done to uncover it.
The military and CIA can muck with explicitly foreign actors, but they shouldn't be doing any kind of domestic law enforcement. Really bad precedent.
What we need to understand is that cyberspace has opened up another theater of Operation and one that the nations enemies actively use against it, because of our free and open culture of speech.
I'll also point out that throughout the article it points how the operation was authorized by Obama, appealed for bt democratic senators trying to stop "disinformation" and prevent election "interference" as well as Republican presidents.
The fact of the matter is almost everything you see or read on the Internet is not organic but is parroting a prepared position for someone trying to influence you. Benignly to buy things, less benignly can be foreign actors attempting to distablize or so discontent amongst a potential geo-political rival. And this isn't new either, all the way back in in WW1 Germany was supporting and supplying Irish rebels. This is how the great game is played unfortunately.
The solution will be found by building bridges, getting to know people in the real world and reducing the influence of cyberspace on your life.
So that the physical agents can sway us?
This is a culmination of everything post-9/11. The lesson for administrations is to not create institutions that will be weaponized by future administrations — against your party too, if you won't think about the citizens. Decentralization has been our saving grace.
You can't be so naive that you think we can "build bridges" with North Korea (one of THE most prominent threat actors in the entire world).
No. He has been nicer to Putin than usual lately, out of desperation to somehow mitigate the fallout from his monumentally stupid and destructive war on Iran, but this should not be confused with actual subservience. A President who actually "did everything Putin asks" would have stopped arming Ukraine and lifted all sanctions on Russia. Trump did not do either of those things during either of his terms, to the contrary he has overall been quite hawkish against Russia and mostly intensified the pressure against them.
even classified stuff gets out because people brag
I'm not saying this isn't a possible scheme, I'm saying the press will find out very quickly
Plus every state is different system, mostly
What we should be talking about is the clear and documented fact the current administration has outright ignored 250 court orders, including deporting one person three times despite being ordered not to and then ordered to return them
Because after the election, that's when they go scorched-earth and ignoring court orders like cutting down nearly 500 trees in a single day rush before they are caught, well that's nightmare fuel
Large segments of people will never see the open secrets
I am unaware of who Klippenstein is and whether he's left or right leaning. This article via HN is my first exposure to him, but without any context at all, just by reading the article, I can figure out he's very left leaning.
Why does that matter?
It matters because journalism in 2026 has turned from reporting facts into appealing to a certain spectrum of an audience. It's no longer about providing facts of the matter but about leading an audience to a conclusion that they already had in their minds and re-enforcing it. This is the same echo chamber loop journalists accuse social media of but they are guilty of the very same.
---
First, Klippenstein (seems to) imply that it was the Trump administration that began claims of Russian intelligence interference.
Not so. In October 7, 2016 - the Obama administration, via both Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, publicly attributed compromises of political organizations’ emails to the Russian government, connecting the subsequent disclosures to Russian-directed efforts. This was a government intelligence attribution and not merely a statement from the Democratic Party or Clinton campaign
Next, Klippenstein (seems to) imply that CYBERCOM is running the show here. That's not how INT works - CYBERCOM complements, and doesn't replaces FBI/DHS, while CIA is itself foreign focused. CYBERCOM’s role also includes disrupting foreign cyber operations, not just merely investigating them.
Now a very noble interpretation of Klippenstein is he's describing a bipartisan willingness to restrict speech in the name of election security - that his central objection is to the government’s intervention in political expression, not exclusively to which party controls it.
This is a fair argument but if there's foreign intelligence interference, that brainwashes the American public, making them draw conclusions that are factually invalid, whose responsibility is to atleast point that out?
The DoW has, at its disposal, incredibly advanced intelligence dissemination tools (as a requirement for INT operations) that are a great fit for this usecase. Should not the American public, who pay for all of it, not make use of it?
By that definition, all medical science is "biased". And until the current administration, it wasnt. Requiring people making claims to demonstrate it with repeatable methods is not "bias".
If you report all crime by black people and no crime by white people, you are factually accurate in what you report but you are also biased.
>whose responsibility is to at least point that out?
Not the military. I agree that work needs done but when you dance close to taking down sites or possibly removing actual human Americans' posts surreptitiously, it should be done with civilian mechanisms and with oversight.
If it were really a good idea; if it were really supported by Congress and people really needed it, the ruling party with Present + Congress wouldn't condition it on them winning more elections.
Any comparison to policies like "elect me and get free education and free healthcare" are statements based on policy positions, and usually coming from people who don't have the power to make that happen alone. Trump and GOP have the power right now to try to do what he said, but they won't.
There was much more than this as well and it was well documented in a Rolling Stone article after the election.
Now that someone you don't like might use these same tactics, you want to stop the 'cheating'.
Get in line with the Republicans and others that lost their jobs and livelihood over having this opinion.
I will echo the statement of the security community during that time that our elections are the most safe and secure in the history of the United States.
Want evidence? ................... (this is what we got after Biden won, along with massive bannings and shutdown of online speech). I stopped taking many in the security community seriously after this when they can be swayed so easily by public opinion.
They are nothing more than political hacks with no integrity.
Yes. I do. Very much.
Do you have any?