U.S. Charges 13 Russians, 3 Companies for Interfering with Election
I bothers me no end that influence&#x2F;propaganda operations continuously get termed &quot;hacking the election&quot; or &quot;interfering with the election.&quot;<p>I also think the notion that there&#x27;s a way to prevent external actors from influencing internal affairs in an ostensibly free and open republic in a networked world is somewhat... ill conceived: a democracy so fragile it needs a great firewall of some kind to protect its citizens from &quot;fake&quot; and &quot;unhealthy&quot; views is probably already on the road to failure.<p>If we, as a nation, were actually serving our citizens and maintaining the level of education and sustaining the standard of living required for democracy to function across most of the population I do not think these Russian-style campaigns would be very effective.<p>And of course that&#x27;s not to mention all the inconsistent double standards. Where&#x27;s the outrage over things like Confucius Institutes and other similar influence operations?<p>And that&#x27;s not even getting in to the whole &quot;do as I say, not as I do&quot; aspect, where we try to pretend that dictatorships and totalitarian states should see our pro-democracy pro-human rights initiatives and NGOs and VOA and such as perfectly fine and friendly and obviously different than RT, etc.<p>The strength of a democracy should be that its citizens can stand in the battleground of ideas unscathed and our abandonment of that ideal does not bode well.