Name:	Buteye -	Reply
Subject:	RUSSIA HACKING
Date:	1/6/2017 12:16:45 AM

I wish everyone, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, could have seen the "monologue" at the beginning of Hannity's program tonight. He showed part of the comments made by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to the Senate Committee investigating Russian hacking. He said that Russia poses "an existential threat to the United States". He said he didn't think we have ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process, but he also said their hacking efforts "did not change the vote tallies" in the election. He said when it comes to the question of whether Russian hacking affected "the choices that the electorate made, there's no way for us to gauge that".  Hannity also pointed out numerous hackings have occurred in our government agencies since 2009 and very little action has been taken to combat these attacks. Hacking of the Office of Personnel Management was hacked in 2015 and 21.5 million people were affected. Another incident happened when a single employee responded to a pfishing email that made the entire IRS system vulnerable. A cursory review on hacking that has occurred recently, (specicically the targets involved), are enough to send "chills" up your spine. Unless you want to deal with complete "shock", don't go there.

Name:	Talullahhound -	Reply
Subject:	RUSSIA HACKING
Date:	1/6/2017 12:49:33 PM

I was one of the 21.5 million whose data was exposed in the OPM hacking and then I was involved with another follow on hacking of my data when they breeched the security clearance system. I figure some group in cyberspace knows every detail about me.  The government "gave" me 18 free months of credit monitoring.  those were blamed on the Chinese.

The threat of hacking is not new - I remember having discussions about it back in 2003, with regard to safeguarding classified dat transfer to European partners.  If Americans knew what could be done to this country by a few well placed hacks, they would be scared to death.  The ability is out there.  The "brilliant" Edward Snowden is sitting over in Moscow.  There is an entire subculture of international hackers.  DoD is the target of attempted hacks almost every day. 

There are resources committed to it, and I have no doubt that we have people attempting to hack foreign computers too that are not discussed with the general public. Sadly, Putin is correct in saying that the only way to assure communications security is by courier note.

Anything I do online I assume is being captured by someone, somewhere.  For every encryption program, there is a hacker working on breaking it.  It's not the world we grew up in - I remember the days of rooms filled with mega computers that did less than your smart phone can do now.  And what happens when they start hacking the "clouds". 

We spend a lot of money on new airplanes, tanks, brilliant weapons, but we're being beaten by improvised weapons and computer genius.