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.
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.
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?
Myth: Nevada’s expansion of mail-in voting resulted in illegal ballot harvesting and fraudulent votes for mail-in
ballots.
Facts: Nevada courts found no fraud for any votes, including mail-in votes.
“The Court finds there is no evidence that voter fraud rates associated with mail in voting are systematically higher than voter fraud rates associated with other forms of voting. …[T]he illegal vote rate totaled at most only 0.00054 percent.”30
• Nevada voters followed the law with respect to the ballot collection.
• Secretary Cegavske, a Republican, defended the integrity of the election. In fact, Secretary Cegavske issues her own “myth versus fact” document that debunks all these conspiracies. She states that “we have yet to see any evidence of wide-spread fraud.” She noted that four separate cases questioned the integrity of the election in Nevada. In all cases, “[a]fter examining records presented, each case was discounted due to a lack of evidence.” She said that “we have not been presented with evidence of non-citizens voting in the 2020 election.”
The theater is amazing. Both parties are neocon, so why influence?
Trump talked a big game before the election about isolationism and then went full neocon and is now worse for Russia and China (and of course also the US) than Democrats.
So these supposed bots should now support the Democrats?
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.
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.
Where did I call it election interference? It's a bribe - this payment was never a campaign promise. The GOP (rightfully) hates it.
We are in agreement that the #1 concern for the midterms is that Americans will vote honestly. Trump was removed from office by honest voters, after his failed attempts to malign them.
And they promised to only deliver those things if their party wins the house/senate(/presidency)? Were those people currently in power to the degree that they could pass those bills before the election, like the republicans currently are? If trump actually wanted to do this he'd have done it already. Did Obama/Biden previously promise multiple different "dividends" like trump has for doge and tariffs?
Find me one example of Obama or Biden promising that they'll give you free shit if you vote for their desired candidates.
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
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
I will never trust a word Ken Klippenstein says after this disgrace of an article. Read the wikipedia pages on the groups mentioned, 764, cvlt, the com, NLM, etc. then think about how he still wrote an article functionally attacking the administration’s going after these groups. Literally disgusting reckless and irresponsible journalism. I dislike this admin as much as the next, FBI is a wreck, I don’t care about any of that. These groups are the worst of the worst. Saying “oh they’re going after them just because of le nihilism” is the feckless liberalist narrative we need less of today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The US is meddling in European elections as well, supporting extreme "right wing" parties across the continent. Entirely ignoring democracy issues.
Inside the US, you have a remarkable lack of serious reporting and common-meaning-generating discussion. Filter bubble echo-chambers are extreme to the point of constituting entirely incompatible realities.
Those distortions aren't random either, they clearly serve a specific goal. Having people scoff at "conspiracies" even when they're facing them dead-on is a surprisingly effective trick.
> American Big Tech is a menace for all democracies around the world.
Wait, aren't that is exactly the definition of the democracy? When the people use all information there is (even if American Big Tech, or China, or Russia, or Soros, or world‑controlling pedo cabal have not very uniformly media coverage of the election process) to make their own decision?
People warned about this 20 years ago when Facebook had started to gain world wide popularity. The basis for the claim that privacy is required for democracy is grounded on the idea that giving up the control of information to a selected few are incompatible with freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, and freedom of expression, and all of it is required for the basic functions of a democracy. A fair election, a fair legal system, and a fair press, all of it require that people have some direct control over their own information flows.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master". In the first decade of the 20th century we kind of know it was true but didn't really act on it. During the second decade, popularity of fake news drove some to reject the idea, arguing that some masters are actually a good thing since that prevent the masses to get the wrong information, believing that platforms should act as the police to prevent people with megaphones. Now during the third decade we are starting to see what happen when such masters are giving free range to use their power, including working with or against governments depending on their own interests and with zero regards for society.
The idea that foreign influence campaigns on American voters should be stopped is just a slightly disguised version of the idea that American voters have too much free speech and too much democracy. Which is a defensible position (I don't currently agree with it, but it's defensible), but I wish that the people who call for stopping foreign influence campaigns would just come out and state that this is indeed their position. Then we could have an honest conversation. They could, for example, argue that American voters are on average too ignorant, too stupid, or too prone to vote in destabilizing ways to be trusted to have free access to information. Or they could take it further and just plain say that we should limit who can vote or what can be voted for so that our politics stays within a given "acceptable" window. I would argue that whatever the American voters' tendencies might be, in the current political climate at least, I still prefer free access to information. Would I still value free access to information over keeping voters a certain "safe" way if it meant that some people would get elected who would actually put me in a concentration camp because of my political opinions or ethnicity? No. But we're nowhere close to that, since America has strong norms of civil liberty, so even people who want to put others in concentration camps because of their political opinions or ethnicity have a tough uphill climb if they want to actually do it.
In any case, I just find arguments that are along the lines of "it's not really free speech restriction, your free speech isn't restricted by not being able to see foreign propaganda" to be beneath contempt.
Personally I want to be able to see even foreign propaganda that is false. But attempts to curtail foreign propaganda lead to situations where even foreign propaganda that is true would be curtailed. And that is even worse. If some foreign government hacks the US government and dumps a bunch of compromising information about US politicians online, you'd best believe that I would like to see it.
68 comments
[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 14.8 ms ] threadIt 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.
And the left? They’ve been driving over cliff after cliff. Left and right cable news are on the take, they have to be.
Where was this guy when cybercom destroyed the Internet Agency's computers and sent them personalized text messages in a highly publicized attack?
Still worse than most other democracies.
https://statesuniteddemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01...
Ballot Harvesting
Myth: Nevada’s expansion of mail-in voting resulted in illegal ballot harvesting and fraudulent votes for mail-in ballots.
Facts: Nevada courts found no fraud for any votes, including mail-in votes.
“The Court finds there is no evidence that voter fraud rates associated with mail in voting are systematically higher than voter fraud rates associated with other forms of voting. …[T]he illegal vote rate totaled at most only 0.00054 percent.”30
• Nevada voters followed the law with respect to the ballot collection.
• Secretary Cegavske, a Republican, defended the integrity of the election. In fact, Secretary Cegavske issues her own “myth versus fact” document that debunks all these conspiracies. She states that “we have yet to see any evidence of wide-spread fraud.” She noted that four separate cases questioned the integrity of the election in Nevada. In all cases, “[a]fter examining records presented, each case was discounted due to a lack of evidence.” She said that “we have not been presented with evidence of non-citizens voting in the 2020 election.”
Signature Verification: Arizona
Debunked on page 3
Signature Verification: Georgia
Debunked on page 5
Signature Verification: Pennsylvania
Debunked on page 23
Trump talked a big game before the election about isolationism and then went full neocon and is now worse for Russia and China (and of course also the US) than Democrats.
So these supposed bots should now support the Democrats?
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.
Calling it out as election interference now shows a clear bias.
We are in agreement that the #1 concern for the midterms is that Americans will vote honestly. Trump was removed from office by honest voters, after his failed attempts to malign them.
Find me one example of Obama or Biden promising that they'll give you free shit if you vote for their desired candidates.
It's good that we now have a recorded timeline for history...
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
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.
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).
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.
So that the physical agents can sway us?
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.
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?
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.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trump-agencies-fight-war-o...
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.
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.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/12/27/1819792/communit...
https://x.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1311772832234385409?s=20
https://www.graphika.com/reports/posing-as-patriots/
https://apnews.com/article/europe-russia-john-brennan-288bc8...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/trump-russ...
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-trump-russia-senate-f...
American Big Tech is a menace for all democracies around the world.
Inside the US, you have a remarkable lack of serious reporting and common-meaning-generating discussion. Filter bubble echo-chambers are extreme to the point of constituting entirely incompatible realities.
Those distortions aren't random either, they clearly serve a specific goal. Having people scoff at "conspiracies" even when they're facing them dead-on is a surprisingly effective trick.
Wait, aren't that is exactly the definition of the democracy? When the people use all information there is (even if American Big Tech, or China, or Russia, or Soros, or world‑controlling pedo cabal have not very uniformly media coverage of the election process) to make their own decision?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master". In the first decade of the 20th century we kind of know it was true but didn't really act on it. During the second decade, popularity of fake news drove some to reject the idea, arguing that some masters are actually a good thing since that prevent the masses to get the wrong information, believing that platforms should act as the police to prevent people with megaphones. Now during the third decade we are starting to see what happen when such masters are giving free range to use their power, including working with or against governments depending on their own interests and with zero regards for society.
In any case, I just find arguments that are along the lines of "it's not really free speech restriction, your free speech isn't restricted by not being able to see foreign propaganda" to be beneath contempt.
Personally I want to be able to see even foreign propaganda that is false. But attempts to curtail foreign propaganda lead to situations where even foreign propaganda that is true would be curtailed. And that is even worse. If some foreign government hacks the US government and dumps a bunch of compromising information about US politicians online, you'd best believe that I would like to see it.