The Mueller Investigation

After a year of diligent searching, the Mueller investigation has finally handed down its first indictments: a handful of Russian hackers working for a few minor Russian corporations. The crime was identity theft and some mail fraud, etc.: Russian agents stole identities to create bank accounts which in turn were used in social media events. Their aim seems to have been thwarting Hillary Clinton and using American social networking sites to generally spew out hamfisted propaganda against her and in favor of her opponents. There is no mention of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin being anywhere near this stuff, though we may assume that this is the initial volley of indictments rather than the culimnation of the process.

Okay...so what? Russian trolls are hacking the United States in some way every single day and have been for years. I would submit China, Israel, France, UK, Iran and any number of Latin American countries have been, too. This is the way of modern technology, it has little to do with politics. If I were a hacker I wouldn't care about the gov't, I'd rather get into Amazon or the banks (who get hacked all the freakin' time!), those are the places with worthwhile information. And, as for American elections, well, as an American I've been unimpressed with them my whole lifetime, don't really see why any foreinger would care. But the scuttlebutt around this is Putin was angry with Hillary Clinton (and Goldman Sachs, another great target for hackers) over the release of the Panama Papers in 2015, which damaged Putin's money laundering schemes and which he took as a personal attack by Hillary. The 2016 election meddling seems to have begun with an 'anyone but Hillary' mindset that favored Bernie Sanders initially and Donald Trump later on.

Does this prove collusion? No. It doesn't even suggest collusion. Foreign agents wouldn't need collusion--indeed, trying to reach out to any American politicians in the middle of this would probably be a really bad idea! They wanted to rile up the voters--not the politicians--and with Facebook, etc., that is easily done because Americans are in a permanently riled up state anyway.

So does this prove that the Russian interference made a difference in the 2016 election? No. To my mind, it shows the exact opposite. Americans are primed to support the candidate they like and to hate the candidate they don't like and any piece of info that confirms their initial prejudices is likely to be seized on regardless of its source. Undecided voters (the ones that actually swing the elections in America) are probably less prone to this kind of propaganda because they're likely to give it very little of their attention.

Americans tells lies about each other all day long, why would a foreigner saying it make any difference? Foreigners with access to the internet can participate in this on-line discussion just like everyone else, doesn't strike me as illegal or out of the ordinary in any way. Now identity theft and wire fraud are a different story and that's why these folks will get prosecuted (if they ever come to America). (Incidentally, identity theft, foreign or domestic, is going to be the real scourge of the digital future and something we as a society ought to be more worried about)

The thing that gets me is that it took Mueller a year to get to some rather minor identity theft and not much else. Well, this is pretty ordinary Russian spy stuff, this undoubtedly went on all through the Cold War, nothing special about this at all. But Obama suggested in a press conference before the election that there was Russian interference and there is a kinda famous (though possibly apocryphal) story that Obama pulled Putin aside at the G-20 Summit in September 2016 and told him to stop meddling in USA's elections. What info did Obama have at the time? Surely he had more than these minor incidents that it took the Mueller investigation more than a year to come up with.

I don't have a problem with the FBI investigating foreign interference in our culture (though that's basically what the NSA was invented to do, why aren't they more prominent in this?), actually I assume there is a division of the FBI that does nothing but track down foreign hackers. And it does seem like there is credible reason to specifically aim at interference in the 2016 election, that investigation should be taking place. But we needn't talk it about 24 hours a day, cranking it up to the most important story of the day is ridiculous, unrealistic, interferes with the investigation and is precisely what our enemies were trying to accomplish.

But why haven't investigators discovered anything more than this in the year and a half that we've known about it? And is this what Obama knew back in September 2016? Come on man, there must have been more indication than this back then for the Presdeint of the United States to pull the leader of another country aside to comment on.

Initially I tried to characterize this story as the confluence of two other recent stories: the FBI's inability to prevent a school shooting in Florida despite warnings of the assailant's potential for violence and a number of Russian mercenaries killed in combat with American forces in Syria (who worked for one of the companies indicted by Mueller, by the way). Something about the FBI's lack of will to detain someone simply because of nonsensical rantings on Facebook and the Russian gov't using private citizens to perform state-related functions but this is just a collection of rabbit holes I'd rather leave uninspected. Suffice to say, citizens do things their gov'ts can't stop but may manipulate to their own ends sfter the fact.

Hackers, Russian and otherwise, are at work 24 hours a day on the internet. Potentially deadly killers are out there, too, plotting the next atrocity. The FBI can investigate but can't predict their crimes or prevent them; the Putin administration can pay agents to commit acts of Russian nationalism but won't acknowledge them or protect them or give them a state funeral in the end. And all the while Ameicans will continue to look to the collective madness of Facebook for self-definition, where soundbites, snapshorts and initial impressions lead to vitriole and suspicion rather than knowledge. 

At any rate, we're no closer to impeaching Donald Trump, protecting our digital Republic, or concluding the endless swirl of propaganda this story has unleashed. We live in a stream of digital propaganda, Mueller's mission is to step in it twice.