<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 10:30 PM, Ron Garret <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ron@flownet.com" target="_blank">ron@flownet.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
On Jul 9, 2017, at 6:27 PM, erik <<a href="mailto:erik@erikgranger.name">erik@erikgranger.name</a>> wrote:<br>
<br>
> Call me crazy, but I think that it is of utmost importance that the<br>
> president of the US, whomever that may be, and the leader of Russia,<br>
> whomever that may be, should be best friends.<br>
><br>
> I think this neo-mcarthyism is a bit dangerous, as people seem to forget<br>
> that both the United States and Russia have H-bombs. Any petty stuff<br>
> about elections is kinda not as important as making sure that, no matter<br>
> what, no escelations exist between the United States and Russia.<br>
><br>
> If a country has H-bombs, diplomacy is of utmost importance. This<br>
> saber-rattling that I'm seeing over the elections is rather concerning,<br>
> considering that nothing less than the future of the human race is at<br>
> stake. Compared to a nuclear winter, rigging elections seem tame.<br>
><br>
> Not that I'm in favor of rigging elections, whether it is Russia doing<br>
> it or the largest election-rigger in modern times, the United States,<br>
> but once you have stakes that reach a certain level, one should be more<br>
> cautious than Americans seem to be.<br>
<br>
</div></div>It would be terrific we could all Just Get Along as Rodney King once put it. And the U.S. is certainly not without sin. But the sad fact of the matter is that at present the U.S. and Russia are still adversaries, and have been for over 70 years. That kind of legacy is not so easily overcome. And you certainly don’t transform a long-standing adversary into an ally simply by treating them as a trusted party in the design of your defenses.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">There is actually a lot of interest in establishing norms for government interventions in cyberspace. But this one crosses a whole series of what were red lines in prior discussions.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">Russia and China have consistently demanded that the US take action to prevent the use of the Internet for 'terrorism'. By which they mean any and all speech critical of Putin or the Chinese communist party from any quarter. Russia and China already police their own citizens to suppress any speech critical of the other. </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">The suggestion is disingenuous on many levels, not least the fact that actual vote tampering is one of the few things that Russia has not been accused of. There is evidence of a Russian intrusion into some computers that had a certain connection to the ballot. But that came very late in the game and might well have been planted with the intention of creating a false lead. </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">When the UK peer Lord McAlpine faced very well documented accusations of funding the libel cases of over 30 pedophiles senior in the Conservative party and thus the implication that he was likely one himself, McAlpine was conveniently accused of being a pedophile by a former victim who retracted the claim almost immediately. McAlpine had previously written a book advising readers to use just such a strategy.</div><br></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">So I really don't see that there is any good faith intention to make elections more secure. Rather it is the intention to disrupt the narrative of the now well established evidence of FSB/GRU hacking of political parties and operatives and spur allegations of Russian tampering with actual votes.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">As for the proposal, it is stupid. Neither the US nor the Russian government has any special expertise in the field of election technology that could be shared with any other party that is not already being shared. There is some relevant expertise (e.g. NIST etc) but those teams are much smaller than those working in industry. The large teams that really do have the expertise needed are at NSA and in the very deepest parts thereof. And while they can pass messages to the outside world, on occasion, my past experience of such is that they are not very useful.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">Now is not the time for any cyber security treaties. The first step in forming a treaty is to establish a common understanding of terms and the range of problems. From there you can go on to establish norms which may be new norms or new applications of old ones. </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">Most treaties are actually codification of what is already considered to be a norm. The Geneva conventions did not introduce novel ideas, they just eliminated the possibility of exceptions. </div><br></div></div></div></div>