The Russians "interfered" in our elections in 2016, and have been actively interfering in elections around the world since WWII and likely before that. The form of their "election interference" was spying by hacking, spreading disinformation and socially disruptive "
Active measures" campaigns, all of which the Russians and the Soviets have been engaged in towards us for decades.
Now, even though this has been occurring non-stop for decades, and certainly occurred every day that Barack Obama was in office, starting the day after Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, the Democrats have all of the sudden decided that this is the greatest scandal in the history of our country, and is also one of the greatest scandals in the history of the world.
It is a problem that needs to be addressed and has needed to be addressed going back to at least the 1950's. So why has this not been seriously addressed before now?
If we all of the sudden want to start openly punishing this sort of spy/espionage activity by foreign actors, then we should respond in a way that will actually provide a serious disincentive to ever doing this again. Does anyone believe that a domestic (DOJ) indictment of 12 members of the Russian military will have that effect?
Think about what has just happened here. It used to be that nations mounted up armed forces under a declaration of war used violent force to impose their nation's will onto another opposing nation.
During the "Cold war," there was a good deal of violence, but most of the conflict was in the form of espionage and spying between us, the USSR, and also other countries. Sowing disinformation and undermining governments became primary tools of the "cold war" warfare.
Now, our Department of Justice has filed a series of lawsuits against Russian spies, as if spying or espionage of this sort were an international crime of sort, such as a violation of the Geneva conventions would be. We have filed a domestic lawsuit against the Russians for what is effectively spying and espionage activities.
Now what does our DOJ expect to happen next?
The Russians are expected to ignore the lawsuit, which is a demonstration of how weak this policy approach is to this sort of activity. However, what could happen is that the Russians do respond and make Mueller and the DOJ "prove it" in court, as they did during the previous set of indictments. That is not likely to end well, as even if they can "prove it" - and it is not at all clear that they can - what would the penalty be to Russia? Even if one or more of these Russian military officers were to fly over and present themselves for long prison sentences, would that cause Russia to stop doing this sort of thing?
Of course not.
Since this approach is not clearly not going to be effective, what can we do to stop or at least substantially mitigate these sorts of attacks against our country? What do you think?
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