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.

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 happy to run them with the current level of (in)security.

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:

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.

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.

No this isn’t about hacking voting machines, it’s about controversial defense work to stop outside foreign influence on social media.

Two scenarios:

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.

One year ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooXAyprJohY

It's good that we now have a recorded timeline for history...

This is so lacking in specifics. How exactly is the military "targeting" Americans? The article provides no examples

Coming from the same people that pushed the Russia-collusion hoax?

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.

Cool, this isn't concerning..

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.

   ...  that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic...

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.

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).

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

So? Cambridge analytica did the same. Nobody seemed to care much in the US

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?

Why title and comments under article act as if that was bad?

I think the biggest fear amongst critics is that the election will be fair and honest.

When Biden was elected, actual laws were suspended, like ballot harvesting and signature verification, by judges in multiple states. Mail-in voting combined with these two things allowed what was essentially legalized cheating in the election.

There was much more than this as well and it was well documented in a Rolling Stone article after the election.

Now that someone you don't like might use these same tactics, you want to stop the 'cheating'.

Get in line with the Republicans and others that lost their jobs and livelihood over having this opinion.

I will echo the statement of the security community during that time that our elections are the most safe and secure in the history of the United States.

Want evidence? ................... (this is what we got after Biden won, along with massive bannings and shutdown of online speech). I stopped taking many in the security community seriously after this when they can be swayed so easily by public opinion.

They are nothing more than political hacks with no integrity.