Hacker News

Trump campaign hacked, possibly by Iranian operatives: News broke this weekend that internal communications within former President Donald Trump’s campaign had been compromised by hackers.

Politico, and possibly other news outlets, received authentic internal campaign documents from a source who called himself “Robert.” Journalists were able to verify the legitimacy of these documents, which include a dossier from February assessing J.D. Vance as a potential running mate—a sort of precursor to his vetting file.

The Trump campaign declared that “foreign sources hostile to the United States” had accessed some private communications and documents. Microsoft has reported that Iranian hackers “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign.” The phishing campaign involved sending an “email [which] contained a link that would direct traffic through a domain controlled by the group before routing to the website of the provided link,” noted Microsoft. “Within days of this activity, the same group unsuccessfully attempted to log into an account belonging to a former presidential candidate.”

“In recent weeks, groups connected with the Iranian government have upped two kinds of activity,” reported Microsoft. “First, they’ve laid the groundwork for influence campaigns on trending election-related topics and begun to activate these campaigns in an apparent effort to stir up controversy or sway voters—especially in swing states. Second, they’ve launched operations that Microsoft assesses are designed to gain intelligence on political campaigns and help enable them to influence the elections in the future.”

In a longer report, Microsoft added that an Iranian group

has been launching covert news sites targeting US voter groups on opposing ends of the political spectrum. One of the sites, called Nio Thinker, caters to left-leaning audiences and insults former president Donald Trump, calling him an “opioid-pilled elephant in the MAGA china shop” and a “raving mad litigiosaur.” Another, called Savannah Time, claims to be a “trusted source for conservative news in the vibrant city of Savannah” and focuses on topics including LGBTQ+ issues and gender reassignment. The evidence we found suggests the sites are using AI-enabled services to plagiarize at least some of their content from US publications.

At the same time, U.S. intelligence organizations have received reports of Iranian plots to kill Trump as retribution for him ordering the assassination, in 2020, of military officer Qassem Soleimani. There’s no indication that last month’s attempt on Trump’s life, at a rally in Pennsylvania, was connected with Iran.

Scenes from New York: Since 1996, significant swaths of the eastern oceanfront section of the Rockaway Peninsula have been closed to the public, reserved for piping plovers (an endangered species) to nest. This is along the neighborhood Edgemere, which is mostly black, and whose residents have begun to raise the question: Why are nesting birds valued more highly than the economic revitalization that our neighborhood could enjoy if our beach access were returned to us?

New York City authorities are at least partly bound by federal guidelines, which call for the protection of endangered shorebirds, but they do not codify how exactly that protection ought to be done or specify that entire beaches must be closed.

• Watch my show, Just Asking Questions, cohosted by Zach Weissmueller. This one, featuring esteemed guest Nate Silver, is extra good:

• “U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered a guided missile submarine to the Middle East and is telling the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group to sail more quickly to the area, the Defense Department said Sunday,” per the Associated Press.
• Ben Dreyfuss, American patriot, writes on why Europe sucks, including such great lines as “People in Europe love boiling foods, which is basically the worst way to prepare them. They love boiling foods because of tradition and poverty but also because much of Europe gets scared around spices.” But more importantly, he makes the case against clicking on self-flagellating headlines about how tourists are ruining Europe and tells Americans to feel a sense of pride in our own culture.
• Fighting continues inside Russia, where Ukrainian forces have managed to stay for several days.
• “What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos?” writes conservative pundit David French in a New York Times column on why he’s voting for Kamala Harris.
• A new Statecraft interview with Russ Vought, who worked as the director of Donald Trump’s Office of Management and the Budget.

• Wow:

Amazing stat here: “Fully 60 per cent of those surveyed said [Harris] should either break completely from the president’s economic policies or ‘make major changes’ to his platform.” https://t.co/ewusNbFnwc #Bidenomics pic.twitter.com/MLDJ5e0EaJ

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) August 11, 2024

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