Pavlov would be content with the omnipresent and pathological fascination of his nation of origin in newsrooms across North American and Europe, and the subsequent Himalayan Mountain range magnitude of scientific evidence supporting his behavioral research on canines, as the mention of “Trump” and “Russia”, sends the majority of the journalistic community into a paroxysmic blathering state marked by heavy slobbering and unsavory pontification.
Two decades from now, the mere mention of the 2016 election will most likely elicit a visceral and hormonal response briefly disrupting the nightmarish traffic patterns of self-driving vehicles, with the stain of Russian collusion forever burned into the subconscious. It’s bad enough when the same flawed talking points are incessantly hammered into the minds of vast audiences, but it gets much worse when and ideology hampers the ability to think outside of the box in causing a vapid stagnation of innovation.
Apparently, NBC News is daring to invest a brain cell or two in entertaining the revolutionary idea that the Russians may not be the only international cyber syndicate capable of unleashing online chaos in reporting that the Iranians are primed to wreck havoc on the vulnerabilities of the global servers. In a fine example highlighting strategic revisionism, the network is willing to take advantage of the light speed news cycle and the extreme short term memory problem of the audience in recycling content and ideas from fifteen years ago. Preying on the unwillingness of the average person to conduct basic research through a search engine quarry, the “Oh yeah, I forgot about that,” phenomenon is alive and well and provides the media the perfect opportunity for indoctrination.
In reality, the evil side of the global hacking community is represented in an Olympic Games diversity of nations with ethics paralleling the corruption of the International Olympic Committee. With the Russian cyber terror teams as the convenient scapegoat for the mainstream press in attempting to quantify Trump’s victory, recent online attacks executed by the North Koreans and the Chinese are promptly swept under the rug and the fact that multiple deliberate breaches of security on US firms which take place on a daily basis is simply ignored. On an international front, since the inception of the internet, nations have been sparring back and forth in trading viruses and spyware on government networks, as the idea of “online security” continually proves to exist as an oxymoron. However, Uzbekistan and Sri Lanka engaged in a back alley cyber brawl is far from newsworthy, and serves no purpose in forwarding a liberal agenda.
The most horrific and disturbing consequence of the media’s obsession with the term “Russian hackers”, is the unscientific assumption that legions of bots were unleashed through the social networks, along with felonious content and advertising purchases, in the shadows of the Kremlin. However, with the ability of low level cyber criminals to utilize cloaking software in disguising a specific location through floating IP addresses, and the existence of untraceable cryptocurrencies in funding ominous PR campaigns, it really comes down to the best guess when processing the available data in attempting to approximate a map revealing a series of user activities.
Russia is interchangeable with China, or Iran, or North Korea, or whatever international hacking consortium entity fits the proper narrative serving the powerful hierarchy of the media. With the constant bombardment of content which insinuates a Putin led involvement in the most recent Presidential elections, “Russian hackers” has become as synonymous in representing the entire scope of cyber crime, as the idea of “professional baseball” being substituted by the simple mention of the “New York Yankees”. What is the first thought that enters one’s mind after hearing or reading the term “hackers”? While the team from the Bronx has claimed 23% of World Series titles, the math supports the notion of long-term sustained success, rather than the myth of utter dominance fueled by the presence of an ingrained and historic reputation. The same logic can be applied in the reckless level of unjustified credit attributed by society to the Russian cyber crooks facilitating ceaseless online attacks, and the false premise of legendary cyrillic lines of code solely responsible for devastating US firewalls, only enhanced by the vivid recollections of the Cold War.
While the ongoing contemporary and future battles continue to be fought online between nations, businesses, news entities and audiences, and individuals, the narrow-minded and toxic concept of propaganda is ominously present within the confines of universally accepted and popular content. A reality that is where truth is superseded by consensus.
Read the NBC News story here.