The US, Russia, China, and other countries have been hacking into each other for decades. I find it amusing that the losers are using this as a poor excuse for an election they thought was in the bag.
That is very true but lets focus a few minutes on the USA specifically since at the moment, our so-called "intelligence" services are the ones crying foul against the Russians. Now being echoed by certain vested political interests who are turning it into a whole cloth narrative and ignoring the history of its rags.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden among his many revelations also revealed that so-called intelligence spying was as much about
industrial espionage as it was about some form of defense intelligence. But then protecting certain privileged economic interests whose value to the existing State power might be seen as defense but this opens a door into what the real purpose of military defense and intelligence gathering is really all about thus the Marine General Smedley Butler's statement "
War is a Racket!"
Program Echelon was code name for a signals intelligence op begun in the 1960's but has continued into such contemporary programs as
Mystic and
Prism. But in the 1990's under the Clinton Presidency, charges began to surface that Echelon was being used by the US for the purpose of industrial espionage. Under the heading
"Concerns" at the Wikipedia article on Echelon, some of those charges are discussed.
The fact that our so-called intelligence structure is heavily focused on economics should come as no surprise as British Intelligence on which for example our CIA via OSS was modeled was admittedly modeled after British Intelligence. In fact, from the CIA's own
website, they admit as much with the following statement:
"When the OSS was created in 1942, its leader Gen. William J. Donovan had not intended for it to be an organization of spies. Donovan originally wanted OSS to support military operations in the field. However, he soon realized the value of clandestine human reporting.
The OSS was modeled after British intelligence organizations and consisted of three branches....."
As you (Scratch) correctly stated, all nationstates in some form spy for and even on one another and this includes on the political order of any given country. Knowledge is power and having such knowledge especially to understand outcomes, especially domestic outcomes aids the spying country in its own self interests.
Hillary is a cold war hawk just a Graham and McCain are. Fact is they all share a certain common thread in neo-conservative approaches that want to maintain what is called The New Great Game. One doesn't have to like or dislike Russia to understand why Russia might favor a Trump Presidency over Clinton just on that point alone. But also understanding the hostility of the west against Russia and to varying degrees Russia's hostility back to the west, one needs to understand the 19th century drama known as
"The Great Game" and what some call the 20th century version,
"The New Great Game." It's all about empire and how to position one's self to maintain a desired advantage, especially economically. Clinton comes from this narrative while Trump does not. But also spying on the election also gives Russia an advantage in that if they discovered political conspiracy and intrigue for example in the Clinton camp which everyone expected to win, they could use this information as leverage, even blackmail to benefit their own ends and hold a Clinton administration hostage with threat of going public to expose to the American public. From that POV I can see why the Russians would be far more interested in spying on Clinton and the democrats as opposed to Trump and the GOP. That likely has changed now as Trump is elected and maybe Graham and McCain's siding with the "Russians are spying" crowd might be more about protecting their own dirty laundry from the light of day than about some false notion of fair play!
From the CIA website once again,
here is just one example of the games being played and the factors behind it but more important this example cut teeth that still negatively effect us today. Even the Wahhabism of today and its implications of strife are as much
a product of both British and American machinations as it is anything else.
It should also be noted that Ian Fleming who authored the James Bonds figure and who himself served in intelligence work fashioned an MI6 agent in James Bond whose nememis were often not state type enemies but rather business interests or business individuals that opposed or threatened the British economic order. Fleming was telling us something about what the nature of intelligence gathering was really all about but we are more easily captured by the hot women, fast cars and things that go boom. Which leads to why we are easily taken in by political narratives and never questioning the deeper vested interests at play when you drill down that rabbit hole.
