Russian Roulette Intrigue

I sometimes wonder how I could ever go on a dating site. I wouldn’t know where to begin with my profile. I don’t know how other profiles read, but I feel like mine might be a tad off putting, or at least confusing:

Mother of two, loves yard work, walking, mostly in love with my long haired miniature dachshund, very in love with Jesus, cooking, eating, movies, reading, writing, ministry, sunbathing, and the Russian invasion or any invasion, of our cyber intelligence.

As I write this, I cannot ignore the irony of it. My ex-husband’s job had largely been in the Internet security business. When we were married, I understood absolute nothing of his work. But my curiosity was peaked when Hillary Clinton’s emails were attacked and we would hear occasional accusations of the Russians interfering with our databases, yet there was really no maddening alarm. Up until then I think I felt relatively safe providing my information on line. But when an entity like the Democratic National Committee or Hillary Clinton’s emails are compromised, who is safe?

I remember thinking, why is this not a really big deal? Why isn’t there an alert to all of us: “Americans, we are at war!” It was about that time that whenever I was prompted to save my password on a site, the voice inside my head answered, NO! I no longer believed any of our information is safe, with anyone, not even Facebook.

During the election and then when Trump was elected, I became more intrigued. We’d hear teasers in the media or on Twitter about Trump’s association with Russia, the DNC emails being hacked and then WikiLeaks. My ears perked up when he praised Putin and it caused me to pay better attention. Even though it was so very vague to me, I felt a simmering anger and vast confusion that we weren’t all taking this more seriously. I wondered what I was missing. What was WikiLeaks and what on earth is an oligarch?

So, I’ve become a little obsessed with the topics of Donald Trump and Russia which has totally fulfilled my newish hobby of listening to podcasts and digital books, all while feeding my other hobbies of yard work and cooking, and the have tos in life like laundry and cleaning. I’ve listened to “The Making of Donald Trump,” podcast: Slow Burn (about Watergate), the new book, “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump,” and I listened to the New Yorker’s story, “Christopher Steele, The Man Behind the Trump Dossier.” Tonight I watched the 60 Minutes piece on the cyber invasion of the election headquarters in Illinois. That piece barely touched on the extent of the subject. If you can imagine, the Russian Roulette book is about 300 pages long; there’s much more to the story. I also got some of Face the Nation this morning (I really like Margaret Brennan). A guy named Thompson feels that the Cambridge Analytica piece of the Facebook data breaches is overblown. How can stealing anything from anyone be overblown??? And by the way, I did make it to church and to Thrive this morning, but Sunday morning shows do slow me down.

This week Mark Zuckerberg will testify on Capitol Hill (I’m not going to pretend I know everything; I know he’s testifying to someone in DC!) about Facebook and how its users’ data was and is compromised. Facebook annoys me. I tried to cancel my account but it was too difficult. How is that possible that we have to practically perform surgery to delete our own information? That seems so wrong. As annoying as that is, I have some sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg.

While Russia was hacking multiple states’ emails, including that of Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign manager, John Podesta, our government hemmed and hawed for months on the action it should take. There were differences of opinion from both republicans and democrats as well as within their own party. Many politicians, even at the highest level, didn’t believe the security breaches were as extensive as they were, in spite of being advised and warned of the grave concerns. It’s no wonder someone like Mark Zuckerberg didn’t take cyber security more seriously. Not to excuse him, but even those in our government looked the other way, missing opportunities to advise, warn, and ultimately avoid catastrophic consequences.

It seems like the media might beginning to catch up with the significance of Russia’s role in our election and the threat of security within our cyber intelligence (thank you, authors David Isikoff and David Corn). Our politicians might be picking up speed, too. I hope they catch up though, because if they don’t take it seriously, no one else is going to.

Well, I got that off my chest. I knew there was a reason I included a Current Affairs tab on my blog site!

Next up? How to make the perfect Russian tea cake.