“Hack Me Baby, One More Time” – Germany keeps the American myth about “Russian hackers” alive

There was a curious sequence of events in the past few days in Germany.

On Sunday, November 27, and on the following Monday around 900,000 routers of Telekom, Germany’s largest internet provider, suddenly went offline blocking their users’ access to Internet, Internet TV and phone services.

While agitated citizens kept plugging and unplugging their routers to install necessary updates, Telekom issued a statement where it said that the outage was due to an “attack.”

The source of the attack was not named. By Monday evening the system resumed its normal work, but the concerned citizens stayed intrigued.

Next day, on Tuesday, November 29, Süddeutsche Zeitung published an interview with Bruno Kahl, the new chief of the main German intelligence service BND. Speaking to press for the first time since assuming the office five months ago, Mr. Kahl warned about the imminent danger of massive cyber-attacks coming from Russia. Kahl also blamed Russian hackers and the so called ‘fake news’, yet once again with zero evidence, for a number of things, including the outcome of the US election.

The BND chief said in that interview that the interferences in the US election provided some ‘indications’ of “certain traces” leading to Russia. “Of course, to attribute these [interferences] to a certain state player is technically difficult. But something (!) tells us that they were at least tolerated or desired on the state’s side,” Kahl was quoted by Süddeutsche Zeitung as saying.

Kahl did not stop there and extended the image of the almighty “Kremlin arm” to the upcoming German parliamentary elections due to be held in 2017. He accused the Kremlin of meddling in German “democracy”.

In the event of Merkel’s defeat, this interview would provide a convenient explanation as to why Mrs. Merkel’s popularity plummeted. Not because of the current refugee crisis, but because of Russian cyber-attacks. Kahl said explicitly referring to Russian ‘internet activities’.

“This danger will also come to the election in Germany in 2017… There are some indications that these cyber-attacks do not have any other purpose besides provoking political uncertainty”,

The irony of this innuendo by the BND chief is that it was published only a couple of days before WikiLeaks revealed on December 1 new details of how close the ties between BND and NSA really are.   The 2,420 documents published contain a wealth of embarrassing information; for example one document states that a BND employee will use software of an NSA system “for searching and analyzing data collected through mass surveillance”.

Curiously enough on the same Tuesday as the new BND chief warned about Russian cyber-attacks, Die Welt published an article titled ‘Why the Traces of Hackers So Often Lead to Moscow’.

Referring for some reason to an old 1980s James Bond movie titled Octopussy (whose plot is centred around another nuclear war provoked by a Russian general) the paper actually admits that there have been no proven traces of Germany’s troubles leading to ‘Putin’s desk’.

Struggling to provide any explanation as to why the German mainstream media, at home often referred to as Lügenpresse (lying press), nonetheless stubbornly continues to cite the mantra “Putin Did It”.

 Die Welt at the end draws a grim picture of what is still to come to the doomed people of Germany.

“Next time the electricity may break down… The message [from Russia] is the same: “There is somebody in your living room. He watches you, and he grabs you by the lapels. We in Russia do not know either, who he is. But the world may still live in peace, if you take the right decisions in a polling booth.””

And if Die Welt or the BND chief together with Süddeutsche Zeitung still cannot convince the German reader of how Russians are the source of all evil on this planet and beyond, the ruling CDU-CSU coalition published a Russia Manifesto on the same Tuesday articulating a state policy on how to handle the “Russian problem.”

In that lengthy document, the apparatchiks of the CDU-CSU coalition lash out not so much at Russia’s “annexation” of Crimea, where the majority of the population are actually Russian patriots. Their main target is Russia’s media:

“With her hybrid exertions of influence, not only does Russia try to split the western countries, to discredit the politics of the German government and especially those of Chancellor [Merkel] … [Russia also tries] to cast a shadow over close relations between European states and the US, as well as to destabilise those countries that want closer relations with the EU and NATO. For that, Moscow implements a wide variety of different instruments: secret service activities, anti-Western propaganda, disinformation through the media like RT or Sputnik News, political and financial support for right-wing parties in the EU, sabotage campaigns through cyber-attacks, as well as instrumentalisation of Russians living abroad.”

So, there you have it – the evil enemy from the same old McCarthy Playbook. And people in Russia still think Europeans are MADE to be Russophobes by the American politicians. No, the EU can easily produce its own brand of McCarthyism.