There’s a term in the data transfer industry: Mean time to innocence, or MTTI.
MTTI is defined as the length of time needed for a networking organization to prove it is not causing performance degradation on the internet or worldwide web.
Or in the case of Putin’s alleged U.S. political hacks, the time it will take to prove Russian agencies aren’t responsible for the dirty tricks the Obama administration is blaming them for.
Every day, President-elect Trump looks more like Putin’s dupe, lickspittle, dogsbody, stooge, patsy, puppet, pussy, bitch, take your pick. At today’s Senate armed services hearings on cybersecurity, senior U.S. intelligence officials from the CIA, armed forces and the Department of Homeland Security and senators from both parties were unanimous in affirming findings by the nation’s top intel advisors that the Russkies hacked and leaked Dem emails and planted fake news to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.
The stateless freelance intel community isn’t so sure, mainly because last week’s CIA/DHS analysis was a dog’s breakfast of any crap they could come up with on short notice. Hit with the bureaucratic equivalent of the kitchen sink, non-aligned data druids had a tough time figuring out what the doc was trying to say, let alone judge it on merits.
Today’s witnesses all but admitted their initial report was over the top and promised specific proof next week. It’ll be a tough sell to the hyper-skeptical hack community, especially after today’s Senate hearings singled out Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder living in exile in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, as a liar.
Here’s the fun part. America’s top intel brass meets tomorrow (Friday) with the President-elect after meeting with Obama today. They’re already on record that the outgoing president hasn’t done enough, so what will their reaction be when Trump asks them to prove it?
Answer: it doesn’t matter. Putin is already the winner in this game of chicken. Obama expelled Russky operatives and closed two of their spy nests, so what did Putin do? Invited their opposite numbers to a Moscow New Year’s Eve bash. Muscovites kill for those invites.
The Republicans on the committee know all this, so tomorrow’s get-together isn’t about selling the President-elect on that which he chooses not to believe.
This is a Trump loyalty test: how can he disbelieve America’s spymasters without looking like he’s in Putin’s pocket?
When it comes to Putin and Mother Russia, Donald S. Trump’s MTTI is approaching infinity.
thousandlashesdotca 
I lived in the US, as a Canadian citizen landed immigrant, through most of the cold war, including the Bay of Pigs and the massive nuclear (nucular in the Bush era) build-up. It was getting boring after Vietnam would down, so I for excitement I moved to Quebec in 1976 just in time for the PQ trying to dismantle Canada.
Decades of diplomacy, statesmanship and a globalizing economy have created an illusion that we’re safer and friendlier today. But the reality is we’re one idiot button push away from triggering a chain reaction of war that will end up destroying the world. And we’ve got two leaders of the two biggest powers on earth who see little value in diplomacy or statesmanship.
As slow as the progress has been over the past 3 decades, it could well be all undone in the next four years. At the very least, these years will be a stress test for the checks and balances adopted by the founding fathers of the USA in 1776.
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