Were RT And Drudge Taken Down So the Government Could Control the Anti-Russia Narrative?

Daisy Luther

Just hours after announcing the government intended to punish Russia for “interfering in the presidential election,” Drudge Report, a massive news aggregator with over 3 million page views per day, was hit by a massive DDoS attack. The attack occurred just minutes after people started reporting that the Russian state-run news network RT was “unavailable” in parts of the United States.  

It doesn’t stretch the imagination too considerably to believe that both RT and Drudge being simultaneously taken down was linked to Obama’s announcement just hours earlier. The US government has been trying in vain to regain control of the official narrative, but citizen journalists, independent media, and sources from outside the country have been strong influences ever since the MSM was completely discredited as a mouthpiece during the election.

https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/814644696656080896

A report in IBTimes stated:

A large-scale distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, can cause major Internet disruptions. In the past, such attacks have shut down major websites such as Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Tumblr, and Reddit. The attack sends a server many illegitimate requests to make it hard for real requests to get through, effectively shutting down the site.

Drudge Report was down briefly around 7 p.m. EST, but working hours later. The top headline read: “MOSCOW MOCKS OBAMA ‘LAME DUCK’” Meanwhile, the conservative Washington Times wrote: “Matt Drudge suggests U.S. government cyberattack on Drudge Report website. DDoS attack comes same day Obama announced countermeasures against Russia for hacking of Democrats.”

Conservatives on Twitter also accused the government of shutting down the Russian news website, RT. “Numerous reports of Russian state-run Network RT being unavailable. Drudge Report also under ‘Biggest DDoS attack since site’s inception,’” wrote one user.

No one has claimed responsibility for the takedown of the two sites.

This is an attack on non-state journalism.

If a site as huge as Drudge Report can be taken down on a whim, this doesn’t bode well for the little guys in independent media. It’s outrageously expensive to defend a website against attacks like this. The monthly server costs alone for a well-protected setup could be in the tens of thousands, an amount that few of us have in the budget.

After the ridiculous accusations of fake news and Russian propaganda, one has to wonder if website attacks will be the next effort to drive independent media out of business.

Russia is ticked off.

Russia is getting fed up. Today, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov requested that President Vladimir Putin gives permission for 35 US diplomats to be expelled from Russian soil.

It seems that Obama, in the final days of his administration, is hellbent on causing as much international bad feeling and disruption as possible.

• Obama and his cronies are mad that Putin and Trump will most likely get along better than he ever did with the Russian
• They are upset that the Turkey-Russia ceasefire in Syria – brokered and implemented without a huge amount of fanfare a la John Kerry, was arranged with no US involvement whatsoever.
• They still can’t get over the fact that Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election.
• And finally, they are angry that the Electoral College didn’t play ball and make waves in their allocation of votes.

The BBC World Service has reported that the Russians expelled from the United States are struggling to get flights during the holiday period. Making these individuals persona non grata means they have to leave US soil within 72 hours of the order.

Russian media say the Russians facing expulsion from the embassy in Washington are struggling to buy plane tickets because flights are full ahead of the New Year holiday.

They will be forced to travel to New York, where their chances of finding plane seats are better, an “informed source” told Interfax news agency.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has denied a report by CNN that Moscow is shutting down a school attended by diplomats’ children.

She said it was a “lie” that the Anglo-American School faced closure as retaliation.

Meanwhile, the Russian embassy to the UK tweeted a visual gag calling the Obama presidency a lame duck.

https://twitter.com/RussianEmbassy/status/814564127230271489

MFA: American people humiliated by its own President pic.twitter.com/Ka9ThFSlkp

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) December 30, 2016

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zhakarova took off the gloves with several statements, telling us how Russia really feels about Obama.

First, on Facebook (translation from The Observer):

“We have been saying this all along, people [who] inhabited the White House for 8 years are not Administration but a bunch of foreign policy losers, angry and primitive. Today, Obama admitted this officially. The most amazing thing is that, having not been able to write down into the history of the Presidency any achievements on international arena, the Nobel Prize Laureate managed to put a fat blob instead of elegant dot…Today, America, American people were humiliated by their own President. Not by international terrorists or foreign enemy’s troops. It’s a curtain time. [The] ugly show is over. The whole world, from stalls to the gallery, had been watching the crashing blow to the prestige of America and to its leadership, caused by Barak Obama and his illiterate foreign policy team that opened to the world her biggest secret—exclusiveness was a mask for helplessness. And no enemy of the United States could have done worse damage.”

Sadly, Russia may be right. The world has watched aghast at the antics of  Clinton supporters and at the last ditch attempts of President Obama to leave the worst legacy possible for his replacement.

What a sad state of affairs.

Daisy Luther