The Russian hacking mess: The long—and short—view
Last Friday, before departing for his Christmas vacation in Hawaii, President Barack Obama firmly promised (once again) that the United States would take action against Russian hacking and, possibly, against Vladimir Putin himself. As earlier blogs here strongly argued, if Obama is really serious this time, he should follow through with decisive action to demonstrate that the US will not tolerate cyberattacks that strike at the foundations of our democratic elections process. But in this blog posting and a follow on later, I want to review the events and policy judgments that brought us to this point in the Russian hacking mess.
Behind all of the indecision and dithering lies a simple fact: despite numerous incidents over the past decade and much public handwringing, the Obama administration still has not advanced even a tentative hierarchy of responses to state-based cyberattacks on US private organizations, critical infrastructure, or public bodies — and now on the US elections process. This has resulted in ad hoc actions that leave both the American public and potential adversaries in the dark about just what actions will trigger which level of kinetic or cyber response. Given the policy and political chaos in the wake of the most recent Russian hacking related to the US election, the old “we want to keep them guessing” argument has clearly outlived its usefulness. The Russians brushed past “guessing”–they just acted.
Turning to the Russian hacking incidents, the most accurate broader judgment comes from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who when asked to characterize the response of the Obama administration, the politicians, and the intelligence agencies, responded, “Given the unprecedented nature of it and the magnitude of the [Russian] effort…people seem to have been somewhat laid back about it.” The phrase “somewhat laid-back” itself understates the surprising laxness in the US government’s early response after it first learned of the Russian incursion. An exhaustive New York Times report concludes bluntly that what occurred was a “series of missed signals, slow responses, and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack.”
It turns out that the FBI first notified the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that it had been hacked in September 2015 — over a year before the Obama administration first publicly identified the Russians as the culprits. Astonishingly, the FBI failed to follow up with the DNC so that as the NYT notes, the Russians were allowed to “to roam through the committee’s networks for nearly seven months before DNC officials were alerted to the attack.”
Some time later, a separate group of Russian hackers also began to break into Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee files, and those of major political figures, including John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.
Of interest here is not only failures of the FBI but also the breakdown of intelligence agency coordination. As a number of analysts have pointed out, the US government has known about and tracked numerous Russian cyber incursions since the late 1990s. These included hacking and exfiltration of defense information from the US Air Force and Navy, and systematic targeting of the US State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet in this DNC, long-developing instance, there seems to have been no in-depth coordination among the chief intelligence agencies — the FBI, the CIA and the NSA. This dissonance became strikingly clear later when the FBI and CIA initially leaked competing theories as to Russia’s intent to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Admittedly, the agencies have separate and congressionally-defined missions, but any hint of Russian activity — a major potential US adversary — should have triggered instant responses and not a laggard, fitful effort.
In the end, much of the problem seems to lie with the White House and President Obama himself. In the months following the discovery of extensive Russian cyberattacks, the president, though briefed thoroughly, hesitated to call Russia out and bowed to arguments that the US needed Putin’s cooperation on a number of fronts, as well as the always paralyzing fear of tit-for-tat cyberwarfare escalation. As one State Department official described it, “We’d have these circular meetings, in which everyone agreed we had to push back at the Russians, and push back hard. But it didn’t happen.”
Further, at that point (in the early summer), the Russian were yet to reveal their ultimate weapon — arranging for the secret, embarrassing information that they had acquired to be published in a successful effort to wreak havoc on the US presidential election (This is called “doxing” in the cyberworld).
In June, fully nine months after the first indication of Russian hacking activity, DNC officials had their first formal meeting with the FBI. At that meeting, DNC officials pleaded — to no avail with the government officials to move quickly to make an attribution to groups with ties to the Russian government. This was probably the last chance (and even this might have been too late) for the White House to make a public Russian attribution before the damning details of intra-Democratic party machinations became public. After that crucial turn of events, the all-encompassing swirls of the presidential political campaign would swamp attempts for rational discourse on Russia’s daring cyber strike against US democratic institutions.
Πηγή: TechPolicyDaily.com
