If you know anything at all about Cyber Warfare which has been ongoing since before the Internet existed both governmental and private hackers are making life in places like Russia and China hell already because of those attacks on our election system. It will not show up in the news because of Russia and China saving face but it is happening and will get worse and worse in both directions. There is a cyber shit storm all over the world right now of attacks and counter attacks. But don't expect to hear about it in the news.
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ASPEN, Colo. — It has been an open secret throughout the Obama presidency that …
If Russia Did Hack, How Should Obama Retaliate?
ASPEN,
Colo. — It has been an open secret throughout the Obama presidency that
world powers have escalated their use of cyberpower. But the recent
revelations of hacking into Democratic campaign computer systems in an
apparent attempt to manipulate the 2016 election is forcing the White
House to confront a new question: whether, and if so how, to retaliate.
So far, the administration has stopped short of publicly accusing the Russian government of President Vladimir V. Putin of engineering the theft of research and emails
from the Democratic National Committee and hacking into other campaign
computer systems. However, private investigators have identified the
suspects, and American intelligence agencies have told the White House
that they have “high confidence” that the Russian government was responsible.
But
suspecting such meddling is different from proving it with a certainty
sufficient for any American president to order a response.
Even
if officials gather the proof, they may not be able to make their
evidence public without tipping off Russia, or its proxies in
cyberspace, about how deeply the National Security Agency has penetrated
that country’s networks. And designing a response that will send a
clear message, without prompting escalation
or undermining efforts to work with Russia in places like Syria, where
Russia is simultaneously an adversary and a partner, is even harder.
The
Russians tried to make it tougher still on Saturday when they declared
that they had found evidence of American activity in their government
systems.
It
was hardly a shocking revelation; anyone who leafed through Edward J.
Snowden’s revelations saw evidence of daily efforts to break into
Russian spy agencies, nuclear installations and leadership compounds.
But
in a talk on Friday evening at the Aspen Security Forum, an annual
gathering that draws many of the nation’s top intelligence and military
officials, John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, made clear that while spying on each other’s political
institutions is fair game, making data public — in true or altered form —
to influence an election is a new level of malicious activity, far
different from ordinary spy vs. spy maneuvers.
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“When
it is determined who is responsible for this,” Mr. Brennan said,
choosing his words carefully to avoid any direct implication of Russia,
there “will be discussions at the highest levels of government about
what the right course of action will be. Obviously interference in the
U.S. election process is a very, very serious matter.”
The Russia problem is thorny, and persistent. Just four months into his presidency in 2009, President Obama
and his top national security advisers received a warning from American
intelligence agencies: Of all the nations targeting America’s computer
networks, Russia had the most “robust, longstanding program that
combines a patient, multidisciplinary approach to computer network
operations with proven access and tradecraft.”
Mr.
Obama might have been a bit distracted at the time. While setting up
his new administration, he was also learning the dark arts of cyberwar,
descending into the Situation Room to oversee a complex
American-Israeli offensive operation to disable Iran’s nuclear
centrifuges. He expressed concern to his aides that the operation would
help fuel the escalation of cyberattacks and counterattacks.
The
concern was justified. Since then, Iran has attacked Saudi Arabia,
Russia has brought down a power grid in Ukraine, the North Koreans have
attacked the South. The list gets longer every month.
But
deterrence has been spotty. In the D.N.C. case, two senior
administration officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss
the options being considered by midlevel officials, ranging from counter
cyberattacks on the F.S.B. and the G.R.U., two competing Russian spy
agencies at the center of the current hacking, to economic, travel and
other sanctions aimed at suspected perpetrators.
But
each approach has downsides: A counterattack, for example, one senior
official said, “brings us to their level, and their moral code.”
At
the same time, the cost of doing nothing could be high. As the United
States and other nations move to more electronic voting systems, the
opportunities for mischief rise exponentially. Imagine, for example, a
vote as close as the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush
and Al Gore, but with accusations about impossible-to-trace foreign
manipulation of the ballots or the vote count, leaving Americans
wondering about the validity of the outcome.
For
Mr. Obama, the president who has done the most to raise alarms about
the risks of cyberattacks and the most to build up the United States
Cyber Command, this territory is fraught with politics, intelligence
trade-offs and questions of American values.
“I
think that the administration needs to be ironclad on the evidence here
to convince the American people that this is about policy, not
politics,” said Jason Healey, a scholar at Columbia University who
specializes in cyberconflict between nations. “This has got to be about
defending a constitutional process, not a party.”
Mr.
Obama often says the world of cyberconflict is still “the Wild West.”
There are no treaties, no international laws, just a patchwork set of
emerging “norms” of what constitutes acceptable behavior.
For
example, Mr. Obama has pressed President Xi Jinping of China to work
with the United States and other nations to develop rules about the
theft of intellectual property, and about not interfering with a
nation’s efforts to bring attacked systems back online. Attacking
another nation’s power grid in peacetime is considered out of bounds.
But every new case brings a new and imaginative way to weaponize cyberpower. Until November 2014, when North Korea hacked into the computers at Sony Pictures Entertainment
in retaliation for a comedy that portrayed a C.I.A. plot to assassinate
Kim Jong-un, the country’s leader, no one seriously considered a movie
studio to be “critical infrastructure.”
Yet
the attack on Sony — which melted down 70 percent of its computing
power — was the only case that brought the president to the White House
press room to accuse another nation of launching a deliberate
cyberattack, and to promise retaliation. Mr. Obama said he was driven to
go public by the fact that North Korea was trying to suppress free
speech and intimidate Americans with threats if they went to the
theater.
It
is unclear how the United States may have retaliated against the North
in secret, if it even did so. But the public punishment, the
announcement of some mild economic sanctions, seemed highly ineffective.
They were lost in the sea of other sanctions imposed on the North since
the signing of the armistice that halted, but did not end, the Korean
War 63 years ago.
Yet the decision to name North Korea — a country with which the United States does no other real business — was an outlier.
China
was never formally named in the theft of the security clearance files
on more than 21 million Americans, revealing fingerprints, personal
financial details and the personal data about family, friends and former
lovers. To James R. Clapper Jr.,
the director of national intelligence, that wasn’t an “attack,” it was
just very good espionage. Given the chance, he said last year, “we would
have done the same thing.”
Similarly,
the administration decided not to call out Russia when the same
intelligence agencies implicated in the D.N.C. attack were believed to
be behind the siphoning of tens of thousands of unclassified emails from
the systems of the State Department and the White House. There was also
a more targeted cyberespionage operation, which investigators
attributed to the same actors, aimed at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But
again, it was considered within the bounds of spy vs. spy.
Speaking
at the Aspen forum on Thursday, Mr. Clapper, while stepping around who
had conducted the hack, said that in Mr. Putin’s mind, the United States
had meddled in Russian politics, in Ukraine and Georgia — all part of
former Soviet territory. (Mr. Putin complained that Hillary Clinton, in
2011, helped spark protests over a Russian parliamentary election that
the United States considered riddled with voter fraud.)
“Of
course they see a U.S. conspiracy behind every bush and ascribe far
more impact than we’re actually guilty of, but that’s their mind-set,”
Mr. Clapper said. “And so I think their approach is they believe we are
trying to influence political developments in Russia, trying to effect
change, and so their natural response is to retaliate and do unto us as
they think we’ve done unto them.”
He
later described Mr. Putin as “paranoid” and said “he is less of a
throwback to the Communist era, than to the czars.” He added later: “He
wants to be seen as the leader of a great power, coequal with the United
States.”
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