Many of us here on Daily Kos are working and hoping for a big Democratic victory this year, the much anticipated blue wave. But bitter experience has taught us that the Republican Party will cheat in any way they think they can get away with to keep us out of the majority: gerrymandering, voter suppression, massive infusions of dark money from shadowy sources, you name it. And since 2016 the Republican Party has had a major ally in its effort to cheat the Democrats out of victory: The leadership of the Russian Federation. Can there be any doubt that the Republicans hope to benefit from Russia’s thumb on the scale AGAIN? I don’t believe McConnell, Ryan, and the other Republican leaders for a single second when they utter their pro forma condemnations of Russia’s interference. Quite the contrary:
We are still finding out the extent of Russian treachery in 2016, and there are grave warnings about 2018. A quick round-up:
The Department of Homeland Security was so alarmed by what it saw the Russians doing [in 2016], it took the unprecedented step of arranging a conference call with election officials from all 50 states. The FBI put out this flash alert. But the intelligence community wasn't prepared to publicly implicate Russia, so the call and the alert simply warned states to be on the lookout for the kind of malicious attack that had hit Illinois.
Bill Whitaker: Did information from other states start flooding in?
Anthony Ferrante [director of Cyber Incident Response for President Barack Obama's National Security Council]: I would show up to work every single day and learn of two, three, four more states that had been actively targeted by the same actors. And it was after two or three weeks of this my colleagues and I said, "We have to believe that this is a large-scale, coordinated campaign to target every single state in the union."
Anthony Ferrante reported what he was learning to Michael Daniel, President Obama's cyber czar.
Bill Whitaker: What was the reaction when you saw this in the White House?
Michael Daniel: I think that was at the point we realized that we were playing a different game, that we had thought that we were dealing with the normal sort of espionage routine that was associated with presidential elections. And we now realized that we were potentially dealing with something way more serious.
60 Minutes obtained this previously undisclosed Department of Homeland Security internal document that details the scope of the Russian cyberattack - a snapshot of what investigators were seeing on October 28th, less than two weeks before the presidential election. The document shows hackers tried to get into 20 state election systems and an election IT provider in Nebraska. Hackers successfully infiltrated Illinois, a county election database in Arizona, a Tennessee state website, and an IT vendor in Florida.
Michael Daniel: But it was always our working assumption that we did not detect all of the potential Russian activity that was going on.
Bill Whitaker: There's other stuff that they might have done that we don't know?
Michael Daniel: It's entirely possible. [My emphasis]
From the Senate Intelligence Committee, by way of Committee to Investigate Russia, right HERE:
The Intelligence Committee has been investigating Russia’s election interference campaign for well over a year now. The findings and earlier recommendations related to election security amount to its first public conclusions based on that work.
(...)
The senators found that the Russians targeted at least 18 states, and said that there is evidence that they also went after three others, scanning them for vulnerabilities. In six states, they went further, trying to gain access to voting websites, and in “a small number of states” actually breached election computer defenses.
In those instances the intruders had the ability to change registration data but appeared unable to change votes, the report stated. The senators cautioned that other Russian attacks and breaches could have gone undetected. [My emphasis.]
More from the report:
The committee concludes the Department of Homeland Security did not do enough quickly enough to warn and assist states in 2016 but has improved since then.
Although DHS provided warning to IT staff in the fall of 2016, notifications to state elections officials were delayed by nearly a year. Therefore, states understood that there was a cyber threat, but did not appreciate the scope, seriousness, or implications of the particular threat they were facing.
And the situation turned out to be even worse than the initial reports had indicated. From Vox, right HERE:
Russia’s efforts to hack the 2016 presidential election were much more widespread than originally thought. The Russian campaign hit 39 states — twice as many as originally reported — and in one case hackers tried to delete and alter voter data.
That’s the startling revelation from a Bloomberg report this morning. The extent of the cyber intrusion was so widespread that Obama administration officials used the infamous “red phone” — which is really a digital communications channel that allows the countries to send information back and forth — to show Kremlin leaders what they had discovered. It remains unclear, though, if these intrusions had any direct effect on the election’s outcome.
Still, this is another example of Russia taking advantage of the many online vulnerabilities in America’s voting network, which is comprised of software companies, online registration sites, and vital information that election officials willingly send to each other over email.
All of them play an important part in obtaining and safeguarding sensitive voter information, but it appears the Russians have figured out how to get that data.
The Trump White House, of course, has been of no help whatsoever. From The Washington Post, 17 July, NSA and Cyber Command to coordinate actions to counter Russian election interference in 2018 amid absence of White House guidance, right HERE:
The head of the nation’s largest electronic spy agency and the military’s cyberwarfare arm has directed the two organizations to coordinate actions to counter potential Russian interference in the 2018 midterm elections.
The move, announced to staff at the National Security Agency last week by NSA Director Paul Nakasone, is an attempt to maximize the efforts of the two groups and comes as President Trump in Helsinki on Monday said Russian President Vladimir Putin was “extremely strong and powerful” in denying Russian involvement in the presidential election two years ago.
It is the latest initiative by national security agencies to push back against Russian aggression in the absence of direct guidance from the White House on the issue.
“Nakasone, and the heads of the other three-letter agencies, are doing what they can in their own lanes, absent an overall approach directed by the president,” said Michael V. Hayden, who has headed the NSA and the CIA. “As good as it is, it’s not good enough. This is not a narrowly defined cyberthreat. This is one of the most significant strategic national security threats facing the United States since 9/11.” [My emphasis]
DNI Director Dan Coats stands by his earlier judgment that the Russians are targeting the 2018 election. And disturbing stories and rumors are flying around about an intelligence community that is buzzing with activity comparable to that of July and August of 2001, the weeks immediately preceding the terrible 9/11 attacks.
Something is up.
Something is happening.
Why did six Republican U.S. Senators and a Republican House member go to Russia over the July 4 holiday? To ask the Russians not to interfere?
Or to make sure they intend to interfere?
Do you have any confidence that Traitor Trump will lift a finger to stop the Russians? THIS might be an indication:
A LITTLE OVER a month ago, the White House forced out Tom Bossert, its cybersecurity czar. A week later, cybersecurity coordinator Rob Joyce said he would depart as well. And now, rather than replace either, the Trump administration will do without anyone at the helm of its cybersecurity policy. It couldn’t have picked a worse time.
The news that the newly appointed national security adviser John Bolton has decided to phase out the cybersecurity coordinator role was first reported by Politico. In place of a single point person in charge of guiding and shaping US cyber policy, the task will now fall instead to two National Security Council senior directors. The NSC did not respond to a request for comment.
Oh, and then there’s THIS:
Over the course of Monday’s controversial Helsinki summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin pushed an agenda that would ostensibly see the U.S. and Russia working side by side as allies. The two countries make stranger bedfellows than ever as just days prior, Trump’s own Department of Justice indicted 12 Russian intelligence officials for the infamous 2016 Democratic National Committee hack.
Nonetheless, the Russian president revived talks of a joint group between the U.S. and Russia dedicated to cybersecurity matters. For anyone with the security interests of the U.S. at heart, such a proposal, which Trump endorsed in a tweet one year ago, would truly be a worst-case scenario outcome of the puzzlingly cozy relationship between the two world leaders.
Bear in mind, by the way, that Russian hackers have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid. Remember that in 2016 the Russians also targeted water systems, aviation, manufacturing, and business enterprises of all kinds. These are probing attacks, and experts explain that the Russians cannot crash the U.S. energy grid. But there is much they can do—and, I believe, intend to.
And this is SO reassuring:
The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them.
In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.
Oh, and in case we forget another Republican weapon:
Last week, the first election in 50 years without the full protection of the federal Voting Rights Act propelled Donald Trump to the White House.
Trump will assume the presidency because of the Electoral College’s influence — though nearly three million more people cast ballots for Hillary Clinton. The election was also marked by low turnout, with tens of millions of eligible voters choosing not to participate at all. Yet there has been relatively little discussion about the millions of people who were eligible to vote but could not do so because they faced an array of newly-enacted barriers to the ballot box.
Their systematic disenfranchisement was intentional and politically motivated. In the years leading up to 2016, Republican governors and state legislatures implemented new laws restricting when, where, and how people could vote — laws that disproportionately harmed students, the poor, and people of color. In several instances, lawmakers pushing such policies said explicitly that their goal was suppression of voters who favor the Democratic Party.
Three such states serve as case studies for the effectiveness of these voting restrictions: Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Florida.
All three elected staunchly conservative governors during President Obama’s terms. All three implemented voting restrictions that affect millions of people. President Obama won all three states in 2008, and won all but North Carolina in 2012, while Hillary Clinton lost all three of those states this year.