According to Vox, and the cybersecurity expert they interivewed, while China and North Korea have the cyber-capacity to hack our elections in various ways to influence the elections in 2018 and beyond Russia and Iran are the real threats.
It’s not just Russia. China, North Korea, and Iran could interfere in 2018 elections, too.
UPDATE to clarify it wasn’: t Bolton who made these comments:
But why would China, North Korea, and Iran want to interfere? James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, told me that “the others might be inspired by 2016,” but that they likely won’t interfere to the extent Russia will.
Russia’s intention is certainly clear: to undermine the American voter’s confidence in the elections and to sow discord among the public. Its success doing just that in 2016 surely gave Moscow the experience and confidence to meddle yet again — which makes it the primary threat to the midterms, experts tell.
In fact, China and North Korea will likely do little harm, per Lewis. Beijing doesn’t want to give Trump any reason to escalate the ongoing trade war, where the US already has placed tariffs on roughly $50 billion of Chinese goods. Pyongyang, meanwhile, likely won’t do anything to derail diplomatic negotiations over how to dismantle its nuclear arsenal.
Iran, however, might “may be tempted [to] try something” as “payback” for Trump pulling the US out of the Iran nuclear deal, Lewis told me. Trump withdrew the US from the agreement in May, which has led to many angry statements from the Iranian regime.
This is an interesting cyber-war to contemplate. Two opposing forces would be trying to swing an American election with one favoring the Republicans and the other the Democrats.
About James Andrew Lewis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) website.
(He) is a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Before joining CSIS, he worked at the Departments of State and Commerce as a Foreign Service officer and as a member of the Senior Executive Service. His government experience includes a broad range of political-military, negotiating, and intelligence assignments. He was an adviser to the U.S. Southern Command for Operation Just Cause, the U.S. Central Command for Operation Desert Shield, and the U.S. Central American Task Force. He led the U.S. delegation to the Wassenaar Arrangement Experts Group on advanced civilian and military technologies. He worked on presidential policies for arms transfers, on commercial space remote sensing, on policies to secure and commercialize the Internet, and on encryption and lawful access to communications. He was the Commerce Department lead for national security and espionage concerns related to high-technology trade with China.
Lewis was the rapporteur for the UN Group of Government Experts on Information Security for the successful 2010, 2013, and 2015 sessions. He has led long-running Track 1.5 discussions on cybersecurity with the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. He has served on several Federal Advisory Committees, including as chair of the Committee on Commercial Remote Sensing, as well as member of the Committees on Spectrum Management and International Communications Policy, and as an adviser on the security implications of foreign investment in the United States. Lewis has authored numerous publications since coming to CSIS on a broad array of topics, including innovation, space, information technology, globalization, deterrence, and surveillance. He was the director for CSIS’s Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency and is an internationally recognized expert on cybersecurity who is frequently quoted in the media. He has testified numerous times before Congress. Lewis’s current research examines the effect of technology on warfare and how the Internet has changed politics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
A full list of publications by James A. Lewis is available here.