The most patriotic moment of former FBI director James Comey’s testimony this week came when he attempted to jolt the nation awake to the subversive force that in many ways has already stormed our shores.
“They’re coming for America,” Comey said of Russia, “and they will be back.”
In fact with each passing month since the November election, an unsettling picture of the kaleidoscope of Russia interference last year has come more clearly into focus. Initially, we learned of how ferociously “fake news” infected our digital digest, largely at the direction of a Russian bots and trolls. That was November. Then in early January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified 25-page report detailing the intelligence estimate of 17 agencies that Russia had engaged in a widespread and highly sophisticated propaganda effort to hack political targets (both Democratic and Republican), create misinformation campaigns, and drive coverage of those campaigns. And yes, they were doing it all to benefit Donald Trump.
In March, we got a couple more bombshells: Obama administration officials were so freaked out by team Trump that they scrambled to preserve intelligence about the Russian meddling by dispersing it widely across the government; and James Comey told us for the first time that the FBI was investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russia and had been doing so since last July. (Good god, since last summer!)
The New York Times provided April’s head turner: the CIA had briefed top Congressional lawmakers—the Gang of Eight—about Russian efforts to help Trump win the election as early as last August. Though the FBI had already opened an investigation by then, it had not yet concluded Russia was working in support of Trump. However, the drip, drip, drip of leaked DNC and Podesta emails in the fall would begin to change minds within the agency.
By the time former CIA chief John Brennan was up in May, what could be left? Plenty. Brennan described a harrowing few months at the agency last summer when he saw intelligence suggesting possible collusion between Trump and Russia that he felt was “worthy” of further investigation by the FBI. Brennan found the intel so unsettling that, beyond briefing lawmakers, he contacted his Russian counterpart in the intelligence community last August and told him to knock it off.
Those are the basic threads leading up to this week’s leaked National Security Agency report detailing Russian efforts to go beyond external influence campaigns and reach directly into US voting systems themselves.
The “top secret” document was relatively fresh, dated May 5, and not meant for public consumption. But after spending the first several months of 2017 learning all the intelligence community and some lawmakers knew about the Russian intrusion last year that we, the American public, did not, one has to wonder when and even if this new information about Russian efforts to penetrate local voting systems ever would have made it into the public realm.
Some members of the intelligence community clearly tried to alert voters and local election officials last fall about the vulnerabilities of our voting infrastructure. An observant Daily Kos reader pointed me to a spate of articles in which anonymous intelligence sources warned that voting systems in nearly half the states had been targeted by hackers.
But ultimately, 2016 represented a system-wide failure to inform the American public about Russia’s extensive efforts to hack and corrupt our democracy. And it doesn’t just fall at the feet of the intelligence community—journalists and elected officials extending all the way up the White House bear some responsibility for the fact that voters walked into voting booths last November virtually in the dark about Russian interference.
But perhaps, most frightening of all, we appear poised to recreate this calamitous experiment all over again in 2018.
The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, confirmed this week that Russian hacking efforts were in fact “much broader” than those outlined in the NSA report.
But one thing the report did quite well was explain the methodology used by the hackers, who reportedly targeted voter rolls rather than vote tallies. Unfortunately, the very methods they used to gain access to the computers of local election officials could also be used to tamper with vote outcomes.
Cybersecurity expert and University of Michigan Professor J. Alexander Halderman outlined just such a scenario last November, following Clinton’s loss; the initial steps he explains are strikingly similar to those described in the NSA report produced last month.
How might a foreign government hack America’s voting machines to change the outcome of a presidential election? Here’s one possible scenario. First, the attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers. Closer to the election, when it was clear from polling data which states would have close electoral margins, the attackers might spread malware into voting machines in some of these states, rigging the machines to shift a few percent of the vote to favor their desired candidate. This malware would likely be designed to remain inactive during pre-election tests, do its dirty business during the election, then erase itself when the polls close. A skilled attacker’s work might leave no visible signs — though the country might be surprised when results in several close states were off from pre-election polls.
Now, again, the NSA report never suggested the Russians succeeded in or even tried to change vote counts, but based on what Russian hackers pulled off in 2016, the scenario Halderman lays out above seems all too plausible. Halderman also suggests a safeguard: paper ballots, which can be counted in the event of notable irregularities.
Yet, here we sit about a year after intelligence officials got their first whiff that something might be terribly wrong and the intelligence community is still sitting on information that could jumpstart efforts to protect our voting systems in 2018. In fact, Sen. Warner is now urging intelligence agencies to declassify information about which states were targeted in 2016 in preparation for next year’s elections.
The fact that we are not already seeing a concerted effort to widely and strategically publicize this information well ahead of the next election cycle is absolutely dumbfounding. Washington is apparently too consumed with the last electoral catastrophe to prevent the next one.
But take it from Comey—“they will be back”—and we need to be prepared.