Of all the Russian tactics deployed in 2016, the hacking and leaking of documents did the most immediate and palpable damage—distracting attention from the In 2020, the damage could be greater still. But in the past, when the federal government has pointed out these vulnerabilities—and attempted to protect against them—the states have chafed and moaned. Less than six months before Election Day, the government will attempt to identify democracy’s most glaring weakness by deploying college kids on their summer break.Despite such well-intentioned efforts, the nation’s vulnerabilities have widened, not narrowed, during the past four years. But there is another reason for the government’s alarmingly inadequate response: a president who sees attempts to counter the Russia threat as a personal affront.After McMaster was fired, having made little if any progress on Russia, the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, took up the cause, installing in his office an election-security adviser named Shelby Pierson. That did not happen. The Macron leaks suggested a dangerous new technique, a sinister mixing of the hacked and the fabricated intended to exploit the electorate’s hunger for raw evidence and faith in purloined documents.In the spring of 2015, trolls in St. Petersburg peered at the feed of a webcam that had been furtively placed in New York City. Afterward, Democrats mocked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as “Moscow Mitch,” an appellation that stung enough that the senator ultimately agreed to legislation that supplied the states with hundreds of millions of dollars to buy new voting systems—but without any security demands placed on the states or any meaningful reforms to a broken system. A democracy can’t defend itself if it can’t honestly describe the attacks against it. Mark Warner, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me, “A day doesn’t go by that I don’t hear from someone in the intelligence community saying, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re worried about integrity, we’re worried about morale, we’re worried about willingness to speak truth to power.’ ” I asked Warner whether he could still trust the intelligence about Russia he received—whether he has faith that the government will render an accurate portrait of the Russian threat to the upcoming presidential election. Instead, he decided to stay on and fight back, using the only methods he knew.Although the American electorate awoke to the reality of Russian influence operations only in 2016, they had begun more than a decade earlier, after that first power change in Ukraine. Podesta told me that when he realized his email had been breached, he feared that the hackers would manufacture embarrassing or even incriminating emails and then publish them alongside the real ones. For their part, the IRA’s minions immodestly credited themselves with having tilted the trajectory of history. On the day of the 2018 midterm elections, a group claiming to be the IRA published a grandiloquent manifesto on its website that declared: “Soon after November 6, you will realize that your vote means nothing. None were forthcoming. Franklin Foer's piece on Slate about Trump and dealings by his campaign manager Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser ... has shown little interest in Trump. For instance, new synthetic-audio software allows hackers to mimic a voice with convincing verisimilitude. The firms are all too ... Putin Is Well on His Way to Stealing the Next Election. The Podesta leaks thus established a precedent, an expectation that hacked material is authentic—perhaps the most authentic version of reality available, an opportunity to see past a campaign’s messaging and spin and read its innermost thoughts.In fact, the Russians have no scruples about altering documents. Government officials would be forced to declare it a hoax. We decide who you vote for and what candidates will win or lose. This winter, the Russians even While the Russians continued their efforts to undermine American democracy, the United States belatedly began to devise a response. When the commission received a complaint suggesting that the FBI was investigating the National Rifle Association as a conduit for Russian money, she asked her fellow commissioners for permission to call the FBI, to, as she put it, “see if they have interesting information they want to share. To repair relationships, Podesta found himself apologizing to co-workers, friends, former Cabinet secretaries.
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