Stealing an Election

by Errington C. Thompson, MD –

It is my fault. It is your fault. We are all to blame.

We were influenced, conned, and outsmarted by our enemies. No, not the Republicans—the Russians. We heard the footsteps, but we were too busy fighting each other to notice. The 2016 election was stolen from us.

The hack that no one cared about

We have all become numb to the idea that hackers will attack us. I’m not talking about little hacks that are simply meaningless. I am talking about major disruptions. Target, the giant superstore, was infiltrated in 2013, and over 40 million accounts were ransacked. Names, addresses, Social Security numbers, credit card information, all of it was stolen. Equifax, one of the three companies whose information influences our personal credit score, was infiltrated by hackers (thieves) who stole information on 145 million customers.

Although there was some isolated outrage at each individual corporation, there was no coordinated national plan to help companies thwart cyber-stealing. Cyber-sabotage, for want of a better phrase, is no different than someone breaking into your house, holding you at gunpoint, and taking your wallet. Clearly we, as a nation, would demand action if millions of households were broken into and Americans were held at gunpoint. Yet when our information was stolen, there was no national outrage—a few days of anger, then … nothing. We didn’t demand that Congress implement measures that would protect us, the American people, from cyberattacks.

In the summer of 2015, the National Security Agency (NSA) knew that the Russians were probing around the edges of our elections. The NSA tipped off the FBI. The FBI called the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and spoke with Yared Tamene, an IT specialist at the DNC, but not an expert in cybersecurity. Several times over the next several months the FBI called, but the DNC could find no evidence of infiltration.

Finally, nearly five months after the first communication, the FBI met with the DNC’s IT specialists and showed them a log of Internet traffic on their computers. The log clearly showed that the DNC computers were contacting some computers at a redacted address outside of the United States.

Still it took several more weeks before the DNC was able to find the problem. CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, was called in. They were able to locate the problem, secure the computers and trace the two groups of hackers back to Russia.

What they found was that, for over a year, Russian cyber thieves were able to read virtually every document, every email, every meeting summary, every plan for resource allocation—everything was open to the Russians.

Comprehensive plan to influence the U.S. election

Just for second, let’s go back to the height of the Cold War. It’s the mid-1960s. Russia used a multi-pronged approach to try to influence American politics and destabilize our government. They targeted specific politicians. They placed letters to the editor in newspapers from “concerned Americans” who were actually Russian agents living in the United States. They tried—with some success—to infiltrate our spy agencies and our military. This was a high-stakes game: its goal was to topple our democracy.

We know that forty years later during the 2008 election cycle, the Russians infiltrated the computers of both the Obama and McCain camps. As far as we know, there was no comprehensive plan to punish Russia for that act of cyber warfare. So the Russians refined it and tested it in 2014, and by 2015, they had a comprehensive plan to influence our elections. They had a whole farm of people (called the Internet Research Agency) who sat in front of computer screens, created false Internet identities on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to confuse and bewilder voters.

Separate groups of Russians were tasked with infiltrating major organizations including the DNC, the DCCC, and even the RNC. Then they would set up websites (DCLeaks) in which they could release the stolen documents, but they would only release the documents at specific times for maximum effect—which was to sow confusion, incite anger, and create distrust in our system and institutions. Some documents were turned over to WikiLeaks, which only released documents when the timing was just perfect. They wanted to create chaos.

The final piece of the puzzle would be that the Russians would need to try to compromise a major candidate and/or his campaign. There seems to be plenty of circumstantial evidence that the Russians tried to infiltrate the Trump campaign. Carter Page, trying to work back channels to get a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, seems to have (inadvertently?) met with a known Russian spy. George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, revealed to an Australian diplomat that Russia had damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Both Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort enjoyed unusually close ties with the Kremlin. Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and other campaign officials met with several Russian intermediaries at Trump Tower to try to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Finally there is Donald Trump himself. We know that Donald Trump has been trying to build a Trump tower or other major construction project in Russia for years. To do that, he would need personal approval from Vladimir Putin—and he’d been trying to win the Russian strongman’s favor for over a decade.

While we were sleeping…

During the 2016 election, instead of paying attention, we leapt from one crisis to another. Donald Trump would say that all Mexicans were rapists. We would become outraged. Hillary Clinton would call some Donald Trump supporters a basket of deplorables. We would become outraged. Yet, we never stood back and took a look at the whole Russian problem.

The Obama administration was trying to walk a political tightrope. They needed to alert the public to this growing threat from Russia, but they didn’t want conspiracy theorists suggesting that Obama was somehow trying to tip the scales toward Clinton. At one point the Director of Homeland Security held a conference call with each state’s election officials to warn them of the potential of being hacked by foreign actors; he wanted to lend assistance in helping to harden their cybersecurity. As you can imagine, the conversation quickly devolved into “big brother” meddling in state affairs, and no comprehensive plan was implemented.

The principals of the Obama administration’s major security agencies met secretly for weeks to draft a memo outlining the Russian problem. Writing it was challenging; deciding who would deliver the message was even harder. If President Obama did so, it would be seen as partisan; coming from a lower-ranking official, the message would be interpreted as unimportant.

Finally the Director of National Intelligence along with the Director of Homeland Security released the memo under their names. But the memo was released the same day as Trump’s Access Hollywood video, in which he basically said that it was okay to assault females because he was a star. So the memo that clearly stated that we were under attack from Russian agencies got no traction from our media.

It is undeniable that Russia tried to influence our election through a variety of methods. Did they change the election results? No one can say.

Securing Our Freedom

If we’re going to have free and fair elections, we must make sure that foreign actors have no influence over our elections. We want to make sure that Russia, China, or even North Korea are completely locked out of our election process. We need a national response. We need a bipartisan response. Anything less is an assault on our freedom.