Politics will Never Be The Same: Revelations & Mysteries from the Intelligence Report on Russian Hacking

A declassified version of the combined Intelligence Report on Russian Hacking of the 2016 Election was released on Friday, just after the classified version of the briefing, (Background to “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution), was presented to President-Elect Trump. This report appears to be the final deliverable associated with President Obama’s request made several weeks after the election to consolidate findings related to Russian hacking during the election. This report follows a release about week ago of a more detailed or specific report related to the larger hacking campaign; the Grizzly Steppe analysis. I review the Grizzly Steppe findings last week and I had hoped there would be a follow-up report and thankfully we’ve finally gotten it.

First, I’d like to commend the Obama administration and the Intelligence Community for doing what is overall a fairly decent job of tackling what is a complex and somewhat explosive issue. Perhaps the most immediate result of the release on Friday was the distinct change in tone coming from our President Elect on the subject – while he is still downplaying the significance of the Russian interference with the 2016 election process – he is no longer denying that it occurred. 

The final report itself includes a number of interesting revelations, but also still contains a few too many mysteries for my tastes and I’ll cover both of these perspectives in the remainder of this post. It is also important to acknowledge that there obviously must be more tangible evidence within the classified version of the report, but whether any of those elements may be declassified later remains to be seen.

The Revelations Include:

• An acknowledgement that both major political parties were attacked, but that only stolen information was only leaked from the Democratic Party hacks.
• That there seems to be some level of disagreement between the FBI, CIA and NSA on conclusions regarding the intent of the attacks, although there is a general consensus.
• The Intelligence Community has taken the time to give at least a general sense of how their analytic process works, including the all-important issue of how attack attribution is assigned / determined.
• There was an acknowledgement that various election related organizations were compromised, including boards of election, although the report emphasizes that no vote tallying machines were involved, I’ll return to this point a bit later.
• There is a strong focus on the multi-faceted and coordinated nature of the activities, which extended beyond hacking to include manipulation of public perception through 21st century variations of propaganda techniques utilizing a variety of technologies, including Social Media and cable networks such as RT (Russia Today).
• The entire campaign was personally mandated, approved by Vladimir Putin with the expectation on his part that Trump would likely be more favorable to Russian policy objectives than Clinton. When it was looking like Clinton would win, the Russians launched a messaging campaign questioning whether the election was rigged if Clinton won (they were also preparing a Twitter campaign called #DemocracyRIP the night of the election). 
• The Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), used a persona called ‘Guccifer 2.0’ to leak DNC emails onto the Internet.
• RT (Russia Today Television), also actively coordinated with Wiki-leaks on the release of Democratic Party emails.
• The 2016 Election activities represent a significant escalation of Russian Intelligence activities against the US, reaching levels not seen since the Cold War and perhaps surpassing those. This new level of interference may be expected to be the new normal, especially given the success enjoyed in the US and other similar outcomes such as BRexit, where Russia is seeking to destabilize Western Liberal democracies.

The Mysteries That Remain

While there were some interesting revelations, many questions remain unanswered; including but not limited to the following:

• There is still no clear explanation of how the US government is safeguarding or not – the election-related systems and processes across the country. I discussed this in some length on my post on voting integrity, but the bottom line from the latest report is that it seems as though there really isn’t any coherent or national strategy for how to deal with this. In the report, while the Intelligence Agencies acknowledge that some voting organizations were compromised they also explain that the voting systems themselves weren’t. But that begs the question, how do they really know that? How many voting systems were audited either during or after the election? Nobody knows and it wasn’t disclosed in the report.
• Related to the above point, take a look at this excerpt from an article on the attempted recount in Michigan: “According to the newspaper, officials “couldn’t reconcile vote totals for 610 of 1,680 precincts” during last month’s countywide canvass of Election Day returns, adding that most are in Clinton stronghold Detroit, “where the number of ballots in precinct poll books did not match those of voting machine printout reports in 59 percent of precincts, 392 of 662.” Trump won Michigan by only 10,000 votes.
• Friday’s Intelligence Report references the Department of Homeland Security in relation to the compromises or attacks on election boards, but doesn’t explain what part of DHS collected that information or who if anyone is actually responsible for safeguarding election systems. There is no discussion of the audit processes that may or may not be in place and what those audits are based upon. 
• There is no discussion as to what an appropriate response could be or ought to be – in other words – it’s an analytic assessment without any policy implications. This, in my opinion, is a big gap in what should have been included in the final report. Making this information declassified and initiating a dialog about what happened is of course valuable, but what are we to make of it? How does the United States intend to respond to these types of events in the future if North Korea, Iran, Russia, China or any other nation decides that it wants to manipulate our political or economic processes to their advantage? We surely can’t expect to just document it, there needs to be a discussion of appropriate levels of response – a policy discussion – and this is needed primarily so we don’t make radical decisions in a haste.

In the title of this post, I’ve claimed that Politics will never be the same after the 2016 election - I firmly believe that. I think that this election has changed how politics will operate for decades to come, both here and abroad. I also don’t think that the US has fully assimilated the impact of what has really happened here yet. There will likely be countless papers, books and courses developed to explore the subject in greater depth over the coming years, but I also fear that the US has somehow lost the initiative in the midst of all of this. The idea that other nations or international actors have used technologies we’ve developed against us in this fashion is quite disturbing; all the moreso given that this just seems to be the start of an merging trend.

Here are the other election-related posts I’ve written since the election:

1. How Technology Defined the 2016 Election
2. Technology & the 2016 Election Part 2: Voting Integrity
3. Technology & Election 2016 part 3 – The Failure of Data Science?
4. Technology & The 2016 Election part 4: A New Age for Political Campaigning
5. Technology & The 2016 Election part 5: Voter Beware
6. The 5 Principles of Cyber Warfare
7. What We Just Learned about Grizzly Steppe
8. Cyber Security Predictions for 2017

Copyright 2017, Stephen Lahanas