Whether Or Not You Believe Russia Interfered In The Election, We Should All Be Worried About Escalation Based On Secret Info

from the be-concerned dept

So, we just wrote about Obama administration's tepid response to claims that Russians "interfered" with the Presidential election. In that post, we noted our concerns about the fact that we seem to be escalating a situation based on claims where we're not allowed to see any of the actual evidence. I've seen a bunch of people arguing that anyone who won't automatically accept that Russia interfered in the election should be dubbed either Putin supporters or, at the very least, "useful idiots" but we should be very, very careful about where this leads. I certainly think that there's a tremendous possibility that Russian forces did intend to interfere with our election, but I'd certainly like to see some actual evidence -- and the "evidence" provided so far shows no such thing.

And this should scare you. Not because it means that anyone is lying, but because it's setting the stage for very dangerous things. If we're setting the precedent that the US government can escalate situations based on purely secret knowledge, what's to stop them from doing so over and over again? Put another way: for those who dislike Trump, but are happy about the White House calling out and sanctioning Russia, how will you feel when President Trump makes similar claims about some other country (perhaps one blocking a new Trump hotel?), and proceeds to issue US government sanctions on that country -- but without releasing any actual evidence of wrongdoing beyond "government agencies say they did bad things." Won't that be concerning too?

Matt Taibbi, over at Rolling Stone, has an excellent article comparing this to when we started the war in Iraq -- noting the similarities, in that the government (and the press) kept insisting that because certain government agencies said something ("Iraq has WMDs"), it must be true:

This dramatic story puts the news media in a jackpot. Absent independent verification, reporters will have to rely upon the secret assessments of intelligence agencies to cover the story at all.

Many reporters I know are quietly freaking out about having to go through that again. We all remember the WMD fiasco.

And, as he later notes:

The problem with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle of a highly politicized environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect. Nothing quite adds up.

If the American security agencies had smoking-gun evidence that the Russians had an organized campaign to derail the U.S. presidential election and deliver the White House to Trump, then expelling a few dozen diplomats after the election seems like an oddly weak and ill-timed response. Voices in both parties are saying this now.

And this is a big part of the problem. Because none of the evidence is public, beyond just statements of attribution, we're left with no way to know what are actually reasonable responses. There's a big spectrum of possibilities that might be described as "Russian interference" from merely helping some independent hackers release information (as some have charged) to using actual intelligence agencies to run a serious hacking operation (as others have charged), all the way up to actively tampering in voting systems (which some in the public now claim, but which no official has suggested actually happened).

The problem isn't so much a question of whether or not the Russians did something. Maybe they did. It certainly wouldn't surprise me at all if they did. At the very least, Russian officials seem to be laughing at everything going on now. The real issue is the danger of having the force and power of the US government responding to "actions" by stating things as true, without providing any evidence to back it up. In that space, a lot of mischief can and will occur. Looking back at the invasion of Iraq based on faulty reports is just one example. We should be learning from that lesson, not repeating it.

Filed Under: escalation, hacking, president obama, president trump, russia, secrecy, secrets, white house

NBC Happily Parrots The CIA's Case For Escalating Cyber War With Russia

from the putting-out-fires-by-burning-the-house-down dept

As we've been noting there have been growing calls for the Obama Administration to publicly scold Russia for hacking the DNC, and to dole out some kind of righteous punishment for this unseemly behavior. Calls on this front have ranged from launching larger cyber offensives or even a brick and mortar military response. We've noted repeatedly how this is stupid for a multitude of reasons, since hacking "proof" is (if the hacker's any good) impossible to come by, with false-flag operations consistently common.

Despite the obvious dangers of escalation, the U.S. press seems pretty intent on helping the intelligence community justify doing exactly that. Countless outlets are breathlessly passing along the idea that we simply must "retaliate" for Russia's behavior, willfully ignoring that the United States wrote the book on nation state hacking and lacks the moral high ground to lecture anyone on cybersecurity. As Snowden and other whistleblowers should have made abundantly clear by now, we've been hacking allies, fiddling in Democratic elections, creating indiscriminately dangerous malware and worse for decades.

Led by our bad example, we've cultivated a global environment in which nation state operators hack one another every second of every day to keep pace with the United States. As such, the idea that the United States is an innocent daisy nobly defending its untarnished honor from uncivilized international ruffians is absurdly, indisputably false, yet this concept sits at 90% of the reporting on this subject. Case in point: eager to get the escalation ball rolling, the CIA last week used NBC to make the case for a renewed cyber-warfare campaign against Russia in the coming months:

According to the full NBC report, the CIA is cooking up a rotating platter of different proposals, most of which involve launching similar hack and leak campaigns intended to embarrass Putin and company:

"The Obama administration is contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News. Current and former officials with direct knowledge of the situation say the CIA has been asked to deliver options to the White House for a wide-ranging "clandestine" cyber operation designed to harass and "embarrass" the Kremlin leadership."

Again though, if you understand that the NSA and its army of private contractors are covertly probing and attacking countless nations day in and day out (allies and enemies alike), the very idea that we'd announce this single counterattack via god-damned NBC should strike you as transparently theatrical and a bit silly. And as some pointed out, the wording of the story seems to strongly suggest we've already obtained plenty of documents that could prove embarrassing to Russia:Like most news coverage of the Russian hacks, our own responsibility for global cyber war escalation is left entirely unmentioned by a media that fancies itself a truth teller, yet somehow still can't escape the grip of fevered nationalism when covering militarism and cyber warfare. And you'll note the only hesitation from most of the government sources quoted in the article is that our "retaliation" won't be vicious enough:

Sean Kanuck, who was until this spring the senior U.S. intelligence official responsible for analyzing Russian cyber capabilities, said not mounting a response would carry a cost. "If you publicly accuse someone," he said, "and don't follow it up with a responsive action, that may weaken the credible threat of your response capability." President Obama will ultimately have to decide whether he will authorize a CIA operation. Officials told NBC News that for now there are divisions at the top of the administration about whether to proceed.

Good. There should be "divisions." Escalating our cyber-offensive "strategies" resulted in the conundrum we're currently enjoying. And escalation here could prove notably fatal to many given our ongoing proxy war with Russia in Syria. But it's abundantly clear the CIA wants the green light and is getting some resistance from the current administration, encouraging NBC to suggest that escalation could protect the sanctity of the November elections:

"The CIA's cyber operation is being prepared by a team within the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence, documents indicate. According to officials, the team has a staff of hundreds and a budget in the hundreds of millions, they say. The covert action plan is designed to protect the U.S. election system and insure that Russian hackers can't interfere with the November vote, officials say. Another goal is to send a message to Russia that it has crossed a line, officials say."

Again though, there is no "line," and any ethical or legal lines that do exist, we obliterated years ago. We've hacked nations aggressively for decades, and are now fanning our collective faces in indignation at the idea that anybody would dare hack us back. We've contributed to escalating cyber-security tensions by being among the most badly behaved nations on Earth, consistently using the resulting threat escalation to justify our ongoing war on encryption, bloated security contractor budgets, and domestic surveillance expansion. It's a vicious, expensive ouroboros of dysfunction.

We've tried escalation as the aggressor, and it consistently makes things collectively, internationally worse, and certainly doesn't stop us from being the targets of these kinds of attacks. That's why we've noted repeatedly that the smart play here is to focus on defense, instead of letting Putin (and our own security contractors and intelligence community) goad us into more idiotic behavior than ever before.

Filed Under: cia, cybersecurity, cyberwar, escalation, russia

Obama Promises 'Proportional' Response To Russian Hacking, Ignores That We Started The Fight

from the bogus-moral-high-ground dept

We've noted several times how launching cyberwar (or real war) on Russia over the recent spike in hack attacks is a notably idiotic idea. One, the United States effectively wrote the book on hacking other countries causing all manner of harm (hello, Stuxnet), making the narrative that we're somehow defending our honor from shady international operatives foundationally incorrect. And two, any hacker worth his or her salt either doesn't leave footprints advertising their presence, or may conduct false flag operations raising the risk of attacking the wrong party.

After significant pressure from intelligence industry saber rattlers and the cybersecurity firms that profit from cyber-hysteria, President Obama this week proudly proclaimed that the U.S. government would be launching a "proportional" response to Russia's recent slate of hacking attacks:

"We obviously will ensure that a U.S. response is proportional. It is unlikely that our response would be announced in advanced. It’s certainly possible that the president could choose response options that we never announce," Earnest told reporters aboard Air Force One. "The president has talked before about the significant capabilities that the U.S. government has to both defend our systems in the United States but also carry out offensive operations in other countries," he added. "There are a range of responses that are available to the president and he will consider a response that’s proportional."

Again though, the very idea that the United States would be "responding" is fundamentally incorrect. We've been engaged in nation state hacking and election fiddling for decades, happily hacking the planet for almost as long as the internet has existed. We use submarines as underwater hacking platforms, the U.S. government and its laundry list of contractors routinely hacking and fiddling with international elections and destroying reputations when and if it's convenient to our global business interests. Our behavior in 1970s South America giving tech support to Operation Condor is the dictionary definition of villainy.

Yet somehow, once countries began hacking us back, we responded with indignant and hypocritical pouting and hand-wringing. But the reality is we are not some unique, special snowflake on the moral high ground in this equation: we've historically been the bully, and nationalism all too often blinds us to this fact. Long a nation driven to war by the weakest of supporting evidence, hacking presents those in power with a wonderful, nebulous new enemy, useful in justifying awful legislation, increased domestic surveillance authority, and any other bad idea that can be shoe-horned into the "because... cybersecurity" narrative.

And as we're witnessing in great detail, hacking has played a starring role in this nightmarish election, with Donald Trump giving every indication he intends to only ramp up nation state hacking as a core tenet of his idiocracy, and Hillary Clinton lumping Russia, hackers, and WikiLeaks into one giant, amorphous and villainous amoeba to help distract us from what leaked information might actually say about the sorry state of the republic.

We're wandering into extremely dangerous territory here. As we saw with Stuxnet's impact on companies like Chevron, the United States' hacking behavior has had very real, negative repercussions for innocent third parties around the globe. Operating from the belief that we're somehow nobly defending ourselves is a falsehood the media consistently perpetuates, making this kind of dangerous digital saber rattling easier than ever for those in power. The U.S. press and public can no longer afford to be so viciously naive as 2016 stumbles drunkenly to its welcome conclusion and hacking becomes the bogeyman du jour for the next administration.

Filed Under: cybersecurity, escalation, hacking, obama, russia, white house