Will Putin pick the next U.S. president? He just might

Putin has now gone beyond praising Trump and thrashing Clinton.

Cyber units operated by two agencies of the Russian government – the GRU (Russia’s military intelligence) and the FSB (heir to the KGB) – have hacked the computer systems of the DNC and stole politically embarrassing internal e-mails, which were critical of Senator Barney Sanders’s primary campaign against Clinton.

The Russian government hackers gave these e-mails to WikiLeaks, which released them on the Friday before the Democratic Party convention, as part of a campaign to deepen divisions in Democratic ranks and weaken Clinton’s chances of unifying the party.

The FBI is now investigating the Russian government hack of the DNC.

Over the weekend the Clinton campaign revealed that the campaign’s own computer systems have been hacked.

The response by Trump and his campaign to the revelations about Russian government hacking of the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has raised more concerns. Trump has publicly called on the Russian hackers to go after what he describes as the “missing” Hillary Clinton e-mails, while his campaign spokeswoman publicly said that if Russian government hackers have in their possession information damaging to Clinton and her campaign, and if they shared that information with the Trump campaign, then the campaign would not hesitate to use this information against Clinton.

Russian government hackers stealing and publicizing politically embarrassing e-mails from the DNC’s computer systems — or stealing analytical voter information and opposition research on Trump from the Clinton campaign’s own computers – is serious enough.

As serious as the theft by these Russian hackers of Democratic campaign donors’ personal data from the computer systems of the DCCC – a theft which may have a chilling effect on future donations to the DCCC.

But as Cory Bennett and Bryan Bender write in Politico, there is even a more serious, and more disturbing, possibility:

The most extreme danger, of course, is that cyber intruders could hack the voting machinery to pick winners and losers. But even less-ambitious exploits could sway the results in a close election — anything from tampering with parties’ volunteer schedules and get-out-the-vote operations to deleting the registrations of frequent voters or knocking registration databases offline.

Bennett and Bender conducted interviews with dozens of election officials, political operatives, and cybersecurity experts – and all said they were increasingly anxious about this type of threat.

In the United States, so far, there has been no evidence which suggests that a cyberattack has changed an election’s outcome. But there were efforts along these lines in other countries. Peter Harris, a former South African election monitor, writes in Birth: The Conspiracy to Stop the ‘94 Election (2011) that pro-apartheid hackers managed to infiltrate the South Africa election commission’s computers during the 1994 election in a desperate effort to depress the African National Congress’s vote total. Their attempt to prevent Nelson Mandela from coming to power failed (also see Eric Geller, “Online voting is a cybersecurity nightmare,” The Daily Dot [10 June 2016]).

Thirty-one members of the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group, a bipartisan group of homeland security and counterterrorism experts, last week have issued a statement on the recent Democratic National Committee (DNC) hack. This cyberattack, they said, “is an attack not on one party but on the integrity of American democracy.”

We should note, though, that while the recent series of cyberattacks by Russian government hackers was indeed an attack on the integrity of American democracy, only one party – the Democratic Party – was attacked, and the attacks had only one purpose: Help Trump win the November election.

The distinguished members of the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group are right to say that “it may not be the end of such attacks. It is not unthinkable that those responsible will steal and release more files, and even salt the files they release with plausible forgeries.”

They conclude: “This is unacceptable. Our president should be chosen by American citizens, not by foreign adversaries or interests.”

The two candidates for president; their campaigns; and anyone associated with their campaigns should unequivocally and unambiguously reiterate this straightforward principle and their adherence to it: “Our president should be chosen by American citizens, not by foreign adversaries or interests.”

We should all ask ourselves: Have both candidates done so? Have both campaigns done so?

And we should ask ourselves another question: If one of the two candidates, and the candidate’s campaign, have failed to do so – if, in fact, they give every impression of encouraging “foreign powers and adversaries” to meddle in our politics and help choose our president – should we not all be worried? Very worried?

Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire