Russian gov. hackers may disrupt Germany’s 2017 elections: Germany’s intel chief

Hackers employed by the FSB and GRU were behind the cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton Campaign, and the coordinated campaign with WikiLeaks to steal and publish both authentic and doctored e-mails from high officials in both organizations. The two Russian intelligence agencies were also behind pre-election attacks on the voter rolls in twenty-three states, but it now appears that the Putin government has decided not to hack the election process itself.

The two German intelligence agencies said that Russian government hackers were behind cyberattacks on Deutsche Telekom on Sunday and Monday, attacks which disabled Internet and phone access for almost a million customers in Germany. Deutsche Telekom said the security breach was part of a worldwide attack on routers.

Earlier today (Tuesday), the German chancellor Angela Merkel said that “such cyber-attacks, or hybrid conflicts as they are known in Russian doctrine, are now part of daily life and we must learn to cope with them.

“We have to inform people, and express our political convictions clearly,” she said, calling on German citizens not to allow themselves to be irritated or frustrated by such operations. “You just have to know that there’s such a thing and learn to live with it,” she said.

DW reports that Arne Schönbohm, director of the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI), the Federal Office for Information Security (he is known as Germany’s ‘“cyber sheriff”), called the Deutsche Telekom attacks worrying: “It shows to what extent cyber-attacks can affect every citizen. We need to get used to the idea that in future computer attacks, both comparable and far worse, will increasingly take place.”

In 2015, the German intelligence services discovered a Russian government cyberattack on Internet in the German parliament.

The 2017 German general election is likely to be especially heated as a result of Merkel’s liberal immigration policies, and the reaction to it by nationalist and populist forces led by the rightwing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is likely to gain seats in the Bundestag for the first time.

Merkel has also been the leader of the tough European response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the on-going Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine and Georgia. Russia has actively – both overtly and covertly — supported right-wing, ethno-nationalist, populist, and proto-Fascist parties like Front National in France, Golden Dawn in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, and Jobbik in Hungary. These parties share not only anti-immigrant policies – but they are also fiercely anti-EU and want to distance their countries from NATO.

What explains the Russian government’s open support for Trump is that Trump’s policies would weaken the global alliance system the United States has created in the late 1940s and early 1950s to keep Soviet (now, Russian) expansionism in check, and weaken the liberal economic order by withdrawing from international trade agreements and adopting a more nationalist, mercantilist economic policies.

As is the case with Trump, these European nationalist parties have all openly expressed their high regard for Vladimir Putin, and their support for policies which are more accommodating of Russian preferences and policy perspective.

Russia’s meddling in the American election was also aimed at doing damage to American democracy by sowing doubts about the integrity and viability of democratic processes and institutions. Merkel sees a similar pattern in Germany, and she warned that populists and social media platforms were spreading propaganda which may cause unprecedented damage to democracy.

Speaking to the Bundestag last week, she said: “Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls – things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms, and we must learn how to deal with them.”

The Atlantic Council earlier this month published a report analyzing Russian Influence on France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The report pointed to an extensive Russian “disinformation campaign” being carried out in Germany, which it said had “opened opportunities for the Kremlin to influence German politics and the public debate” (also see Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It [RAND, 2016]).

One of the major themes in the public rallies – and political platform – of the German far-right, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant Pegida movement is that the influence of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia in Germany would be a welcome alternative to the imperial designs of the United States and Brussels.