ArgumentIf Russia Hacked Burisma, Brace for the Leaks to Follow
The Kremlin hackers who helped put Donald Trump in the White House are at it again – this time in an effort to keep him there, and the hacking of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma by hackers of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, is one of the first plays in their new campaign. Andy Greenberg writes that what should worry Americans – both voters and journalists – is the next play: the selective release of documents – some forged, some doctored – by Kremlin disinformation and propaganda specialists, timed to inflict maximum damage on Joe Bide’s campaign and be of maximum help to the Trump campaign. Greenberg asks: “Did the U.S. learn enough from 2016 to ignore” such selective leaks?
The Kremlin hackers who helped put Donald Trump in the White House are at it again – this time in an effort to keep him there, and the hacking of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma is one of the first move in their new campaign. What should worry Americans – both voters and journalists – is the next play: the selective release of documents – some forged, some doctored – by Kremlin disinformation and propaganda specialists, timed to inflict maximum damage on Joe Biden and be of maximum help to the Trump campaign. Did the U.S. learn enough from 2016 to ignore them?
Andy Greenberg writes in Wired that
given the potential for even the slightest speck of Biden dirt found on Burisma’s server to carry political weight, a hacking campaign targeting the firm or other Biden-linked organizations was almost inevitable, says Clint Watts, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and author of the book Messing with the Enemy. As are subsequent leaks.
“Anyone who’s worked with Hunter Biden should be having a panic attack right now,” Watts says. In some respects, he argues, a Russian influence operation based on stolen files is even easier in 2020 than it was in 2016, when Russian intelligence used an invented “hacktivist” named Guccifer 2.0 to distribute Clinton’s stolen files to news outlets.
“Last time they did broad hacking to find as much information as possible to dig through and find derogatory narratives,” Watts says. “This time they’ve got the president advancing a very specific narrative already. So rather than finding the dirt, this time they can pursue a narrative that’s already out there and make it come true.”
The notion that postmortem analysis of Russia’s influence campaign in 2016 somehow immunized the United States against a rerun of the same tactics is “fanciful,” Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins and author of the forthcoming book Active Measures, which explores the history of disinformation and influence operations, told Greenberg.
Rid warned that any 2020 leaking campaign by a foreign intelligence agency will likely include false documents or ones that have been slightly modified to better suit the leaker’s agenda.
