9 votes

#DemocracyRIP: What the Russian government did to the 2016 elections in the US was just the beginning

Posted by Kuromantis
Tags: politics, russia, elections, democracy, kgb, gru, ira, 2016 us presidential election, usa, election interference, intelligence services, author.franklin foer, source.the atlantic, long read, paywall.soft
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/putin-american-democracy/610570/

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Title
RIP Democracy
Authors
Franklin Foer
Published
Jun 11 2020
Word count
7698 words

1 comment

  1. Kuromantis
    (edited )
    Link
    Reposted because after all that quoting, I forgot the damn link. The beginning of the article, detailing how insecure some US voting systems are These chunks I found particularly important: [...]

    Reposted because after all that quoting, I forgot the damn link.

    The beginning of the article, detailing how insecure some US voting systems are

    Jack cable sat down at the desk in his cramped dorm room to become an adult in the eyes of democracy. The rangy teenager, with neatly manicured brown hair and chunky glasses, had recently arrived at Stanford—his first semester of life away from home—and the 2018 midterm elections were less than two months away. Although he wasn’t one for covering his laptop with strident stickers or for taking loud stands, he felt a genuine thrill at the prospect of voting. But before he could cast an absentee ballot, he needed to register with the Board of Elections back home in Chicago.

    When Cable tried to complete the digital forms, an error message stared at him from his browser. Clicking back to his initial entry, he realized that he had accidentally typed an extraneous quotation mark into his home address. The fact that a single keystroke had short-circuited his registration filled Cable with a sense of dread.

    Despite his youth, Cable already enjoyed a global reputation as a gifted hacker—or, as he is prone to clarify, an “ethical hacker.” As a sophomore in high school, he had started participating in “bug bounties,” contests in which companies such as Google and Uber publicly invite attacks on their digital infrastructure so that they can identify and patch vulnerabilities before malicious actors can exploit them. Cable, who is preternaturally persistent, had a knack for finding these soft spots. He collected enough cash prizes from the bug bounties to cover the costs of four years at Stanford.

    Though it wouldn’t have given the average citizen a moment of pause, Cable recognized the error message on the Chicago Board of Elections website as a telltale sign of a gaping hole in its security. It suggested that the site was vulnerable to those with less beneficent intentions than his own, that they could read and perhaps even alter databases listing the names and addresses of voters in the country’s third-largest city. Despite his technical savvy, Cable was at a loss for how to alert the authorities. He began sending urgent warnings about the problem to every official email address he could find. Over the course of the next seven months, he tried to reach the city’s chief information officer, the Illinois governor’s office, and the Department of Homeland Security.

    As he waited for someone to take notice of his missives, Cable started to wonder whether the rest of America’s electoral infrastructure was as weak as Chicago’s. He read about how, in 2016, when he was a junior in high school, Russian military intelligence—known by its initials, GRU—had hacked the Illinois State Board of Elections website, transferring the personal data of tens of thousands of voters to Moscow. The GRU had even tunneled into the computers of a small Florida company that sold software to election officials in eight states.

    Out of curiosity, Cable checked to see what his home state had done to protect itself in the years since. Within 15 minutes of poking around the Board of Elections website, he discovered that its old weaknesses had not been fully repaired. These were the most basic lapses in cybersecurity—preventable with code learned in an introductory computer-science class—and they remained even though similar gaps had been identified by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, not to mention widely reported in the media. The Russians could have strolled through the same door as they had in 2016.

    Between classes, Cable began running tests on the rest of the national electoral infrastructure. He found that some states now had formidable defenses, but many others were like Illinois. If a teenager in a dorm room—even an exceptionally talented one—could find these vulnerabilities, they were not going to be missed by a disciplined unit of hackers that has spent years studying these networks, a unit with the resources of a powerful nation bent on discrediting an American election.

    #democracyrip was both the hashtag and the plan. The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to persuade American officials to allow its functionaries to act as observers in polling places. A Twitter campaign alleging voting irregularities was queued. Russian diplomats were ready to publicly denounce the results as illegitimate. Events in 2016, of course, veered in the other direction. Yet the hashtag is worth pausing over for a moment, because, though it was never put to its intended use, it remains an apt title for a mission that is still unfolding.

    These chunks I found particularly important:

    The subject of voting divides Republicans and Democrats. Especially since the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000, the parties have stitched voting into their master narratives. Democrats accuse Republicans of suppressing the vote; Republicans accuse Democrats of flooding the polls with corpses and other cheating schemes. Despite this rancor, both sides seemed to agree that Russian hacking of voting systems was not a good thing. After the 2016 election, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, from Minnesota, partnered with Republican Senator James Lankford, from Oklahoma, on the Secure Elections Act. The bill would have given the states money to replace electronic voting machines with ones that leave a paper trail and would have required states to audit election results to confirm their accuracy. The reforms would also have had the seemingly salutary effect of making it easier for voters to cast ballots.

    The Secure Elections Act wouldn’t have provided perfect insulation from Russian attacks, but it would have been a meaningful improvement on the status quo, and it briefly looked as if it could pass. Then, on the eve of a session to mark up the legislation—a moment for lawmakers to add their final touches—Senate Republicans suddenly withdrew their support, effectively killing the bill. Afterward, Democrats mocked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as “Moscow Mitch,” an appellation that stung enough that the senator ultimately agreed to legislation that supplied the states with hundreds of millions of dollars to buy new voting systems—but without any security demands placed on the states or any meaningful reforms to a broken system. McConnell made it clear that he despised the whole idea of a legislative fix to the electoral-security problem: “I’m not going to let Democrats and their water carriers in the media use Russia’s attack on our democracy as a Trojan horse for partisan wish-list items that would not actually make our elections any safer.” For McConnell, suppressing votes was a higher priority than protecting them from a foreign adversary.

    [...]

    Outside Weintraub’s office, the subject of Russia’s illicit financing of campaigns hardly provokes any attention. The Alliance for Securing Democracy was the only organization I could find that comprehensively tracks the issue. It has collected examples of Russian money flowing into campaigns around the world: a 9.4-million-euro loan made to the French nationalist Marine Le Pen’s party; operatives arriving in Madagascar before an election with backpacks full of cash to buy TV ads on behalf of Russia’s preferred candidate and to pay journalists to cover his rallies.

    Vladimir Putin dreams of discrediting the American democratic system, and he will never have a more reliable ally than Donald Trump. A democracy can’t defend itself if it can’t honestly describe the attacks against it. But the president hasn’t just undermined his own country’s defenses—he has actively abetted the adversary’s efforts. If Russia wants to tarnish the political process as hopelessly rigged, it has a bombastic amplifier standing behind the seal of the presidency, a man who reflexively depicts his opponents as frauds and any system that produces an outcome he doesn’t like as fixed. If Russia wants to spread disinformation, the president continually softens an audience for it, by instructing the public to disregard authoritative journalism as the prevarications of a traitorous elite and by spouting falsehoods on Twitter.

    In 2020, Russia might not need to push the U.S. for it to suffer a terrible election-year tumble. Even without interventions from abroad, it is shockingly easy to imagine how a pandemic might provide a pretext for indefinitely delaying an election or how this president, narrowly dispatched at the polls, might refuse to accept defeat. But restraint wouldn’t honor Russia’s tradition of Active Measures. And there may never be a moment quite so ripe for taking the old hashtag out of storage and giving it a triumphalist turn. #DemocracyRIP.

    4 votes