How Russia Interfered in the 2016 U.S. Election

Russia’s strategy to influence the 2016 US presidential election was designed for
maximum deniability, but the evidence clearly shows Moscow’s fingerprints everywhere.
This is what we know about Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election.
For years, Moscow has dreamed of undermining the US-led liberal democratic order that it
views as a threat to its oligarchy and the regime of Vladimir Putin, but its 2016 election
activity demonstrated a significant escalation compared to previous operations.
In September, 2015 — a few months before Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders squared
off in the Iowa caucus - the FBI notified a cyber-security contractor working for the
Democratic National Committee that it had been infiltrated by a Russian cyber-espionage
group.
It was the opening move in a hacking and information warfare campaign whose capabilities Russia
had been developing for decades.
Twenty years earlier, it launched the first major international cyber attack.
Russian hackers infiltrated computer systems across the US government and stole so many
files that if all the documents were printed and stacked, they would be taller than the
Washington Monument.
They also broke into networks in Canada, the UK, Brazil, and Germany.
Despite this intrusion, the U.S. was mainly concerned with fending off the Chinese, whose
headline-grabbing attacks did more damage.
Toward the end of George W. Bush’s second term in 2007, Russia began using hacking for
political purposes.
First, it punished Estonia for joining the NATO military alliance.
Then, Moscow shut down Georgia’s Internet before invading the small country—the first
time in history cyber-weapons had been used in an actual war.
President Obama’s Secretary of Defense put Russia and China on notice that any moves
against America’s critical infrastructure would not be tolerated, and warned that the
United States would consider a serious cyber attack an act of war.
[Leon Panetta] “Attackers could also seek to disable or degrade critical military systems
and communication networks.
The collective result of these kinds of attacks could be a cyber Pearl Harbor.”
In 2014 and 2015, as the US sanctioned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, a Russian hacking
group systematically infiltrated the State Department, the White House, and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff.
State had to repeatedly shut down its systems to expel the intruders.
While in Vienna, Secretary Kerry’s team had to use Gmail to communicate.
President Obama received briefings on all of these attacks, but the White House thought
retaliating too strongly could start an all-out cyberwar, or even a real war.
But the Russians became more emboldened.
They intercepted and broadcast a phone call of an Obama administration official expressing
frustration with Europe.
Then they stole documents from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and released doctored
versions to make it seem Soros was funding Putin’s opposition.
Still, they were met with little resistance for crossing the line, so they crossed it
even more.
On the day a French TV network debuted a new channel, its entire system was shut down by
malicious software that began to rapidly destroy its computers.
A quick-thinking tech identified the infected machine and disconnected it.
The Russians behind the attack tried to make it look like the work of terrorists, calling
themselves the Cyber Caliphate.
Next, the Kremlin ordered the first known successful cyberattack on another nation’s
power grid, disrupting the electricity supply of 230,000 Ukrainians.
Which brings us to the operation to interfere in the election—the first time a foreign
government has acted so boldly against American democracy.
Seven months after he was first notified by the FBI of the Russian intrusion in the DNC’s
computer system, the cyber-security contractor finally confirmed that an unauthorized user
was inside the network.
It’s unclear exactly why it took him so long to take a closer look.
Part of the problem was a lack of follow-through by the FBI agent who had warned him the year
before.
But the Democratic National Committee - a non-profit - also hadn’t spent enough money
on cybersecurity.
The party would pay dearly for that mistake.
It then brought on leading cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and within a day it was confirmed
that the breach had originated in Russia and was the work of two different hacking groups:
Cozy Bear — believed to be either Russia's Federal Security Service or its Foreign Intelligence
Service, and Fancy Bear — thought to be Russia's military intelligence agency, GRU.
But identifying the hackers didn’t help the DNC, the intruders had gone undetected
in their system for so long that the damage was already done.
The only question was how much damage?
When the Russians assessed the time was right to begin publishing the documents, they set
up aliases and fake websites to create confusion and undermine evidence that connected them
to the hack.
On July 6th, 2016, 12 days before the Republican National Convention, Guccifer released a gold
mine for Republican operatives: the DNC’s counter-strategy.
Then, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published 44,000 DNC
emails.
The messages were fairly mundane, but some revealed that a few party officials favored
Clinton over her opponent Bernie Sanders.
To political observers this was unsurprising.
Hillary Clinton had been a superstar in the party for 25 years, while Bernie Sanders - an
independent - wasn’t even technically a Democrat.
But that didn’t matter to Sanders’ supporters, who were still bitter over his loss.
The leaks gave them someone to blame.
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz — the party chairwoman who had planned the entire convention and
was about to preside over it — was forced to abruptly resign.
Still unsatisfied, angry Sanders delegates protested throughout the event, including
during Clinton’s acceptance speech.
As the election entered its final weeks, democratic candidates in dozens of states were targeted
by leaked documents stolen from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Conspicuously missing from all of these leaks was any publication of Republican emails.
Instead of condemning the hacks as the act of a foreign government against America’s
sacred democratic process, Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump praised Putin.
Falling further behind in the polls, he directly asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s emails.
But Russia didn’t need any prodding, they liked the prospect of Trump becoming president
so much they had even explored the possibility of directly tampering with the vote.
In June, the FBI sent a warning to states that "bad actors" were probing state voter-registration
databases and systems in search of vulnerabilities.
In July, CIA Director John Brennan was so alarmed over intelligence reports that Russia
was trying to “hack” the election that he formed a working group of officials from
the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
In August, Brennan called his Russian counterpart, the head of the Federal Security Service,
to warn him against meddling in the presidential election.
Two weeks later the FBI issued a nationwide “flash alert” warning state election officials
about foreign infiltration.
The alert includes technical evidence detailing Russian responsibility, and urged states to
boost their cyber defenses.
The Department of Homeland Security determined that while over three dozen states had their
election departments infiltrated, none of the compromised systems were involved in actual
vote tallying.
It is unclear whether the Russian hackers were blocked from disrupting the vote, or
whether the Kremlin simply decided not to.
The hacking methods the Russians used to gain access to these systems was fairly basic—phishing
and spear-phishing, which uses a tailored email to trick a specific person into thinking
the message is from a trusted source.
Throw enough spears into a school of fish and you’re bound to have some hits.
There was no bigger fish to skewer than Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
One month before the election, WikiLeaks began publishing a daily stream of Podesta’s entire
email archive.
The timing of the release is highly suspicious.
The first batch hit the Internet just half an hour after the Washington Post made public
the infamous Access Hollywood tape of Trump.
Just like the DNC emails, the Podesta archive did not contain any major bombshells.
But it did open the door for the second phase of Russia’s operation—a barrage of fake
news stories written on blogs and posted to social media where they were spread by a small
army of Russian run Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Because no one was going to read the many thousands of leaked democratic emails, they
were cited as the source for hundreds of fake news stories.
Many of them were too crazy to believe, but the sheer number of them that passed through
the social media feeds of tens of millions of Americans helped to plant seeds of doubt
about Clinton’s integrity and trustworthiness.
Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee after the election, former FBI agent
Clint Watts described how this strategy targeted swing-voters.
[Clinton Watts] “I know this from working on influence campaigns in the counter-terrorism
context.
If you do an appropriate target audience analysis on social media, you can actually identify
an audience in a foreign country or in the United States, parse out all of their preferences.
Part of the reason those bios had conservative, Christian, America, all those terms in it,
is those are the most common ones.
If you inhale all the accounts of people in Wisconsin, you identify the most common terms
in it, you just recreate accounts that look exactly like people from Wisconsin.
So that way whenever you're trying to socially engineer them and convince them that the information
is true, it's much more simple because you see somebody and they look exactly like you,
even down to the pictures.
When you look at the pictures, it looks like an American from the Midwest or the South
or Wisconsin or whatever the location is.”
Which brings us to the third phase of the operation: mobilizing Russia’s state-run
propaganda machine.
Outlets like RT and Sputnik, contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform
for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences.
It had consistently cast President Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional
US media outlets who — it says — served a corrupt political establishment.
RT’s coverage of Secretary Clinton throughout the US presidential campaign was consistently
negative and focused on her leaked e-mails and accused her of corruption, poor physical
and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism.
Thousands of paid Russian trolls spread these stories on social media and the comment sections
of news organizations.
The likely financier of the so-called Internet Research Agency of professional trolls located
in Saint Petersburg is a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.
A journalist who is a leading expert on the Internet Research Agency tied social media
accounts to Russia’s professional trolls by showing how they were previously devoted
to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine before advocating for President-elect Trump as early
as December 2015.
In 2013, RT’s editor-in-chief had visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian
embassy to discuss renewing his contract with RT.
During the 2016 campaign, Assange became one of Russia’s most valuable propagandists.
On August 6, RT published an English language video called “Julian Assange Special: Do
WikiLeaks Have the E-mail That’ll Put Clinton in Prison?” and an exclusive interview with
Assange entitled “Clinton and ISIS Funded by the Same Money.”
RT’s most popular video on Secretary Clinton, “How 100% of the Clintons’ ‘Charity’
Went to…Themselves,” had more than 9 million views on social media platforms.
RT’s most popular English language video about Trump, called “Trump Will Not Be Permitted
To Win,” featured Assange and had 2.2 million views.
The month before the release of the Podesta emails, President Obama had pulled Putin aside
during a summit in China to tell him to stop meddling in the election.
[President Obama] “What I was concerned in particular was making sure that that wasn’t
compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election
process itself.
And so, in early September when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective
way to ensure that that didn’t happen, was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut
it out and there were going to be significant consequences if he didn’t.”
After the release of the Podesta emails, the Obama administration issued a direct threat
to Russia through the Moscow—Washington crisis hotline that further action would be
met with “armed conflict.”
President Obama was now focused on deterring Putin from taking more aggressive actions
that could actually disrupt voting on election day.
But few US media outlets understood the gravity of the situation at the time.
Many American journalists were seduced by the gossipy nature of the leaks and the clicks
they generated.
Every major publication wrote several stories citing the DNC and Podesta emails, becoming
an inadvertent instrument of Russia.
Then, Mother Jones reported on the existence of a 35-page dossier written by a former MI-6
agent.
It sourced numerous Russian insiders and laid out the details of Russia’s operation to
help Trump become president.
While few news outlets picked up on it then, since the election, Buzzfeed has published
it in full, many of its claims have been verified both by the media and US Intelligence agencies,
and Presidents Obama and Trump both received briefings on it.
According to the dossier, in the run-up to the election, Putin fully understood the operation
may have gone too far and that Russia was exposed and beginning to suffer significant
blowback.
His team had been caught off-guard by how effectively investigative journalists and
the American government was exposing parts of the operation.
But there was no denying it was working—even if things were getting a little too messy.
Before Obama told him to “cut it out,” Putin had already moved command of the operation
from the Foreign Ministry to the FSB, and then into his own presidential administration;
he had ordered his team not to discuss it in public or private; and he had dismissed
the man who had been leading the effort—his Chief of Staff Sergei Ivanov.
On election night, Putin, like everyone else, was left to wait and see if he had done enough
to make Trump President.
The election turned out to be extremely close.
Donald Trump’s margin of victory was less than one percent in Michigan, Pennsylvania,
and Wisconsin, which combine for 46 electoral votes—more than enough to sway the outcome.
Russian media hailed President-elect Trump’s victory as a vindication of Putin’s advocacy
of global populist movements and the latest example of Western liberalism’s collapse.
Reports said officials in the Kremlin drank champagne the night of the election.
Intelligence agencies assess with a high degree of confidence that Moscow will apply lessons
learned from this campaign to future influence efforts in the United States and the rest
of the world, including against American allies and their election processes.
The New York Times summarizes the operation this way: “While there’s no way to be
certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear: A low-cost, high-impact
weapon that Russia had test-fired in elections from Ukraine to Europe was trained on the
United States, with devastating effectiveness.
For Russia, with an enfeebled economy and a nuclear arsenal it cannot use short of all-out
war, cyberpower proved the perfect weapon: cheap, hard to see coming, hard to trace.
Putin, a student of martial arts, had turned two institutions at the core of American democracy
— political campaigns and independent media — to his own ends.”
So that’s the question: what are those ends?
In part two of our investigation, we’ll present Putin’s motives for helping Donald
Trump become President instead of Hillary Clinton.
Thanks for watching.
For The Daily Conversation, I’m Bryce Plank.

How Russia Interfered in the 2016 U.S. Election

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