Comey: Russian Hackers Will Interfere With More Elections

[Jimbo101]

Slashdot

NY Times

James B. Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., testified that the Russians had not only intervened in last year's election, but would try to do it again... Russian hackers did not just breach Democratic email accounts; according to Mr. Comey, they orchestrated a "massive effort" targeting hundreds of -- and possibly more than 1,000 -- American government and private organizations since 2015... As F.B.I. director, he supervised counterintelligence investigations into computer break-ins that harvested emails from the State Department and the White House, and that penetrated deep into the computer systems of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet President Barack Obama's administration did not want to publicize those intrusions, choosing to handle them diplomatically -- perhaps because at the time they looked more like classic espionage than an effort to manipulate American politics...

Graham Allison, a longtime Russia scholar at Harvard, said, "Russia's cyberintrusion into the recent presidential election signals the beginning of what is almost sure to be an intensified cyberwar in which both they -- and we -- seek to participate in picking the leaders of an adversary." The difference, he added, is that American elections are generally fair, so "we are much more vulnerable to such manipulation than is Russia," where results are often preordained... Similar warnings have been issued by others in the intelligence community, led by James R. Clapper Jr., who has sounded the alarm since retiring in January as director of national intelligence. "I don't think people have their head around the scope of what the Russians are doing," he said recently.

Daniel Fried, a career diplomat who oversaw sanctions imposed on Russia before retiring this year, told the Times that Comey "was spot-on right that Russia is coming after us, but not just the U.S., but the free world in general. And we need to take this seriously."

[L. Coyote]

1. And Republicans will steal more elections.

Maybe we should focus on the bigger problem, the Republicans stealing democracy.

[moondust]

2. I'm wondering

how big Pooty's hacker army has become. It may be pretty big considering Russia has the worst inequality among first- and second-world countries. Pooty and his oligarchs could probably find a lot of hungry unemployed/underemployed to work for a hot meal and a few rubles in vodka money, not just in Moscow and St. Petersburg but out in remote areas as well given the reach of the Internet.

[TheFrenchRazor]

3. no sh*t. nt

[Turbineguy]

4. That's why the repubs call him a liar.

If the Russians do it, the GOP won't have to.