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Senate Quietly Passes The "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act"

While we wait to see if and when the Senate will pass (and president will sign) Bill "H.R. 6393, Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017", which was passed by the House at the end of November with an overwhelming majority and which seeks to crack down on websites suspected of conducting Russian propaganda and calling for the US government to "counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence … carried out in coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders or the security services of the Russian Federation and the role of the Russian Federation has been hidden or not acknowledged publicly,” another, perhaps even more dangerous and limiting to civil rights and freedom of speech bill passed on December 8.

Recall that as we reported in early June, "a bill to implement the U.S.’ very own de facto Ministry of Truth has been quietly introduced in Congress.

As with any legislation attempting to dodge the public spotlight the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 marks a further curtailment of press freedom and another avenue to stultify avenues of accurate information. Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s

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“security and stability.”

Also called the Countering Information Warfare Act of 2016 (S. 2692), when introduced in March by Sen. Rob Portman, the legislation represents a dramatic return to Cold War-era government propaganda battles.

“These countries spend vast sums of money on advanced broadcast and digital media capabilities, targeted campaigns, funding of foreign political movements, and other efforts to influence key audiences and populations,” Portman explained, adding that while the U.S. spends a relatively small amount on its Voice of America, the Kremlin provides enormous funding for its news organization, RT.

“Surprisingly,” Portman continued, “there is currently no single U.S. governmental agency or department charged with the national level development, integration and synchronization of whole-of-government strategies to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.”

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Long before the "fake news" meme became a daily topic of extensive conversation on which mainstream fake news portals as CNN and WaPo, H.R. 5181 would task the Secretary of State with coordinating the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to “establish a Center for Information Analysis and Response,” which will pinpoint sources of disinformation, analyze data, and — in true dystopic manner — ‘develop and disseminate’ “fact-based narratives” to counter effrontery propaganda.

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Fast forward to this past Thursday, December 8, when the "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act" passed in the Senate, quietly inserted inside the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report.

Here is the full statement issued by the generously funded Senator Rob Portman (R- Ohio) on the passage of a bill that further chips away at press liberties in the US, and which sets the stage for future which hunts and website shutdowns, purely as a result of an accusation that any one media outlet or site is considered as a source of "disinformation and propaganda" and is shut down by the government.

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Senate Passes Major Portman-Murphy Counter-Propaganda Bill as Part of NDAA

Portman/Murphy Bill Promotes Coordinated Strategy to Defend America, Allies Against Propaganda and Disinformation from Russia, China & Others

U.S. Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) today announced that their Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act – legislation designed to help American allies counter foreign government propaganda from Russia, China, and other nations – has passed the Senate as part of the FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report. The bipartisan bill, which was introduced by Senators Portman and Murphy in March, will improve the ability of the United States to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation by establishing an interagency center housed at the State Department [i.e. the CIA- SIGNY] to coordinate and synchronize counter-propaganda efforts throughout the U.S. government. To support these efforts, the bill also creates a grant program for NGOs, think tanks, civil society and other experts outside government who are engaged in counter-propaganda related work ....

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... This will better leverage existing expertise and empower local communities to defend themselves from foreign manipulation.

“The passage of this bill in the Senate today takes us one critical step closer to effectively confronting the extensive, and destabilizing, foreign propaganda and disinformation operations being waged against us. While the propaganda and disinformation threat has grown, the U.S. government has been asleep at the wheel. Today we are finally signaling that enough is enough; the United States will no longer sit on the sidelines. We are going to confront this threat head-on,” said Senator Portman. “With the help of this bipartisan bill, the disinformation and propaganda used against our allies and our interests will fail.”

“Congress has taken a big step in fighting back against fake news and propaganda from countries like Russia. When the president signs this bill into law, the United States will finally have a dedicated set of tools and resources to confront our adversaries’ widespread efforts to spread false narratives that undermine democratic institutions and compromise America’s foreign policy goals,” said Murphy. “I’m proud of what Senator Portman and I accomplished here because it’s long past time for the U.S. to get off the sidelines and confront these growing threats.”

NOTE: The bipartisan Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act is organized around two main priorities to help achieve the goal of combatting the constantly evolving threat of foreign disinformation. They are as follows:

* The first priority is developing a whole-of-government strategy for countering foreign propaganda and disinformation. The bill would increase the authority, resources, and mandate of the Global Engagement Center to include state actors like Russia and China in addition to violent extremists. The Center will be led by the State Department, but with the active senior level participation of the Department of Defense, USAID, the Broadcasting Board of Governors

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... the Intelligence Community, [CIA, NSA] and other relevant agencies. The Center will develop, integrate, and synchronize whole-of-government initiatives to expose and counter foreign disinformation operations and proactively advance fact-based narratives that support U.S. allies and interests.

Second, the legislation seeks to leverage expertise from outside government to create more adaptive and responsive U.S. strategy options. The legislation establishes a fund to help train local journalists and provide grants and contracts to NGOs, civil society organizations, think tanks, private sector companies, media organizations, and other experts outside the U.S. government with experience in identifying and analyzing the latest trends in foreign government disinformation techniques.

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This fund will complement and support the Center’s role by integrating capabilities and expertise available outside the U.S. government into the strategy-making process. It will also empower a decentralized network of private sector experts and integrate their expertise into the strategy-making process.

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In other words, the Act will i) greenlight the government to crack down with impunity against any media property it deems "propaganda", and ii) provide substantial amounts of money fund an army of "local journalist" counterpropaganda, to make sure the government's own fake news drowns that of the still free "fringes."

So while packaged politely in a veneer of "countering disinformation and propaganda", the bill, once signed by Obama, will effectively give the government a full mandate to punish, shut down or otherwise prosecute, any website it deems offensive and a source of "foreign government propaganda from Russia, China or other nations."

And since there is no formal way of proving whether or not there is indeed a foreign propaganda sponsor, all that will be sufficient to eliminate any "dissenting" website, will be the government's word against that of the website. One can be confident that the US government will almost certainly prevail in every single time.

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Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

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FBI disagrees with CIA on Russian influence in the presidential election

The FBI did not corroborate the CIA’s claim that Russia had a hand in the election of President-elect Donald Trump in a meeting with lawmakers last week.

A senior FBI counterintelligence official met with Republican and Democrat members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in order to give the bureau’s view of a recent CIA report. The official did not concur with the CIA, frustrating Democrats. ... The different conclusions reached by the two intelligence agencies is a reflection of their different institutional styles. CIA officials often use past behavior and analysis based on gathered intelligence to advise leaders, whereas the FBI comes from a more legalistic background which relies on hard evidence to make a case.

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Originally posted by G:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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FBI disagrees with CIA on Russian influence in the presidential election

The FBI did not corroborate the CIA’s claim that Russia had a hand in the election of President-elect Donald Trump in a meeting with lawmakers last week.

A senior FBI counterintelligence official met with Republican and Democrat members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in order to give the bureau’s view of a recent CIA report. The official did not concur with the CIA, frustrating Democrats. ... The different conclusions reached by the two intelligence agencies is a reflection of their different institutional styles. CIA officials often use past behavior and analysis based on gathered intelligence to advise leaders, whereas the FBI comes from a more legalistic background which relies on hard evidence to make a case.

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http://www.bizpacreview.com/2016/12/12/fbi-disagrees-cia-russian-influ
ence-presidential-election-422763

Because who needs evidence when simple accusation will do?

I see a fight shaping up between the DIA and FBI on the one hand, and the CIA on the other.

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So much to unpack:

1. At least your source bizpac, is upfront about their bias:

"Conservative News You Can Trust
Based in Palm Beach County, BizPac Review is a privately held, for-profit news and opinion website covering news that matters to conservatives throughout Florida and the United States."

2. This statement: "FBI disagrees with CIA on Russian influence in the presidential election" Disagrees how? Did bizpac say what specifically they disagreed on? No - they teased they would, but fishtailed away from being specific, only citing: "The different conclusions reached by the two intelligence agencies is a reflection of their different institutional styles." Ok, they're different entities so it's normal they would have different styles. On other words - BS article.

3. The money shot from the article only fizzles: "The official did not concur with the CIA, frustrating Democrats..."
Not no concur could mean ANYTHING. Did not think 1% was correct? It's wide open - again, a BS article.

4. Gathered Intelligence versus hard evidence? They're not the same? BS.

5. It is widely known that for many many years those 2 agencies have not played well together. That's messed up, but it explains why these 2 aren't slurping each other's work.

6. "The FBI did not corroborate the CIA’s claim that Russia had a hand in the election of President-elect Donald Trump in a meeting with lawmakers last week." Define: "had a hand in the election of President-elect Donald Trump." I'd like to see what the FBI thought had happened. Do they think there were no Russian hacks of the DNC or connection to Wikileaks? I really need to see a reputable source say that with facts to back it up before I would believe it.

7. It's easy to say Russia is being used by main stream media to sell papers/ads, but that would be true either way, so that proves nothing.

8. You have to ask: isn't it logical that Russia would want to influence our election? Of course.

9. Why would the CIA break a false story now? How would that change anything? What do they have to gain?

10. SIGNYM: "Because who needs evidence when simple accusation will do?"

OR, what you do:

"Because who needs evidence when Fake News will do?"

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The FBI hasn't concluded that the RNC itself was directly breached, a law enforcement official said Sunday. FBI investigators did find that a breach of a third-party entity that held data belonging to the RNC. But the data appears to have been outdated and of little value to the hackers. The FBI also found that some conservative groups and pundits were hacked. The FBI also hasn't found conclusive evidence to show that it was done to help Trump.

"At this point, there appears to have been a combination of motivations," one US law enforcement official said. "They wanted to sow discord and undermine our systems. It's clear not even the Russians thought he would win."

Officials familiar with the briefings given to Congress say the CIA assessment wasn't as definitive as has been portrayed in news reports this weekend. The agency developed new information in recent weeks, based on intelligence sources, which prompted a new assessment of the Russian hack. That assessment "leans" toward the view that the Russians were trying to hurt Clinton and help Trump. But the CIA assessment wasn't definitive, the officials said. http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/11/politics/russia-hacking-conclusions-dona
ld-trump/

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
More fake news:

A "secret" CIA report which alleges that Russia influenced our elections, from oney of my favorite fake news sources:

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Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-re
view-of-russian-hacking-during-presidential-campaign/2016/12/09/31d6b300-be2a-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.582fcdd48d5f

However,

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FBI disagrees with CIA on Russian influence in the presidential election

The FBI did not corroborate the CIA’s claim that Russia had a hand in the election of President-elect Donald Trump in a meeting with lawmakers last week.

A senior FBI counterintelligence official met with Republican and Democrat members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in order to give the bureau’s view of a recent CIA report. The official did not concur with the CIA, frustrating Democrats. ... The different conclusions reached by the two intelligence agencies is a reflection of their different institutional styles. CIA officials often use past behavior and analysis based on gathered intelligence to advise leaders, whereas the FBI comes from a more legalistic background which relies on hard evidence to make a case.

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http://www.bizpacreview.com/2016/12/12/fbi-disagrees-cia-russian-influ
ence-presidential-election-422763

Because who needs evidence when simple accusation will do?

I see a fight shaping up between the DIA and FBI on the one hand, and the CIA on the other.

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Originally posted by Riverlove:
Oh those damn pesky Russians! It's amazing what they can force people to do.


Wikileaks publishes 1000's of e-mails - Why?

Debbie Wasserman Schultz conspires against Bernie at DNC - Why?

Donna Brazile gives debate questions in advance to Hillary campaign - Why?

Hillary deletes e-mails from her bathroom closet server after subpoena issued for them - Why?

Hillary uses vulnerable private server for classified info that a Russian 6-year old could hack - Why?

Hillary tells FBI she didn't know that the BIG "C" on govt. docs meant classified - Why?

Podesta coordinates with news media to pre-approve debate and interview questions - Why?


So how'd the Russians make all those smart and honest people do so many dumb and naughty things? >>>>> Mind Control using genetically altered Beluga Caviar!

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

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Originally posted by Riverlove:
Oh those damn pesky Russians! It's amazing what they can force people to do.


Wikileaks publishes 1000's of e-mails - Why?

Debbie Wasserman Schultz conspires against Bernie at DNC - Why?

Donna Brazile gives debate questions in advance to Hillary campaign - Why?

Hillary deletes e-mails from her bathroom closet server after subpoena issued for them - Why?

Hillary uses vulnerable private server for classified info that a Russian 6-year old could hack - Why?

Hillary tells FBI she didn't know that the BIG "C" on govt. docs meant classified - Why?

Podesta coordinates with news media to pre-approve debate and interview questions - Why?


So how'd the Russians make all those smart and honest people do so many dumb and naughty things? >>>>> Mind Control using genetically altered Beluga Caviar!

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I am wondering if this is the best post you have ever made in RWED.
Bravo.

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Exclusive: Top U.S. spy agency has not embraced CIA assessment on Russia hacking - sources

The overseers of the U.S. intelligence community have not embraced a CIA assessment that Russian cyber attacks were aimed at helping Republican President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 election, three American officials said on Monday.

While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) does not dispute the CIA's analysis of Russian hacking operations, it has not endorsed their assessment because of a lack of conclusive evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, said the officials, who declined to be named.

The position of the ODNI, which oversees the 17 agency-strong U.S. intelligence community, could give Trump fresh ammunition to dispute the CIA assessment, which he rejected as "ridiculous" in weekend remarks, and press his assertion that no evidence implicates Russia in the cyber attacks.

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"Fake news" discussions always remind me of this

Consider how life in North America is going....
social media
hatred of cops
racism
media distrust
etc.
Makes one wonder

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What's this have to do with WaPo?- GSTRING

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Usually, when someone makes a bold statement to start a post: "Wow! The WaPo is sure taking a beating!" they follow that up with information that supports it- GSTRING

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Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence
The Washington Post late Friday night published an explosive story that, in many ways, is classic American journalism of the worst sort: The key claims are based exclusively on the unverified assertions of anonymous officials, who in turn are disseminating their own claims about what the CIA purportedly believes, all based on evidence that remains completely secret. https://theintercept.com/2016/12/10/anonymous-leaks-to-the-washpost-ab
out-the-cias-russia-beliefs-are-no-substitute-for-evidence/

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"Hillary is going to start WWIII? HIllary is near death?"

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc
.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the US.

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By ERIC LIPTON, DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANEDEC. 13, 2016

WASHINGTON — When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.
His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the DNC had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the Dukes,”* https://labsblog.f-secure.com/2015/09/17/the-dukes-7-years-of-russian-
cyber-espionage/ a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.
The FBI knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government’s best-protected networks.
Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the DNC who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and conduct a cursory search of the DNC computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real FBI agent and not an impostor.
“I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo, obtained by The New York Times, that detailed his contact with the FBI.

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It was the cryptic first sign of a cyberespionage and information-warfare campaign devised to disrupt the 2016 presidential election,

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the first such attempt by a foreign power in American history. What started as an information-gathering operation, intelligence officials believe, ultimately morphed into an effort to harm one candidate, Hillary Clinton, and tip the election to her opponent, Donald J. Trump.
Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the DNC The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing emails and zeros and ones.

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What is phishing?
Phishing uses an innocent-looking email to entice unwary recipients to click on a deceptive link, giving hackers access to their information or a network. In “spear-phishing,” the email is tailored to fool a specific person.
An examination by The Times of the Russian operation

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— based on interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama administration officials who deliberated over the best response — reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack.
The DNC’s fumbling encounter

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with the FBI meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks undercut efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully meant the Russians have not paid a heavy price for their actions,

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a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks.

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The low-key approach of the FBI meant that Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months before top DNC officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyberexperts to protect their systems.

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In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the DNC, including Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, whose private email account was hacked months later.

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Even Mr. Podesta, a savvy Washington insider who had written a 2014 report on cyberprivacy for President Obama * https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/big_data_privacy_r
eport_may_1_2014.pdf , did not truly understand the gravity of the hacking. Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, incorrectly legitimized a phishing email sent to the personal account of John D. Podesta, the campaign chairman.
By last summer, Democrats watched in helpless fury as their private emails and confidential documents appeared online day after day — procured by Russian intelligence agents

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, posted on WikiLeaks and other websites, then eagerly reported on by the American media, including The Times. Mr. Trump gleefully cited many of the purloined emails on the campaign trail.
The fallout included the resignations of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida * http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/us/politics/debbie-wasserman-schultz
-dnc-wikileaks-emails.html?_r=0 , the chairwoman of the DNC, and most of her top party aides. Leading Democrats were sidelined at the height of the campaign, silenced by revelations of embarrassing emails or consumed by the scramble to deal with the hacking. Though little-noticed by the public, confidential documents taken by the Russian hackers

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from the DNC’s sister organization * https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/dccc-internal-docs-on-prima
ries-in-florida/ , the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, turned up in congressional races in a dozen states, tainting some of them with accusations of scandal * . http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/house-democrats-hacking-
dccc.html?_r=0
In recent days, a skeptical president-elect, the nation’s intelligence agencies and the two major parties have become embroiled in an extraordinary public dispute over what evidence exists that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia moved beyond mere espionage to deliberately try to subvert American democracy and pick the winner of the presidential election.
Many of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides believe that the Russian assault had a profound impact on the election

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, while conceding that other factors — Mrs. Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate; her private email server; the public statements of the FBI director, James B. Comey, about her handling of classified information — were also important.
While there’s no way to be certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear

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: 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

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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.
“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind,” Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command, said at a postelection conference. “This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily,” he said. “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

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For the people whose emails were stolen, this new form of political sabotage has left a trail of shock and professional damage. Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a key Clinton supporter, recalls walking into the busy Clinton transition offices, humiliated to see her face on television screens as pundits discussed a leaked email in which she had called Mrs. Clinton’s instincts “suboptimal.” http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/18/politics/clinton-staffers-frustrated-hil
lary-clinton-bill-clinton-chelsea-clinton/
“It was just a sucker punch to the gut every day,” Ms. Tanden said. “It was the worst professional experience of my life.”
The United States, too, has carried out cyberattacks, and in decades past the CIA. tried to subvert foreign elections. But the Russian attack is increasingly understood across the political spectrum as an ominous historic landmark

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— with one notable exception: Mr. Trump has rejected the findings of the intelligence agencies he will soon oversee as “ridiculous,” insisting that the hacker may be American, or Chinese, but that “they have no idea.”

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Mr. Trump cited the reported disagreements between the agencies about whether Mr. Putin intended to help elect him. On Tuesday, a Russian government spokesman echoed Mr. Trump’s scorn.
“This tale of ‘hacks’ resembles a banal brawl between American security officials over spheres of influence,” Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, wrote on Facebook.

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Over the weekend, four prominent senators — two Republicans and two Democrats — joined forces to pledge an investigation

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while pointedly ignoring Mr. Trump’s skeptical claims.
“Democrats and Republicans must work together, and across the jurisdictional lines of the Congress, to examine these recent incidents thoroughly and devise comprehensive solutions to deter and defend against further cyberattacks,” said Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Schumer and Jack Reed.
“This cannot become a partisan issue,” they said. “The stakes are too high for our country.”
A Target for Break-Ins
Sitting in the basement of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, below a wall-size 2012 portrait of a smiling Barack Obama, is a 1960s-era filing cabinet missing the handle on the bottom drawer. Only a framed newspaper story hanging on the wall hints at the importance of this aged piece of office furniture.
“GOP Security Aide Among 5 Arrested in Bugging Affair, *” reads the headline from the front page of The Washington Post on June 19, 1972, with the bylines of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Andrew Brown, 37, the technology director at the DNC, was born after that famous break-in. But as he began to plan for this year’s election cycle, he was well aware that the DNC could become a break-in target again.
There were aspirations to ensure that the DNC was well protected against cyberintruders — and then there was the reality, Mr. Brown and his bosses at the organization acknowledged: The DNC was a nonprofit group, dependent on donations, with a fraction of the security budget that a corporation its size would have. “There was never enough money to do everything we needed to do,” Mr. Brown said.
The DNC had a standard email spam-filtering service, intended to block phishing attacks and malware created to resemble legitimate email. But when Russian hackers started in on the DNC

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, the committee did not have the most advanced systems in place to track suspicious traffic, internal DNC memos show.
Mr. Tamene, who reports to Mr. Brown and fielded the call from the FBI agent, was not a full-time DNC employee; he works for a Chicago-based contracting firm called The MIS Department * https://web.archive.org/web/20160507204851/http:/www.misdepartment.com
/staff . He was left to figure out, largely on his own, how to respond — and even whether the man who had called in to the DNC switchboard was really an FBI agent.

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“The FBI thinks the DNC has at least one compromised computer on its network and the FBI wanted to know if the DNC is aware, and if so, what the DNC is doing about it,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo about his contacts with the FBI He added that “the Special Agent told me to look for a specific type of malware dubbed ‘Dukes’ by the US. intelligence community and in cybersecurity circles.”
Part of the problem was that Special Agent Hawkins did not show up in person at the DNC Nor could he email anyone there, as that risked alerting the hackers that the FBI knew they were in the system.
Mr. Tamene’s initial scan of the DNC system — using his less-than-optimal tools and incomplete targeting information from the FBI — found nothing. So when Special Agent Hawkins called repeatedly in October, leaving voice mail messages for Mr. Tamene, urging him to call back, “I did not return his calls, as I had nothing to report,” Mr. Tamene explained in his memo.

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In November, Special Agent Hawkins called with more ominous news. A DNC computer was “calling home, where home meant Russia,” Mr. Tamene’s memo says, referring to software sending information to Moscow. “SA Hawkins added that the FBI thinks that this calling home behavior could be the result of a state-sponsored attack.”
Mr. Brown knew that Mr. Tamene, who declined to comment, was fielding calls from the FBI. But he was tied up on a different problem: evidence suggesting that the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Mrs. Clinton’s main Democratic opponent, had improperly gained access to her campaign data.

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Ms. Wasserman Schultz, then the DNC’s chairwoman, and Amy Dacey, then its chief executive, said in interviews that neither of them was notified about the early reports that the committee’s system had likely been compromised.
Shawn Henry, who once led the FBI’s cyber division and is now president of CrowdStrike Services, the cybersecurity firm retained by the DNC in April, said he was baffled that the FBI did not call a more senior official at the DNC or send an agent in person to the party headquarters to try to force a more vigorous response.
“We are not talking about an office that is in the middle of the woods of Montana,” Mr. Henry said. “We are talking about an office that is half a mile from the FBI office that is getting the notification.”
“This is not a mom-and-pop delicatessen or a local library. This is a critical piece of the US. infrastructure because it relates to our electoral process, our elected officials, our legislative process, our executive process,” he added. “To me it is a high-level, serious issue, and if after a couple of months you don’t see any results, somebody ought to raise that to a higher level.”
The FBI declined to comment on the agency’s handling of the hack. “The FBI takes very seriously any compromise of public and private sector systems,” it said in a statement, adding that agents “will continue to share information” to help targets “safeguard their systems against the actions of persistent cybercriminals.”
By March, Mr. Tamene and his team had met at least twice in person with the FBI and concluded that Agent Hawkins was really a federal employee. But then the situation took a dire turn.
A second team of Russian-affiliated hackers

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began to target the DNC

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and other players

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in the political world, particularly Democrats. Billy Rinehart, a former DNC regional field director who was then working for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, got an odd email warning from Google.
“Someone just used your password to try to sign into your Google account,” the March 22 email said * (* scrubbed or otherwise inaccessible), adding that the sign-in attempt had occurred in Ukraine. “Google stopped this sign-in attempt. You should change your password immediately.”
Mr. Rinehart was in Hawaii at the time. He remembers checking his email at 4 a.m. for messages from East Coast associates. Without thinking much about the notification, he clicked on the “change password” button and half asleep, as best he can remember, he typed in a new password. What he did not know until months later is that he had just given the Russian hackers access to his email account.
Hundreds of similar phishing emails were being sent to American political targets, including an identical email sent on March 19 to Mr. Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign. Given how many emails Mr. Podesta received through this personal email account, several aides also had access to it, and one of them noticed the warning email, sending it to a computer technician to make sure it was legitimate before anyone clicked on the “change password” button.
“This is a legitimate email,” Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, replied * https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/34899 to another of Mr. Podesta’s aides, who had noticed the alert. “John needs to change his password immediately.”
With another click, a decade of emails that Mr. Podesta maintained in his Gmail account — a total of about 60,000 — were unlocked for the Russian hackers.

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Mr. Delavan, in an interview, said that his bad advice was a result of a typo: He knew this was a phishing attack, as the campaign was getting dozens of them. He said he had meant to type that it was an “illegitimate” email, an error that he said has plagued him ever since.
During this second wave, the hackers also gained access to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and then, through a virtual private network connection, to the main computer network of the DNC.

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The FBI observed this surge of activity as well, again reaching out to Mr. Tamene to warn him. Yet Mr. Tamene still saw no reason to be alarmed: He found copies of the phishing emails in the DNC’s spam filter. But he had no reason, he said, to believe that the computer systems had been infiltrated.
One bit of progress had finally been made by the middle of April: The DNC, seven months after it had first been warned, finally installed a “robust set of monitoring tools,” Mr. Tamene’s internal memo says.
The United States had two decades of warning that Russia’s intelligence agencies were trying to break into America’s most sensitive computer networks. But the Russians have always managed to stay a step ahead.
Their first major attack was detected on Oct. 7, 1996, when a computer operator at the Colorado School of Mines discovered some nighttime computer activity he could not explain. The school had a major contract with the Navy, and the operator warned his contacts there. But as happened two decades later at the DNC, at first “everyone was unable to connect the dots,” said Thomas Rid * http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/warstudies/people/professors/rid
.aspx , a scholar at King’s College in London who has studied the attack.
Investigators gave it a name — Moonlight Maze * https://medium.com/@chris_doman/the-first-sophistiated-cyber-attacks-how-operation-moonlight-maze-made-history-2adb12cc43f7#.lzxoflofx — and spent two years, often working day and night, tracing how it hopped from the Navy to the Department of Energy to the Air Force and NASA. In the end, they concluded that the total number of files stolen, if printed and stacked, would be taller than the Washington Monument.
Whole weapons designs were flowing out the door, and it was a first taste of what was to come: an escalating campaign of cyberattacks around the world.
But for years, the Russians stayed largely out of the headlines, thanks to the Chinese — who took bigger risks, and often got caught. They stole the designs for the F-35 fighter jet, corporate secrets for rolling steel, even the blueprints for gas pipelines that supply much of the United States. And during the 2008 presidential election cycle, Chinese intelligence hacked into the campaigns of Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, making off with internal position papers and communications. But they didn’t publish any of it.
The Russians had not gone away, of course. “They were just a lot more stealthy,” said Kevin Mandia * https://www.fireeye.com/company/leadership.html , a former Air Force intelligence officer who spent most of his days fighting off Russian cyberattacks before founding Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm that is now a division of FireEye — and the company the Clinton campaign brought in to secure its own systems.

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The Russians were also quicker to turn their attacks to political purposes. A 2007 cyberattack on Estonia, a former Soviet republic that had joined NATO, sent a message that Russia could paralyze the country without invading it.

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The next year cyberattacks were used during Russia’s war with Georgia.
But American officials did not imagine that the Russians would dare try those techniques inside the United States. They were largely focused on preventing what former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned was an approaching “cyber Pearl Harbor” — a shutdown of the power grid or cellphone networks.
But in 2014 and 2015, a Russian hacking group

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began systematically targeting the State Department, the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff

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. “Each time, they eventually met with some form of success,” Michael Sulmeyer, a former cyberexpert for the secretary of defense, and Ben Buchanan, now both of the Harvard Cyber Security Project * http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/project/69/cyber_security_project.
html , wrote recently in a soon-to-be published paper for the Carnegie Endowment.
The Russians grew stealthier and stealthier

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, tricking government computers into sending out data while disguising the electronic “command and control” messages that set off alarms for anyone looking for malicious actions. The State Department was so crippled that it repeatedly closed its systems

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to throw out the intruders. At one point, officials traveling to Vienna with Secretary of State John Kerry for the Iran nuclear negotiations had to set up commercial Gmail accounts

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just to communicate with one another and with reporters traveling with them.
Mr. Obama was briefed regularly on all this, but he made a decision that many in the White House now regret: He did not name Russians publicly, or issue sanctions. There was always a reason: fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the United States needed Russia’s cooperation in negotiations over Syria.
“We’d have all these circular meetings,” one senior State Department official said, “in which everyone agreed you had to push back at the Russians and push back hard. But it didn’t happen.”
So the Russians escalated again — breaking into systems not just for espionage

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, but to publish or broadcast what they found, known as “doxing” in the cyberworld.
It was a brazen change in tactics, moving the Russians

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from espionage to influence operations. In February 2014, they broadcast an intercepted phone call

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* https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/08/world/europe/ukraine.html?_r=0 between Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state who handles Russian affairs and has a contentious relationship with Mr. Putin, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the United States ambassador to Ukraine. Ms. Nuland was heard describing a little-known American effort to broker a deal in Ukraine, then in political turmoil.
They were not the only ones on whom the Russians used the steal-and-leak strategyhttps:// www.nytimes.com/2014/02/08/world/europe/ukraine.html?_r=0. The Open Society Foundation, run by George Soros, was a major target, and when its documents were released * http://soros.dcleaks.com/ , some turned out to have been altered to make it appear as if the foundation was financing Russian opposition members.
Last year, the attacks became more aggressive. Russia hacked a major French television station, frying critical hardware. Around Christmas, it attacked part of the power grid in Ukraine, dropping a portion of the country into darkness, killing backup generators and taking control of generators. In retrospect, it was a warning shot.
The attacks “were not fully integrated military operations,” Mr. Sulmeyer said. But they showed an increasing boldness.
Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear
The day before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April, Ms. Dacey, the DNC’s chief executive, was preparing for a night of parties when she got an urgent phone call.
With the new monitoring system in place, Mr. Tamene had examined administrative logs of the DNC’s computer system and found something very suspicious: An unauthorized person, with administrator-level security status, had gained access to the DNC’s computers.
“Not sure it is related to what the FBI has been noticing,” said one internal DNC email sent on April 29. “The DNC may have been hacked in a serious way this week, with password theft, etc.”
No one knew just how bad the breach was — but it was clear that a lot more than a single filing cabinet worth of materials might have been taken. A secret committee was immediately created, including Ms. Dacey, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, Mr. Brown and Michael Sussmann * https://www.perkinscoie.com/en/professionals/michael-sussmann.html , a former cybercrimes prosecutor at the Department of Justice who now works at Perkins Coie, the Washington law firm that handles DNC political matters.
“Three most important questions,” Mr. Sussmann wrote to his clients the night the break-in was confirmed. “1) What data was accessed? 2) How was it done? 3) How do we stop it?”
Mr. Sussmann instructed his clients not to use DNC email because they had just one opportunity to lock the hackers out — an effort that could be foiled if the hackers knew that the DNC was on to them.
“You only get one chance to raise the drawbridge,” Mr. Sussmann said. “If the adversaries know you are aware of their presence, they will take steps to burrow in, or erase the logs that show they were present.”
Michael Sussmann, a Washington lawyer and former cybercrime prosecutor at the Justice Department, received an email in late April confirming that the DNC’s computer system had been compromised.
The DNC immediately hired CrowdStrike * https://www.crowdstrike.com/ , a cybersecurity firm, to scan its computers, identify the intruders and build a new computer and telephone system from scratch. Within a day, CrowdStrike confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia

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, Mr. Sussmann said.
The work that such companies do is a computer version of old-fashioned crime scene investigation, with fingerprints, bullet casings and DNA swabs replaced by an electronic trail that can be just as incriminating. And just as police detectives learn to identify the telltale methods of a veteran burglar, so CrowdStrike investigators recognized the distinctive handiwork of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear.

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Those are CrowdStrike’s nicknames for the two Russian hacking groups

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that the firm found at work inside the DNC network. Cozy Bear — the group also known as the Dukes or A.P.T. 29, for “advanced persistent threat” — may or may not be associated with the F.S.B., the main successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., but it is widely believed

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to be a Russian government operation. It made its first appearance in 2014, said Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
It was Cozy Bear, CrowdStrike concluded, that first penetrated the DNC in the summer of 2015, by sending spear-phishing emails to a long list of American government agencies, Washington nonprofits and government contractors. Whenever someone clicked on a phishing message, the Russians would enter the network, “exfiltrate” documents of interest and stockpile them for intelligence purposes

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.
“Once they got into the DNC

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, they found the data valuable and decided to continue the operation,” said Mr. Alperovitch, who was born in Russia and moved to the United States as a teenager.
Only in March 2016 did Fancy Bear show up — first penetrating the computers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and then jumping to the DNC, investigators believe

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. Fancy Bear, sometimes called A.P.T. 28 and believed to be directed by the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency

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, is an older outfit, tracked by Western investigators for nearly a decade. It was Fancy Bear that got hold of Mr. Podesta’s email.
Attribution, as the skill of identifying a cyberattacker is known, is more art than science. It is often impossible to name an attacker with absolute certainty. But over time, by accumulating a reference library of hacking techniques and targets, it is possible to spot repeat offenders. Fancy Bear, for instance, has gone after military and political targets in Ukraine and Georgia, and at NATO installations.
That largely rules out cybercriminals and most countries, Mr. Alperovitch said. “There’s no plausible actor that has an interest in all those victims other than Russia

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,” he said. Another clue: The Russian hacking groups tended to be active during working hours in the Moscow time zone

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.
To their astonishment, Mr. Alperovitch said, CrowdStrike experts found signs that the two Russian hacking groups had not coordinated their attacks. Fancy Bear, apparently not knowing that Cozy Bear had been rummaging in DNC files for months, took many of the same documents.
In the six weeks after CrowdStrike’s arrival, in total secrecy, the computer system at the DNC was replaced. For a weekend, email and phones were shut off; employees were told it was a system upgrade. All laptops were turned in and the hard drives wiped clean, with the uninfected information on them imaged to new drives.
Though DNC officials had learned that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had been infected, too, they did not notify their sister organization, which was in the same building, because they were afraid that it would leak.
All of this work took place as the bitter contest for the Democratic nomination continued to play out between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders, and it was already causing a major distraction for Ms. Wasserman Schultz and the DNC’s chief executive.

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“This was not a bump in the road — bumps in the road happen all the time,” she said in an interview. “Two different Russian spy agencies

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had hacked into our network

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and stolen our property. And we did not yet know what they had taken. But we knew they had very broad access to our network. There was a tremendous amount of uncertainty. And it was chilling.”
The DNC executives and their lawyer had their first formal meeting with senior FBI officials in mid-June, nine months after the bureau’s first call to the tech-support contractor. Among the early requests at that meeting, according to participants: that the federal government make a quick “attribution” formally blaming actors with ties to Russian government for the attack to make clear that it was not routine hacking but foreign espionage.
“You have a presidential election underway here and you know that the Russians have hacked into the DNC

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,” Mr. Sussmann said, recalling the message to the FBI “We need to tell the American public that. And soon.”
In mid-June, on Mr. Sussmann’s advice, DNC leaders decided to take a bold step. Concerned that word of the hacking might leak, they decided to go public in The Washington Post with the news * https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-governm
ent-hackers-penetrated-dnc-stole-opposition-research-on-trump/2016/06/14/cf006cb4-316e-11e6-8ff7-7b6c1998b7a0_story.html?utm_term=.8a1048383d67

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that the committee had been attacked. That way, they figured, they could get ahead of the story, win a little sympathy from voters for being victimized by Russian hackers and refocus on the campaign.
But the very next day, a new, deeply unsettling shock awaited them. Someone calling himself Guccifer 2.0 appeared* https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/dnc/ on the web, claiming to be the DNC hacker — and he posted a confidential committee document detailing Mr. Trump’s record and half a dozen other documents to prove his bona fides.
“And it’s just a tiny part of all docs I downloaded from the Democrats networks,” he wrote. Then something more ominous: “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks. They will publish them soon.”
It was bad enough that Russian hackers had been spying

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inside the committee’s network for months. Now the public release of documents had turned a conventional espionage operation into something far more menacing: political sabotage, an unpredictable, uncontrollable menace for Democratic campaigns.
Guccifer 2.0 borrowed the moniker of an earlier hacker, a Romanian who called himself Guccifer and was jailed for breaking into the personal computers of former President George W. Bush, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other notables. This new attacker seemed intent on showing that the DNC’s cyberexperts at CrowdStrike were wrong to blame Russia. Guccifer 2.0 called himself a “lone hacker” and mocked CrowdStrike for calling the attackers “sophisticated.”
But online investigators quickly undercut his story. On a whim, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a writer for Motherboard, the tech and culture site of Vice, tried to contact Guccifer 2.0 by direct message on Twitter.
“Surprisingly, he answered right away,” Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai said. But whoever was on the other end seemed to be mocking him. “I asked him why he did it, and he said he wanted to expose the Illuminati. He called himself a Gucci lover. And he said he was Romanian.”
That gave Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai an idea. Using Google Translate, he sent the purported hacker some questions in Romanian. The answers came back in Romanian. But when he was offline, Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai checked with a couple of native speakers, who told him Guccifer 2.0 had apparently been using Google Translate as well — and was clearly not the Romanian he claimed to be.
Cyberresearchers found other clues pointing to Russia. Microsoft Word documents posted by Guccifer 2.0 had been edited by someone calling himself, in Russian, Felix Edmundovich — an obvious nom de guerre honoring the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky *

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. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Felix_Dzerzhinsky Bad links in the texts were marked by warnings in Russian, generated by what was clearly a Russian-language version of Word.
When Mr. Franceschi-Bicchierai managed to engage Guccifer 2.0 over a period of weeks, he found that his interlocutor’s tone and manner changed. “At first he was careless and colloquial. Weeks later, he was curt and more calculating,” he said. “It seemed like a group of people, and a very sloppy attempt to cover up.”

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Computer experts drew the same conclusion about DCLeaks.com * http://dcleaks.com/ , a site that sprang up in June, claiming to be the work of “hacktivists” but posting more stolen documents. It, too, seemed to be a clumsy front for the same Russians who had stolen the documents. Notably, the website was registered in April, suggesting that the Russian hacking team planned well in advance to make public what it stole.
In addition to what Guccifer 2.0 published on his site, he provided material directly on request to some bloggers * and publications *. The steady flow of Guccifer 2.0 documents constantly undercut Democratic messaging efforts. On July 6, 12 days before the Republican National Convention began in Cleveland, Guccifer released the DNC’s battle plan and budget for countering it. For Republican operatives, it was insider gold.
Then WikiLeaks, a far more established outlet, began to publish the hacked material — just as Guccifer 2.0 had promised. On July 22, three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks dumped out 44,053 DNC emails with 17,761 attachments * . https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/ Some of the messages made clear that some DNC officials favored Mrs. Clinton over her progressive challenger, Mr. Sanders.
That was no shock; Mr. Sanders, after all, had been an independent socialist, not a Democrat, during his long career in Congress, while Mrs. Clinton had been one of the party’s stars for decades. But the emails, some of them crude or insulting, infuriated Sanders delegates as they arrived in Philadelphia. Ms. Wasserman Schultz resigned under pressure on the eve of the convention where she had planned to preside.
Mr. Trump, by now the Republican nominee, expressed delight at the continuing jolts to his opponent, and he began to use Twitter and his stump speeches to highlight the WikiLeaks releases. On July 25, he sent out a lighthearted tweet: “The new joke in town,” he wrote, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”
But WikiLeaks was far from finished. On Oct. 7, a month before the election, the site began the serial publication of thousands of private emails to and from Mr. Podesta * https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/ , Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager.
The same day, the United States formally accused the Russian government of being behind the hackings, in a joint statement * https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homelan
d-security-and-office-director-national by the director of national intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, and Mr. Trump suffered his worst blow to date, with the release of a recording in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women.
The Podesta emails were nowhere near as sensational as the Trump video. But, released by WikiLeaks day after day over the last month of the campaign, they provided material for countless news reports. They disclosed the contents of Mrs. Clinton’s speeches to large banks, which she had refused to release. They exposed tensions inside the campaign, including disagreements over donations to the Clinton Foundation that staff members thought might look bad for the candidate and Ms. Tanden’s complaint that Mrs. Clinton’s instincts were “suboptimal.”

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“I was just mortified,” Ms. Tanden said in an interview. Her emails were released on the eve of one of the presidential debates, she recalled. “I put my hands over my head and said, ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me.’” Though she had regularly appeared on television to support Mrs. Clinton, she canceled her appearances because all the questions were about what she had said in the emails.
Ms. Tanden, like other Democrats whose messages became public, said it was obvious to her that WikiLeaks was trying its best to damage the Clinton campaign. “If you care about transparency, you put all the emails out at once,” she said. “But they wanted to hurt her. So they put them out 1,800 to 3,000 a day.”
The Trump campaign knew in advance about WikiLeaks’ plans. Days before the Podesta email release began, Roger Stone, a Republican operative working with the Trump campaign, sent out an excited tweet about what was coming.
But in an interview, Mr. Stone said he had no role in the leaks; he had just heard from an American with ties to WikiLeaks that damning emails were coming.
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and editor, has resisted the conclusion that his site became a pass-through for Russian hackers working for Mr. Putin’s government or that he was deliberately trying to undermine Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. But the evidence on both counts appears compelling

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.
In a series of email exchanges, Mr. Assange refused to say anything about WikiLeaks’ source for the hacked material. He denied that he had made his animus toward Mrs. Clinton clear in public statements (“False. But what is this? Junior high?”) or that the site had timed the releases for maximum negative effect on her campaign. “WikiLeaks makes its decisions based on newsworthiness, including for its recent epic scoops,” he wrote.
Mr. Assange disputed the conclusion of the Oct. 7 statement from the intelligence agencies that the leaks were “intended to interfere with the US. election process.”
“This is false,” he wrote. “As the disclosing party we know that this was not the intent. Publishers publishing newsworthy information during an election is part of a free election.”
But asked whether he believed the leaks were one reason for Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Assange seemed happy to take credit. “Americans extensively engaged with our publications,” he wrote. “According to Facebook statistics WikiLeaks was the most referenced political topic during October.”
Though Mr. Assange did not say so, WikiLeaks’ best defense may be the conduct of the mainstream American media. Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the DNC and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence

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.
Mr. 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. The media’s appetite for the hacked material, and its focus on the gossipy content instead of the Russian source

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, disturbed some of those whose personal emails were being reposted across the web.
“What was really surprising to me?” Ms. Tanden said. “I could not believe that reporters were covering it.”
Inside the White House, as Mr. Obama’s advisers debated their response, their conversation turned to North Korea.
In late 2014, hackers working for Kim Jong-un, the North’s young and unpredictable leader, had carried out a well-planned attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment intended to stop the Christmastime release of a comedy about a CIA plot to kill Mr. Kim.
In that case, embarrassing emails had also been released. But the real damage was done to Sony’s own systems: More than 70 percent of its computers melted down when a particularly virulent form of malware was released. Within weeks, intelligence agencies traced the attack back to the North and its leadership. Mr. Obama called North Korea out in public, and issued some not-very-effective sanctions. The Chinese even cooperated, briefly cutting off the North’s internet connections.
As the first Situation Room meetings on the Russian hacking began in July, “it was clear that Russia was going to be a much more complicated case,” said one participant. The Russians clearly had a more sophisticated understanding of American politics, and they were masters of “kompromat *,” their term for compromising information.
But a formal “attribution report” still had not been forwarded to the president.
“It took forever,” one senior administration official said, complaining about the pace at which the intelligence assessments moved through the system.
In August a group that called itself the “Shadow Brokers” * published a set of software tools that looked like what the NSA uses to break into foreign computer networks and install “implants,” malware that can be used for surveillance or attack. The code came from the Tailored Access Operations unit of the NSA, a secretive group that mastered the arts of surveillance and cyberwar.
The assumption — still unproved — was that the code was put out in the open by the Russians as a warning: Retaliate for the DNC, and there are a lot more secrets, from the hackings of the State Department, the White House and the Pentagon, that might be spilled as well. One senior official compared it to the scene in “The Godfather” where the head of a favorite horse is left in a bed, as a warning.
The NSA said nothing. But by late August, Admiral Rogers, its director, was pressing for a more muscular response to the Russians. In his role as director of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, he proposed a series of potential counter-cyberstrikes.
Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command, pressed for a more muscular response to the Russians. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
While officials will not discuss them in detail, the possible counterstrikes reportedly included operations that would turn the tables on Mr. Putin, exposing his financial links to Russia’s oligarchs, and punching holes in the Russian internet to allow dissidents to get their message out. Pentagon officials judged the measures too unsubtle and ordered up their own set of options.
But in the end, none of those were formally presented to the president.
In a series of “deputies meetings” run by Avril Haines, * the deputy national security adviser and a former deputy director of the CIA, several officials warned that an overreaction by the administration would play into Mr. Putin’s hands.
“If we went to Defcon 4,” one frequent participant in Ms. Haines’s meetings said, using a phrase from the Cold War days of warnings of war, “we would be saying to the public that we didn’t have confidence in the integrity of our voting system.”

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Even something seemingly straightforward — using the president’s executive powers, bolstered after the Sony incident, to place economic and travel sanctions on cyberattackers — seemed too risky.
“No one was all that eager to impose costs before Election Day,” said another participant in the classified meeting. “Any retaliatory measures were seen through the prism of what would happen on Election Day.”
Instead, when Mr. Obama’s national security team reconvened after summer vacation, the focus turned to a crash effort to secure the nation’s voting machines and voter-registration rolls from hacking. The scenario they discussed most frequently — one that turned out not to be an issue — was a narrow vote in favor of Mrs. Clinton, followed by a declaration by Mr. Trump that the vote was “rigged” and more leaks intended to undercut her legitimacy.
Donna Brazile, the interim chairwoman of the DNC, became increasingly frustrated as the clock continued to run down on the presidential election — and still there was no broad public condemnation by the White House, or Republican Party leaders, of the attack as an act of foreign espionage.
Ms. Brazile even reached out to Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, urging him twice in private conversations and in a letter * to join her in condemning the attacks — an offer he declined to take up.
“We just kept hearing the government would respond, the government would respond,” she said. “Once upon a time, if a foreign government interfered with our election we would respond as a nation, not as a political party.”
But Mr. Obama did decide that he would deliver a warning to Mr. Putin in person at a Group of 20 summit meeting in Hangzhou, China, the last time they would be in the same place while Mr. Obama was still in office. When the two men met for a tense pull-aside, Mr. Obama explicitly warned Mr. Putin of a strong American response if there was continued effort to influence the election or manipulate the vote, according to White House officials who were not present for the one-on-one meeting.
Later that day, Mr. Obama made a rare reference to America’s own offensive cybercapacity, which he has almost never talked about. “Frankly, both offensively and defensively, we have more capacity,” he told reporters.
But when it came time to make a public assertion of Russia’s role in early October, it was made in a written statement from the director of national intelligence and the secretary of homeland security. It was far less dramatic than the president’s appearance in the press room two years before to directly accuse the North Koreans of attacking Sony.
The reference in the statement to hackings on “political organizations,” officials now say, encompassed a hacking on data stored by the Republicans as well. Two senior officials say the forensic evidence was accompanied by “human and technical” sources in Russia

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, which appears to mean that the United States’ implants or taps in Russian computer and phone networks helped confirm the country’s role.
But that may not be known for decades, until the secrets are declassified.
A week later Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was sent out to transmit a public warning to Mr. Putin: The United States will retaliate “at the time of our choosing. And under the circumstances that have the greatest impact.”
Later, after Mr. Biden said he was not concerned that Russia could “fundamentally alter the election,” he was asked whether the American public would know if the message to Mr. Putin had been sent.
“Hope not,” Mr. Biden responded.
Some of his former colleagues think that was the wrong answer. An American counterstrike, said Michael Morell, the former deputy director of the CIA under Mr. Obama, has “got to be overt. It needs to be seen.”
A covert response would significantly limit the deterrence effect, he added. “If you can’t see it, it’s not going to deter the Chinese and North Koreans and Iranians and others.”
The Obama administration says it still has more than 30 days to do exactly that.
The Next Target
As the year draws to a close, it now seems possible that there will be multiple investigations of the Russian hacking — the intelligence review Mr. Obama has ordered completed by Jan. 20, the day he leaves office, and one or more congressional inquiries. They will wrestle with, among other things, Mr. Putin’s motive.
Did he seek to mar the brand of American democracy, to forestall anti-Russian activism for both Russians and their neighbors? Or to weaken the next American president, since presumably Mr. Putin had no reason to doubt American forecasts that Mrs. Clinton would win easily? Or was it, as the CIA concluded last month, a deliberate attempt to elect Mr. Trump?
In fact, the Russian hack-and-dox scheme accomplished all three goals.
What seems clear is that Russian hacking, given its success, is not going to stop. Two weeks ago, the German intelligence chief, Bruno Kahl, warned * that Russia might target elections in Germany next year. “The perpetrators have an interest to delegitimize the democratic process as such,” Mr. Kahl said. * Now, he added, “Europe is in the focus of these attempts of disturbance, and Germany to a particularly great extent.”
4262Comments
But Russia has by no means forgotten its American target. On the day after the presidential election, the cybersecurity company Volexity reported five new waves of phishing emails, evidently from Cozy Bear, aimed at think tanks and nonprofits in the United States.
One of them purported to be from Harvard University, attaching a fake paper. Its title: “Why American Elections Are Flawed.”
Correction: December 13, 2016
Editors’ Note: An earlier version of the main photograph with this article, of a filing cabinet and computer at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, should not have been published. The photographer had removed a framed image from the wall over the filing cabinet — showing a Washington Post Watergate front page — because it was causing glare with the lighting. The new version shows the scene as it normally appears, with the framed newspaper page in place.

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The hack started just as Trump was entering the primaries, in 2015. It's a little hard to claim that whoever did the hack was supporting Trump - OR ANYBODY - at that point. - SIGNY

Which means absolutely nothing, thanks. Hacks don't have calendars or seasons - wise up. - GSTRING

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From:slatham@hillaryclinton.com
To: mfisher@hillaryclinton.com, john.podesta@gmail.com
Date: 2016-03-19 12:07
Subject: Fwd: S?me?ne has your passw?rd
The gmail one is REAL
Milia, can you change - does JDP have the 2 step verification or do we need to do with him on the phone? Don't want to lock him out of his in box!
Sent from my iPhone ....

Sara,
This is a legitimate email. John needs to change his password immediately, and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account. He can go to this link: https://myaccount.google.com/security to do both. It is absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP. If you or he has any questions, please reach out to me at 410.562.9762

Hi John
Someone just used your password to try to sign in to your Google Account john.podesta@gmail.com.
Details:
Saturday, 19 March, 8:34:30 UTC
IP Address: 134.249.139.239
Location: Ukraine
Google stopped this sign-in attempt. You should change your password immediately.

CHANGE PASSWORD < https://bit.ly/1PibSU0>;;
Best,
The Gmail Team
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/34899#efmAAGAAbAHLAIUAWxA
XH

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Further evidence of the political motivation behind the whole CIA claim that Russia was behind the DNC and Podesta leaks has come from an unexpected quarter – James Clapper’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (“ODNI”) – which supervises the work of all of the US’s 17 intelligence agencies.

Speaking anonymously to Reuters, three ODNI officials have trashed the CIA claim that Russia provided Wikileaks with the DNC and Podesta leaks in order to help Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the US election.

The key point the ODNI officials are making is that whilst there is some evidence of Russian intelligence having hacked the DNC, that does not prove it was Russian intelligence which passed on the information to Wikileaks in order to swing the election to Donald Trump.

In the words of one of the unnamed ODNI officials

“[The CIA conclusion] was a judgment based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked. (It was) a thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgment.”

Moreover it turns out that this is the same thinking as that of the FBI. As one of the ODNI officials told Reuters

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose evidentiary standards require it to make cases that can stand up in court, declined to accept the CIA’s analysis – a deductive assessment of the available intelligence – for the same reason”.

“We’re aware that campaigns and related organizations and individuals are targeted by actors with a variety of motivations — from philosophical differences to espionage — and capabilities — from defacements to intrusions,” said Brian P. Hale, director of public affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “We defer to FBI for specific incidents.”

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No, I'm saying the sudden orchestrated she-could-die-in-office discussion about her "health" was fake

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which you were a happy, willing participant in

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Do you know how many hacking attempts/leaks on the DNC that the media has reported?

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Further evidence of the political motivation behind the whole CIA claim that Russia was behind the DNC and Podesta leaks has come from an unexpected quarter – James Clapper’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (“ODNI”) – which supervises the work of all of the US’s 17 intelligence agencies.

Speaking anonymously to Reuters, three ODNI officials have trashed the CIA claim that Russia provided Wikileaks with the DNC and Podesta leaks in order to help Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the US election.

The key point the ODNI officials are making is that whilst there is some evidence of Russian intelligence having hacked the DNC, that does not prove it was Russian intelligence which passed on the information to Wikileaks in order to swing the election to Donald Trump.

In the words of one of the unnamed ODNI officials

“[The CIA conclusion] was a judgment based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked. (It was) a thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgment.”

Moreover it turns out that this is the same thinking as that of the FBI. As one of the ODNI officials told Reuters

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose evidentiary standards require it to make cases that can stand up in court, declined to accept the CIA’s analysis – a deductive assessment of the available intelligence – for the same reason”.

“We’re aware that campaigns and related organizations and individuals are targeted by actors with a variety of motivations — from philosophical differences to espionage — and capabilities — from defacements to intrusions,” said Brian P. Hale, director of public affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “We defer to FBI for specific incidents.”

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Originally posted by G:
Are you saying it's ok to visit forums and social media outlets and post false assumptions or erroneous conclusions based only on partial or zero knowledge or hearsay as if it were factual?

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Originally posted by G:
Are you saying it's ok to visit forums and social media outlets and post false assumptions or erroneous conclusions based only on partial or zero knowledge or hearsay as if it were factual?

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Is that a question?

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Originally posted by G:

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

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Originally posted by G:
Are you saying it's ok to visit forums and social media outlets and post false assumptions or erroneous conclusions based only on partial or zero knowledge or hearsay as if it were factual?

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Are you arguing for government censorship of news and discussion?

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Is that a question?

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Washington Post Admits Its 'Russians Hacked A US Utility' Story Was 'Fake News'

Jan 3, 2017 10:54 AM

Over the weekend we noted that the Washington Post was caught spreading "fake news" about an alleged attempt by "Russian hackers" to take over a Vermont Utility (see "Washington Post Caught Spreading More Fake News About 'Russian Hackers'"). Within hours of reporting that the "Russian hackers" had gained access to the electrical grid, the Burlington Electric Department in Vermont had to issue a statement confirming that the provocative Wapo story simply wasn't true and that a laptop found to be infected with malware was never actually connected to the grid. An embarrassed Wapo was subsequently forced to change it's sensationalized headline and publish a retraction.

Now, as they often do, it appears this Wapo "fake news" rabbit holes gets even deeper. Not only are "federal officials" now confirming that "Russian hackers" never targeted the Vermont electrical grid, but the whole mishap was derived from an employee's attempt to check his Yahoo email account which, as Wapo reports, resulted in his computer connecting to a "suspicious IP address" that is "found elsewhere in the country suggesting the company wasn't being targeted by Russians."

The Post now reports that the Vermont utility hack was just an employee connecting to a flagged IP address... https://t.co/fapgFHt9aQ pic.twitter.com/zIGp0NEXnl

— Eric Geller (@ericgeller) January 3, 2017



Moreover, not only was the malware not linked to a specific attempt of "Russian hackers" to penetrate the U.S. electrical grid, the software in question isn't even linked to the "Grizzly Steppe" group that the Obama administration says is behind the DNC and John Podesta email hacks. Of course, this is a direct contradiction to the opening paragraph of Wapo's original story which directly connected the Vermont "hack" back to "Grizzly Steppe"...apparently with no evidence whatsoever.

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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
People have gone to alt-news, twitter, blogs which strangely enough might be even more fake?

Or is CNN, BBC etc the fake news?

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Originally posted by THGRRI:
It is no surprise to some of us here that you can not tell what is fake. Why is that? Well, it's due to your opinions and what you post. Nothing but garbage.

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Originally posted by THGRRI:
It is no surprise to some of us here that you can not tell what is fake. Why is that? Well, it's due to your opinions and what you post. Nothing but garbage

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

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Originally posted by THGRRI:
It is no surprise to some of us here that you can not tell what is fake. Why is that? Well, it's due to your opinions and what you post. Nothing but garbage

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Just pointing out that - AS USUAL - THUGGER degrades the entire thread by posting nothing but topic-free trolling.

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Originally posted by THUGGER (to 6-string):
It is no surprise to some of us here that you can not tell what is fake. Why is that? Well, it's due to your opinions and what you post. Nothing but garbage.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
Just pointing out that - AS USUAL - THUGGER degrades the entire thread by posting nothing but topic-free trolling.

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Originally posted by THUGGER:
You SIG and Jaynztown, ARE fake news.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

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Originally posted by THUGGER (to 6-string):
It is no surprise to some of us here that you can not tell what is fake. Why is that? Well, it's due to your opinions and what you post. Nothing but garbage.

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Gee, I guess many of us were right all along. Imagine that...

http://nyti.ms/2hquET1

Russians No Longer Dispute Olympic Doping Operation

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http://www.bbc.com/sport/38448842

Russian anti-doping agency denies admitting to existence of doping programme

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Originally posted by SIGNYM: If fake news weren't so consequential and if people were just a little more skeptical about what they read and hear, fake news would be a lot funnier overall. =SIGNY

I get all my "funny news" from zero hedge and RT - they are frellin' hi-larious. =GSTRING

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Trump Aides Deny Plan For Summit With Putin In Reykjavik
According to Reuters, two top aides to President-elect Donald Trump denied a published report on Saturday that he is planning to hold a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin weeks after taking office. The Sunday Times of London

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reported that Trump had told British officials that such a summit was being planned, possibly to be staged in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik.

"The story is a fantasy," one Trump aide told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. Another said the report was not true.

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Trump Aides Deny Plan For Summit With Putin In Reykjavik
According to Reuters, two top aides to President-elect Donald Trump denied a published report on Saturday that he is planning to hold a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin weeks after taking office. The Sunday Times of London

... published fake news of their own

reported that Trump had told British officials that such a summit was being planned, possibly to be staged in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik. "The story is a fantasy," one Trump aide told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. Another said the report was not true.

Sunday Times of London = another fake news publication.= SIGNY

Or did Trump cancel it after the shit storm it started rolled through? Like when they backed down from gutting the Office of Ethics? Do you know? (sorry, that's a joke!).= GSTRING

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

It may be a joke, but jokes only funny when they're on-target, and this is just stupid. I just had to preserve this for posterity. It was CONGRESS that wanted to going to gut the Ethics Committee, and TRUMP which made them stop that plan. Not a case of "Trump backing down".

"If you aren't aware, Texans don't have much concern for the well-being of Yankees or Californians, even Yankee factory workers in Indiana "- SECOND

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kpo: Watersportsgate.
SECOND: ... http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/01/bbcs-paul-wood-there-are
-four-sources-possible-trump-russia-blackmail

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

SECOND

Just to remind you - you signed on to the fake news 'watersportsgate'.

I will keep reminding you, individually and plural, of that. You believed it because it was in the 'news' purveyed by 'reliable sources', and because you all suffer from a severe case of confirmation bias.

The fact that you all signed onto this demonstrates you're all EXTREMELY gullible, and make exactly zero effort to check what you read. You just react. And that makes you the perfect target of propaganda. And you all just demonstrated what perfect, willing, obedient little targets you are - not only signing on to propaganda, but endorsing it, spreading it, embellishing it, and defending it.

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kpo: Watersportsgate.
SECOND: ... http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/01/bbcs-paul-wood-there-are
-four-sources-possible-trump-russia-blackmail

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kpo: Watersportsgate.
'G': So - show of hands: who thinks the president elect p*ssy grabber didn't get up to some naughty sh*t while being wined and dined in Russia? If that goofy elf from Entertainment Tonight can get him on tape anyone can. I bet it is epic stuff.

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"I just had to preserve this for posterity."

You and KikiBullShitDumbAsDirtDumbShit seem to have gotten the same directive. You and It are threatening to "preserve" posts for some kind of future Kremlin tribunal. Is that your new mandate? = GSTRING

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