Trump walks back email hack comments, but damage lingers; CNN, 7/28/16

Stephen Collinson and Tom Kludt, CNN; Trump walks back email hack comments, but damage lingers:

"The affair is a lesson for Trump in how every word a potential commander in chief utters is parsed and amplified, and can have significant political and diplomatic consequences. US presidents in the modern era have seen singular sentences and offhand comments define global perceptions on US policies and leadership.

It's nothing new for the outspoken Republican nominee to cause a firestorm with comments that he made in a press conference; he's been doing it for his entire presidential campaign, with any resulting political damage seeming to be offset by the media attention and appeal they have to his voters.

But when they step up to accept their party's nomination, candidates move into an arena where the stakes are higher and the bar for mistakes is much more unforgiving than the rough-and-tumble of a primary campaign.

Nominees are viewed by voters, reporters, their peers and future international counterparts as commanders in chief-in-waiting on whose choice of words lives and crucial national security interests could ultimately depend. As a result, the room for error is far narrower than before."

'Treason'? Critics savage Trump over Russia hack comments; Politico, 7/27/16

Nahal Toosi, Politico; 'Treason'? Critics savage Trump over Russia hack comments:

"Leon Panetta, a former CIA director, said Trump's comments were "beyond the pale" because he was "in fact asking the Russians to engage in American politics." An aide to House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has endorsed Trump, added, meanwhile, that "Russia is a global menace led by a devious thug" and that it should stay out of the U.S. election.

Philip Reiner, a former National Security Council official in the Obama administration, called Trump a "scumbag animal."

"Hacking email is a criminal activity. And he's asked a foreign government — a murderous, repressive regime — to attack not just one of our citizens but the Democratic presidential candidate? Of course it's a national security threat," he added.

And William Inboden, who served on the NSC during the George W. Bush administration, said Trump's comments were "tantamount to treason.""

By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines; Washington Post, 7/27/16

Bruce Shneier, Washington Post; By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines:

"Russia was behind the hacks into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network that led to the release of thousands of internal emails just before the party’s convention began, U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly concluded.

The FBI is investigating. WikiLeaks promises there is more data to come. The political nature of this cyberattack means that Democrats and Republicans are trying to spin this as much as possible. Even so, we have to accept that someone is attacking our nation’s computer systems in an apparent attempt to influence a presidential election. This kind of cyberattack targets the very core of our democratic process. And it points to the possibility of an even worse problem in November — that our election systems and our voting machines could be vulnerable to a similar attack."

How Putin Weaponized Wikileaks to Influence the Election of an American President; Defense One, 7/24/16

Patrick Tucker, Defense One; How Putin Weaponized Wikileaks to Influence the Election of an American President:

"The use of Wikileaks as the publishing platform served to legitimize the information dump, which also contains a large amount of personal information related to democratic donors such as social security and credit card numbers. This suggests that Wikileaks didn’t perform a thorough analysis of the documents before they released them, or simply didn’t care.

It’s the latest installment in a trend that information security researcher Bruce Schneier calls organizational doxing and that Lawfare’s Nicholas Weaver calls the weaponization of Wikileaks."

Donald Trump Calls on Russia to Find Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails; New York Times, 7/27/16

Ashley Parker, New York Times; Donald Trump Calls on Russia to Find Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails:

"Donald J. Trump said Wednesday that he hoped Russia had hacked Hillary Clinton’s email, essentially encouraging an adversarial foreign power’s cyberspying on a secretary of state’s correspondence.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said, staring directly into the cameras. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Mr. Trump’s call was an extraordinary moment at a time when Russia is being accused of meddling in the U.S. presidential election. His comments came amid questions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers, which researchers have concluded was likely the work of two Russian intelligence agencies.

Later in the news conference, when asked if he was really urging a foreign nation to hack into the private email server of Mrs. Clinton, or at least meddle in the nation’s elections, he dismissed the question. “That’s up to the president,” Mr. Trump said, before finally telling the female questioner to “be quiet — let the president talk to them.”"

The (alleged) Russian hack of the DNC should be one of the biggest stories of the year. Why isn’t it?; Washington Post, 7/26/16

Paul Waldman, Washington Post; The (alleged) Russian hack of the DNC should be one of the biggest stories of the year. Why isn’t it? :

"...[T]here’s something utterly bizarre about the kind of coverage this story is getting. Evidence currently suggests that the Russian government may have attempted to sway the results of the U.S. presidential election. I put that in italics, because it ought to be in screaming 72-point headlines on every front page in America. And yet, it’s being treated like just one more odd story in a wacky election year, not much more important than the latest fundraising numbers or which ethnic group Donald Trump has insulted most recently...

That being said, this hack represents something profoundly different from what we’ve seen before. We’ve known that foreign intelligence services from countries like China and Russia have in the past attempted to infiltrate not only government networks but those of other political organizations and actors, like the parties. What distinguishes this attack is that it wasn’t just for the purposes of surveillance. They weren’t trying to figure out what Americans are up to, they were trying to intervene to change the results of our election. Goldsmith suggests some even more frightening possibilities:

What if the hackers interspersed fake but even more damning or inflammatory emails that were hard to disprove? What if hackers break in to computers to steal or destroy voter registration information? What if they disrupted computer-based voting or election returns in important states during the presidential election? The legitimacy of a presidential election might be called into question, with catastrophic consequences. The DNC hack is just the first wave of possible threats to electoral integrity in the United States—by foreign intelligence services, and others.

For all we know, the DNC hack was a trial run for something much more ambitious."

Bigger than Watergate: The Russian-orchestrated DNC email hack places our national sovereignty at stake; Salon, 7/27/16

Bob Cesca, Salon; Bigger than Watergate: The Russian-orchestrated DNC email hack places our national sovereignty at stake:

"As of this writing, further details along with the chain-of-evidence is still being established by journalists, security experts and the FBI. (By the way, before anyone kneejerks to the “crazy conspiracy theory” conclusion, it’s worth noting that everyone from the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, to A-list reporter Richard Engel, along with The Daily Beast, ABC News, NBC News, Yahoo! News, Slate, TPM, Vice and The Washington Post have been uncovering new and frightening aspects of this story going back to June and culminating with the past 48 hours.) According to investigative journalists at Vice’s “Motherboard,” in particular, a security firm hired by the DNC discovered the existence of “two sophisticated adversaries” that had infiltrated the Democratic Party’s internal email network. Known as “APT 28″ and “APT 29,” the handles are used by both the Russian intelligence service, the FSB (formerly the KGB) and the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU. Later, using a front handle known as the aforementioned “Guccifer 2.0,” the agencies announced back in June that it had given Wikileaks “thousands of files and mails.”

Regarding the content of some of the emails, bear this in mind: according to conservative author and former NSA analyst, John Schindler, who, by the way, is no fan of Hillary Clinton, part of the FSB’s tradecraft is to fabricate intelligence and toss it into a cocktail of legitimate documents. In other words, it’s fair to speculate, based on Russia’s modus operandi, that the questionable emails were doctored, if not manufactured for impact, while exculpatory emails might’ve been scrubbed from the tranche. We have to question everything here, given the tenacity of Putin’s propaganda efforts...

One last thing: if you’re only looking at this story as an internal DNC scandal, you’re missing the despotic forest for the trees. We can’t emphasize enough: this story is bigger than Bernie or Hillary. It’s bigger than Trump. It speaks directly to the sovereignty of our electoral process. The sooner it’s treated this way, the better off we’ll be."

The DNC Hack Is Watergate, but Worse; Slate, 7/26/16

Franklin Foer, Slate; The DNC Hack Is Watergate, but Worse:

"What’s galling about the WikiLeaks dump is the way in which the organization has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks. Leaks are an important tool of journalism and accountability. When an insider uncovers malfeasance, he brings information to the public in order to stop the wrongdoing. That’s not what happened here. The better analogy for these hacks is Watergate. To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party. The hackers installed the cyber-version of the bugging equipment that Nixon’s goons used—sitting on the DNC computers for a year, eavesdropping on everything, collecting as many scraps as possible. This is trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy. It falls into that classic genre, the dirty trick. Yet that term feels too innocent to describe the offense. Nixon’s dirty tricksters didn’t mindlessly expose the private data of low-level staff."