Since precisely nobody in the Trump regime seems even remotely concerned about defending the country from Russian cyberwarfare, tech companies and intelligence agencies are freely leaking to the press that the Russians look very eager to shut off the lights in America at their leisure.
State-sponsored Russian hackers appear far more interested this year in demonstrating that they can disrupt the American electric utility grid than the midterm elections, according to United States intelligence officials and technology company executives.
Despite attempts to infiltrate the online accounts of two Senate Democrats up for re-election, intelligence officials said they have seen little activity by Russian military hackers aimed at either major American political figures or state voter registration systems.
By comparison, according to intelligence officials and executives of the companies that oversee the world’s computer networks, there is surprisingly far more effort directed at implanting malware in the electrical grid.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence findings, but their conclusions were confirmed by several executives of technology and technology security firms.
This week, the Department of Homeland Security reported that over the last year, Russia’s military intelligence agency had infiltrated the control rooms of power plants across the United States. In theory, that could enable it to take control of parts of the grid by remote control.
While the department cited “hundreds of victims” of the attacks, far more than they had previously acknowledged, there is no evidence that the hackers tried to take over the plants, as Russian actors did in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016.
In interviews, American intelligence officials said that the department had understated the scope of the threat. So far the White House has said little about the intrusions other than raise the fear of such breaches to maintain old coal plants in case they are needed to recover from a major attack.
On Friday, President Trump was briefed on government efforts to protect the coming midterm elections from what a White House statement described as “malign foreign actors.” It said it was giving cybersecurity support to state and local governments to protect their election systems.
“The president has made it clear that his administration will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections from any nation state to other malicious actors,” the statement said.
It is possible that Russian hackers are holding their fire until closer to Election Day in November. Given the indictments this month of 12 Russian military officers who are accused of American election interference, the agency once known as the G.R.U. may be all too aware it is being closely watched by the National Security Agency and other American intelligence services.
But that has not completely deterred Russia’s intelligence agencies from targeting politicians.
Why not attack both?
Surely knocking out power to urban centers on Election Day or during early voting periods would cause massive damage to Democratic voter turnout, not to mention hurting millions and costing billions of dollars, even if they chose not to cause power outage chaos when people are voting.
We'd potentially be crippled, maybe for weeks or months. Who knows?
All I know is that Donald Trump sure doesn't act very concerned about this in anything outside White House statements, and Putin is still our "friend".
After nearly two years of calling Russian election interference a hoax and its investigation a witch hunt, President Donald Trump on Friday presided over the first National Security Council meeting devoted to defending American democracy from foreign manipulation.
"The President has made it clear that his administration will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections from any nation state or other malicious actors," the White House said in a statement afterward.
But current and former officials tell NBC News that 19 months into his presidency, there is no coherent Trump administration strategy to combat foreign election interference — and no single person or agency in charge.
In the statement, the White House took issue with that, saying a strategy was put in motion when Trump took office. No such strategy has been made public — or even mentioned before.
After terrorists struck on 9/11, the U.S. government passed laws, boosted funding, and reorganized itself with the goal of making sure such an attack could never happen again. But no wholesale changes have taken place in the nearly two years since Russia sought to manipulate the 2016 election, cyber aggression that some lawmakers have called an act of war.
I will say that the government reaction to 9/11 was massively overwrought and we're still suffering as a result. But there is such a thing as going too far in the other direction, and that's where we are now with Trump.
There's a lot going on behind the scenes here, and when we learn the truth, it'll be shocking.
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