i can't tell if Rosenstein is really looking out for his ass or if he's baiting Trump
RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
nytimes.com
F.B.I. Warns of Russian Interference in 2020 Race and Boosts Counterintelligence Operations
8-10 minutes
Intelligence officials have said Russia has kept up its election interference operations under the direction of President Vladimir V. Putin and that they are likely to intensify during the 2020 presidential campaign.CreditCreditShamil Zhumatov/Reuters
WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director warned anew on Friday about Russia’s continued meddling in American elections, calling it a “significant counterintelligence threat.” The bureau has shifted additional agents and analysts to shore up defenses against foreign interference, according to a senior F.B.I. official.
The Trump administration has come to see that Russia’s influence operations have morphed into a persistent threat. The F.B.I., the intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have made permanent the task forces they created to confront 2018 midterm election interference, senior American national security officials said.
“We recognize that our adversaries are going to keep adapting and upping their game,” Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said Friday in a speech in Washington, citing the presence of Russian intelligence officers in the United States and the Kremlin’s record of malign influence operations.
“So we are very much viewing 2018 as just kind of a dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020,” he said.
Mr. Wray’s warnings came after the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, laid out in hundreds of pages of detail the interference and influence campaign carried out by Russian operatives in the 2016 election.
While American officials have promised to continue to try to counter, block and weaken the Russian intelligence operations, they have complained of a lack of high-level coordination. President Trump has little interest or patience for hearing about such warnings, officials have said.
Mr. Trump views any discussion of future Russian interference as effectively questioning the legitimacy of his 2016 victory, prompting senior officials to head off discussions with him. Earlier this year, the White House chief of staff told Kirstjen Nielsen, then the homeland security secretary, not to raise the threat of new forms of Russian interference with Mr. Trump, current and former senior administration officials have said.
But outside of meetings with Mr. Trump, intelligence officials have continued to raise alarms. Officials including both Mr. Wray and Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, have said Russia has aimed its influence campaigns at undermining faith in American democracy.
“What has pretty much continued unabated is the use of social media, fake news, propaganda, false personas, etc. to spin us up, pit us against each other, to sow divisiveness and discord, to undermine America’s faith in democracy,” Mr. Wray said on Friday. “That is not just an election-cycle threat. It is pretty much a 365-day-a-year threat.”
In response to growing threats from Russia and other adversaries, the F.B.I. recently moved nearly 40 agents and analysts to the counterintelligence division, the senior bureau official said in an interview this month. Many of the agents will work on the Foreign Influence Task Force, a group of cyber, counterintelligence and criminal experts. Officials have made that task force, initially formed on a temporary basis before the midterm elections, permanent.
The Department of Homeland Security made its midterm election task forces permanent, folding them into an election security initiative at their National Risk Management Center. And the National Security Agency and the United States Cyber Command have also expanded and made permanent their joint task force aimed at identifying, and stopping, Russian malign influence, officials said.
Intelligence officials have said Russia has kept up its interference operations since the 2016 election. They continued through the midterms and are likely to intensify during the next presidential campaign — albeit with new tactics.
Some intelligence officials believe Russia intends to raise questions in the aftermath of future elections about irregularities or purported fraud to undermine faith in the result. During the midterm elections, Cyber Command conducted an operation to temporarily take offline the most prominent Russian troll farm to keep its operatives from mounting a disinformation operation during voting or vote counting.
Mr. Trump’s continued hostility toward discussing Moscow’s malign influence campaigns, as well as his broader attitude toward Mr. Putin and Russia, puzzles many national security experts.
“The way Trump spoke about U.S. foreign policy, with a particular focus on Russia, NATO and some other cardinal aspects of U.S. foreign policy views were out of kilter with traditional, mainstream foreign policy thinking,” said Andrew S. Weiss, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Weiss said, Russia tried to explore what motivated Mr. Trump, to determine any advantages that Moscow could glean from his pro-Russia stance.
“What motivates Trump is still a mystery,” Mr. Weiss said. “Every time he talks about this is so out of sync with the way Republicans, or Democrats, talk.”
Mr. Trump often asserts his desire for a good, or improved, relationship with Russia as one of his foreign policy goals and has argued that Washington and Moscow could cooperate on a range of issues, such as counterterrorism.
At the same time, Trump administration officials have dismissed the notion that the government has taken a soft position on Moscow, noting continued support for American troops in Europe, the expulsion of Russian diplomats and continuing sanctions on Moscow.
The aftermath of the 2016 election and Russia’s attempts to influence the American government illustrates the dangers of a loose, ad hoc approach to foreign policy that Mr. Trump embraced during the transition and still favors to a degree, former national security officials said.
“If you can be led by the nose by foreign governments, that is the simplest definition of what a successful influence operation looks like,” Mr. Weiss said. “All sorts of leaders figure out there are ways to work with the Trump team that stressed informal channels, flattery and a freewheeling approach.”
Campaign officials with little security background looking to make impromptu deals are particularly vulnerable to Russian intelligence operations, said James M. Olson, a former chief of C.I.A.’s counterintelligence unit and the author of “To Catch a Spy.”
“They are dilettantes, no question about it. They have no intelligence or national security background, and they shouldn’t be playing in a game they don’t understand the rules of,” Mr. Olson said. “These people are jumping into deep water, and they don’t even know how to swim.”
What Russia has gained from its influence campaign remains subject to debate. The strong sanctions against Russia remain in place, toughened by congressional action. Funding for American military presence in Europe increased under the Trump administration. The United States has kept up its support for the Ukrainian government and has made no official move to recognize Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
But Mr. Trump’s skepticism of the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and his occasional wavering over the mutual defense pact have strengthened Mr. Putin’s hand in Eastern Europe.
Former officials and other experts agree with Mr. Wray’s assessment that Russian intelligence has also contributed to sowing chaos in political systems, undermining faith in democratic voting systems and potentially further polarizing already divided electorates.
“My hunch is Putin feels pretty good about how it’s going for him,” Mr. Olson said.
Last edited:
Can’t wait until all those fukk boi’s get got...
ill
Superstar
Nap is just talking to himself in this thread.
Went from platinum to not mentioned at all.
Went from platinum to not mentioned at all.
:ALERTRED::ALERTRED::ALERTRED:
JFC.
they're gonna slow walk this shyt
Russian Hackers Were ‘In a Position’ to Alter Florida Voter Rolls, Rubio Confirms
JFC.
they're gonna slow walk this shyt
Russian Hackers Were ‘In a Position’ to Alter Florida Voter Rolls, Rubio Confirms
Russian Hackers Were ‘In a Position’ to Alter Florida Voter Rolls, Rubio Confirms
By Frances Robles
April 26, 2019
A single line in the long-anticipated Mueller report about a breach in a Florida county’s elections system has state officials scrambling.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
A single line in the long-anticipated Mueller report about a breach in a Florida county’s elections system has state officials scrambling.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
It was the day before the 2016 presidential election, and at the Volusia County elections office, near Florida’s Space Coast, workers were so busy that they had fallen behind on their correspondence.
Lisa Lewis, the supervisor of elections, stumbled on an important email sent to her and three others in the office, by then a week old, that appeared to be from VR Systems, the vendor that sells electronic voter list equipment to nearly every county in the state. “Please take a look at the instructions for our modernised products,” it said, using British spelling and offering an attachment. Something about the email seemed off.
“It was from Gmail,” Ms. Lewis said. “They don’t have Gmail.”
Ms. Lewis, it turned out, was right to be suspicious. Though it had VR Systems’ distinctive logo, with a red V and a blue R, the email contained a malicious Trojan virus, and it originated not from the elections vendor but from the Russian military intelligence unit known as the G.R.U. The email had been sent to 120 elections email accounts across Florida.
Also buried in Ms. Lewis’s inbox was a warning from VR’s chief operating officer, flagging the dangerous spearphishing attempt and warning all his customers not to click on it.
But, it now appears, someone did.
Slipped into the long-anticipated special counsel report on Russian interference in the 2016 election last week was a single sentence that caused a stir throughout the state and raised new questions about the vulnerability of the nation’s electoral systems.
Although the spearphishing attempt in Florida had first been brought to light nearly two years ago when The Intercept cited a secret National Security Agency report, state officials said they were certain no elections computers had been compromised. The Mueller report turned that assertion on its head. “The F.B.I.,” it said, “believes that this operation enabled the G.R.U. to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government.”
In an interview on Friday, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida took it one step further, saying that Russian hackers not only accessed a Florida voting system, but were “in a position” to change voter roll data.
The report has sent Florida officials scurrying once again for specifics. Which county? Could there have been more than one?
“They won’t tell us which county it was. Are you kidding me?” an exasperated Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, said at a news conference in Miami on Thursday. “Why would you have not said something immediately?”
The Florida Secretary of State’s office in Tallahassee said it had been unable to learn which county it was. “The department reached out to the F.B.I. and they declined to share that information with us,” said Sarah Revell, a department spokeswoman. “No county has come forward.” The secretary of state who was running the department at the time, Ken Detzner, did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. DeSantis, who took office in January, is scheduled to meet with the F.B.I. in the coming weeks, and has promised to make the information public, if it is not classified.
VR Systems’ chief executive, Ben Martin, said his company was aware of only a “small number of customers” who had received the fraudulent email, and of those, none had notified VR Systems that they had clicked on the attachment or were compromised.
Mr. Rubio said in the interview that there was, in fact, an intrusion, but the target or targets were never notified. The information was gleaned through an intelligence operation, not a criminal investigation, said Mr. Rubio, a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. In order to protect intelligence methods, he said, national security officials chose to issue a general warning to everyone.
“Everybody has been told what it is they need to do to protect themselves from the intrusion,” Mr. Rubio said. “I don’t believe the specific victims of the intrusion have been notified. The concern was that in a number of counties across the country, there are a couple of people with the attitude of: ‘We’ve got this; we don’t need your help. We don’t think we need to do what you are telling us we need to do.’”
Mr. Rubio said he was constrained as a member of the intelligence committee as to how much he could tell his constituents.
“When someone you know had a problem, but you can’t tell them they had a problem, it becomes tense,” he said.
letter last year to the state’s top elections official encouraging him “in the strongest terms” to take advantage of federal services to secure election systems.
“I have repeatedly voiced concerns about overconfidence of some #Florida elections officials,” Mr. Rubio said on Twitter this week.
And he noted in the interview that he had first issued a warning about the intrusion in 2018.
Marco Rubio
✔@marcorubio
Among the findings in the Senate Intelligence Committee Preliminary report we released this week is that during the 2016 election cyber actors were in a position to, at a minimum, alter or delete voter registration data in a number of states. #Sayfie
471
8:45 AM - May 11, 2018
Twitter Ads info and privacy
455 people are talking about this
Mr. Nelson, who lost his bid for re-election and left office at the end of 2018, said he could not share classified information on the purported intrusion.
“The Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman and Vice Chairman asked Senator Rubio and me in June 2018 to send a letter to the 67 county Supervisors of Election to warn them of Russian intrusion in Florida,” Mr. Nelson said in a statement. “The Mueller Report makes clear why we had to take that important step as well as my verbal warnings thereafter.”
At the time, Mr. Nelson’s warnings did not appear to be taken seriously, and in fact were widely criticized.
“When Bill Nelson said that, Republicans ripped him apart,” said Ion Sancho, the longtime supervisor of elections in Tallahassee, who recently retired. “‘You senile old man!’ Guess what, he might have been right.”
The F.B.I. did hold a conference call warning all Florida elections supervisors of a cyber threat two months before the 2016 election, but officials declined to say this week whether the bureau ever told elections supervisors from the county that had been hacked about the breach.
An official with the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that whenever the authorities discover a successful case of hacking, targets are notified by the F.B.I. Identities are kept secret in an effort to maintain positive working relationships with hacking victims.
“We believe it is their purview to talk about the possible incident, how it impacted them and when,” the official said.
The official stressed that elections computer systems in 48 of 50 states are now equipped with “Albert sensors,” devices affixed to networks to detect cyber intrusions. No foreign government has been found to be trying to penetrate, the official said, and the process of hardening security has vastly improved information-sharing between county, state and federal agencies.
Paul Lux, the president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, said elections supervisors across the state still have not been made aware of exactly what happened.
Most said they had received no specific reports. “I have not heard a whisper of such a thing,” said Mr. Lux, who runs elections in Okaloosa County, in northwest Florida. But he isn’t necessarily surprised. “If you had a neighbor’s house broken into, the police aren’t going to knock and say, ‘Hey, just to let you know, Fred down the street got broken into, so be careful.’”
He and other elections officials parsed the language in the Mueller report, wondering whether the semantics offered hints. “We understand the F.B.I. believes that this operation enabled the G.R.U. to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government,” the report said.
“Accessing can be like sneaking into an apartment building behind someone, but you can’t get the code for the elevator, so you are stuck in the lobby and get bored and leave,” Mr. Lux said.
Elections officials throughout the state insisted that even if systems were penetrated, it likely would have been the voter registration rolls, where a hacker could potentially wreak havoc on Election Day by changing addresses and precincts — but would not be able to gain access to vote tabulations.
“They’d have to knock me out, steal the key and passcodes — in front of multiple cameras,” said Todd Putnam, the systems administrator for Lee County Supervisor of Elections, near Fort Myers.
In the end, it appeared that most counties successfully fended off the attack. In response to a public record request from a reporter, officials in Broward County, who had initially denied they had been the target of any spearphishing attempt, reported that at least three people there had been targeted with the fake VR email. It had been blocked by spam filters, they said.
“Did we get hacked? No. We did get phished,” said Steve Vancore, a spokesman for the Broward elections office. “A rock was thrown at the window, the window didn’t break. The rock bounced off.”
Adam Goldman and Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on April 27, 2019, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Russian Hackers Gained Access to at Least One Florida Elections System. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@DonKnock @dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @Cali_livin @NY's #1 Draft Pick
Last edited:
