There is hypocrisy today in the Foreign Relations Committee hearings. Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University has done a complete study of how many times the US tried to influence a national election in other countries. He has shown that 81 times between 1946 to 2000 the US attempted the altar the elections of other nations. We now call foul when another country uses propaganda, get out the votes and campaign materials through public pronouncements. In the same study, Russia had interfered in 36 countries.
Russia did not raise this in 1996, the US participated through the IMF to support Boris Yeltsin to the tune of a 10.2 billion loan. In 1999, Israeli elections saw Bill Clinton help Ehud Barak against Benjamin Netanyahu. In the 2016 election, the Jerusalem Post cited “There were various liberal groups in the United States that were raising millions to fund a campaign called V15 against Prime Minister Netanyahu." McLaughlin also cited an effort "to organize the [Israeli] Arabs into one party and teach them about voter turnout."
Having Sec. Klapper talks about a glass house and not throwing stones, sounds like the United States apparently succeeded in doing this. If what the United States Foreign Relations Committee wants to do is to create an awareness of cybersecurity this is a strange way to bring this about. Declaring we can create a cyber battle with most of the countries being far more sophisticated without creating more harm would be nothing short illustrating the issues we have with the current Congress. The hearings were mainly to have the Congressman create a bully pulpit for their belief in the so-called Russian hackings. Amazingly outside of McCain and Graham, it was split largely along party lines. When Congress thinks they are fighting a conventional war in cyberspace, they need to step back and understand what this means its totally different.
The press and the Congress has no concept of what it will take to counterattack because it will expose to our adversaries or capabilities. You cannot respond to anything other than real time. Also, why are the people like John Podesta who use the word password for password, why is he not held accountable for securing his sensitive information? Also, we need to be very succinct about how the DNC was hacked and whether there is any direct involvement with WikiLeaks.
Having lived in this industry for so many years cyber attacks or more sophisticated and potentially more lethal as the attack is not against the archival records such as email but data. We need to educate or train the government to deal with this threat. The day of Congress debating rather than reacting will cause the United States to fall further behind.
What’s happening to intelligence is that there are in a new era of cyber network warfare that they do not understand or can deal with. The climate of this whole situation is that we knew we were attacked for the last decade and when the incumbent party gets defeated then we go into action. I hope the new administration has a complete view of what is going on here.