Putin

Earlier in 2016 the Democratic National Committee’s email account was penetrated by a group that called itself Guccifer 2.0 in homage to the original Romanian hacker of that name. There is forensic evidence to support Guccifer 2.0 being run by the FSB with some involvement by Russian military intelligence. Though it is quite certain that the Russian government used hackers in an effort to tilt the American presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor, a full picture will likely never emerge unless there is a brief opening of the secret police archives after the fall of Putin’s Russia as there was after the fall of the USSR.

These types of situations are always murky because four activities that are quite distinct in most countries—politics, crime, business, and the secret police—in Russia blur and merge, making them hard to tell apart. For example, cybercriminals arrested for bank fraud and extortion are offered a choice between fifteen years in prison with no access to computers or a five-year contract with the FSB as a hacker with access to unparalleled equipment and databases. One assumes they don’t agonize long. And those same hackers were exploited by Russian foreign policy when Putin discovered how effective an instrument of espionage and influence the Internet can be.

In any case, the Russian hackers gathered material on everything from what the DNC itself had gathered on Donald Trump to the emails that revealed a supposedly neutral DNC covertly working against Bernie Sanders. That latter revelation of compromised integrity caused the DNC’s chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign. What mattered here was not the specific political fallout—Schultz was quickly thereafter reelected in her Florida district. Of more importance was that the DNC, and, Clinton’s campaign hacked later, was revealed as compromised and hypocritical, exactly the Kremlin critique of American democracy.

Putin was hardly indifferent to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The bad blood with Clinton went way back. Trump seemed easier to play. But more important to Putin than the winner of a particular election was the elective process itself. It needed to be revealed as unreliable, riggable if not rigged.

And for that reason the Russian hacking of the voter registration systems in Arizona and Illinois in the summer of 2016 were more significant than the DNC break-in. The Washington Post called the Illinois hack “the first successful compromise of a state voter registration system” and the FBI rated the threat posed by a similar attack on the Arizona system as “an eight on a scale of one to 10.”

Showing the American electoral process to be vulnerable and therefore unworthy of trust weakens the United States at its very core. Putin wants a weaker United States because he sees ample evidence that the United States wants a weaker Russia. It’s his golden rule—do unto others as they would do unto you, and preferably before.

But Putin himself may also be vulnerable from within. Many of Russia’s freelance hackers partake of the political anarchism that seems inherent to the Internet. The main criminal/anarchist organization, known as Anonymous International or, more familiarly, as Humpty Dumpty, cracked into Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev’s twitter account and sent out the following message in his name: “I’m resigning. I am ashamed of this government’s actions. Forgive me.”

Other break-ins resulted in information with more substantial political content, e.g., concerning how the Kremlin prepared Crimea’s secessionist referendum.

Humpty Dumpty not only engages in pranks and politics but is known to have made significant money through blackmail and extortion. Its members glide easily from crime to business to work for the secret police and the Kremlin’s political aims. They have also displayed astonishing high connections in the Russian government. Sergei Mikhailov, the number two man in the FSB Information Security Center, was closely connected with Humpty Dumpty and may even have been running it. During a top-level FSB meeting in late January 2017 Mikhailov was arrested for treason and escorted from the meeting with a hood-like bag over his head.

The treason charges against Mikhailov include passing information to the United States. The U.S. intelligence agencies undoubtedly had such a high degree of confidence about accusing Russia of cyber involvement in the U.S. election not only because of forensic evidence but because they had people on the inside. That does not necessarily mean that Mikhailov was the CIA’s man. There are other candidates for that role, one of them already suddenly and conveniently dead.