FBI didn’t tell US targets as Russian hackers hunted emails
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A new federal agency with the sole focus of combating cybercrime should be created operating outside the DoJ.
The FBI treats cybercrime too much like a janitorial service. The special agents involved in cybercrime have only some general cybercrime training; their training is still overly broad, including firearms and combat training.
Part of the problem is that the FBI is also an intelligence organization, so information that feeds into the FBI is almost never disseminated outside the agency, and when it does it is almost always too late. Their reasoning is "sources and methods".
What the Russians taught us in the 2016 Election is that it's no longer enough to just _have_ information. You must act on it in innovative new ways. This disruptive behavior (a la Wikileaks) has turned the US IC on it's head. If we had an agency with a sole focus on cybercrime investigation and prevention prior to the 2016 Election, we would probably have a different President right now.
This has changed in the last 5-8 years. They finally got agents that grew up with computers.
Have you seen malwareinvestigator.gov? They built an automated framework for pulling apart common malware and made it available to state and local law enforcement to aid in investigations. This is just one example of the "new FBI."
> information that feeds into the FBI is almost never disseminated outside the agency
I get a few intelligence reports from the FBI every week. Just because you aren't seeing it, doesn't mean that it does not exist.
> If we had an agency with a sole focus on cybercrime investigation and prevention prior to the 2016 Election, we would probably have a different President right now.
As much as you dislike Trump, I don't really think you want to live in a country where the IC influences elections. Remember that the FBIs job for the most part is to investigate crimes, not prevent them. Mueller will do his job.
We already do. One of the contributions to the Democrat's nominee loss was the FBI director's letter.
Can you outline why this should be different from say terrorists flying planes into buildings? I assume everyone wants the IC to be preventing that, not just prosecuting those responsible afterwards?
One key difference is of course that one is trying to kill an unprecedented number of innocent Americans, but it's possible his health reforms won't ever get enacted and the EPA will be forced by the courts to actually do its job, so there is still hope.
The FBI is part of the Justice Department, they are there to investigate crimes that have been committed.
The IC does a ton of work to prevent attacks against America of all sorts. They identified Russian interference and brought it to the Obama administrations attention, exactly in line with what they should have done.
They need to add an A Record for @ because when I malwareinvestigator.gov I received NXDOMAIN. But www works fine.
Podesta, on the other hand, and as I recall, did get his emails stolen by clicking on a baited link.
Aside from that, I think your suggestion for a new federal agency dedicated to dealing with this is a great idea. The hurdle there is the NSA that works on ways to crack into our computers and then leaves the exploits where they can be found and used against us by others too.
"Clusterfk" would be an appropriately descriptive word for this sort of situation.
What I do find interesting however is why the Russian hackers picked wikileaks rather than giving the emails to a right wing news paper. Could have just anonymously mailed a few USB drive to each journalist and I bet one would have published it. I would guess this has something to do with Assange personal vendetta against Hillary Clinton which he has been rather open with ever since the US investigation against him, the reported discussion between US diplomats and Swedish investigators, the "assassination"/drone comments, and the closing of bank accounts.
Assange has implied that it was Seth Rich that took those DNC emails and that's how they acquired them. Assange has flat out said the Russians did not give him the emails.
We have seen no hard evidence from the DNC the Russians took those emails.
We're left to choose what to believe about it, or wait until something concrete comes out.
I think one major development in the 2016 election was the 9/11 incident.
Much of the mainstream news media in America participated in a news cycle of essentially propaganda during the weeks leading up to 9/11 of last year. Candidate Clinton fainted (initially due to "overheating") on one of the most pleasant days of the year, (and later, pneumonia). Prior to this, rumors of her ill health were leaked by someone or the other, which then became more apparent with coughing at events and other questionable incidents. Like some sort of automated defense mechanism, all of this received a very strong, almost religious defense from much of the mainstream media and the late night talk show circuit, culminating in the candidate making an appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel show herself, to participate in a gag in which she opens a pickle jar, as if to dismiss the entire thing as a made up conspiracy.
Some links for emphasis on how bad this was:
MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-allies-push-co...
CNN (before): http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/22/politics/hillary-clinton-h... CNN (after - doubling down): http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/13/politics/hillary-clinton-h...
Washington Post (before): https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/06/th... Washington Post (after), same author: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/11/hi...
Google Search autocomplete: http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/08/28/google-censoring-searc...
Stephen Colbert: https://www.businessinsider.in/Stephen-Colbert-investigates-...
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/26/hillary-clin...
Esquire: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/videos/a47964/karl-rove...
Vox: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/18/12505078/hillary-clinton-healt...
BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37090082
Politico: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/donald-trump...
In isolation, of course, this can be dismissed with a lot of different explanations, but the John Podesta emails highlighted the inappropriate relationship that many journalists seemed to have with members of the campaign. This is further coupled with the fact that all of the polling done by these groups and their affiliates showed an almost demoralizing level of support for President Trump. Heck, Chris Cuomo on CNN went ahead and told the viewers point blank that it was illegal to read Wikileaks and that it is "different for the media", so "everything you learn about this, you're getting from us".
It has been long known that Fox News leans heavily to the right and will almost always present stories with a perspective that is favorable to conservatives in government. This is pretty much universally accepted without debate. In 2016, however, much like Fox, the entirety of the mainstream media had effectively chosen a side in the election.
In my opinion, before blame can be cast on foreign governments, who are more than happy to engage in this kind of thing, since it is in their interests, it may perhaps be more prudent to raise some serious questions about how America's own news media is more than happy to push a particular agenda until is becomes untenable to do so in light of hard evidence, as was seen in the case of the 9/11 incident. This principly poses the exact same threat to democracy, with the exception that rather than serving the interest of a foreign government, it is serving the interests of the shareholders of the respective parent organizations, who may very well end up being foreign nationals with close ties to their respective governments.
The voter can choose to vote for a candidate based on any arbitrary reason. It is being assumed that most voters are reasonable people and will keep themselves informed by watching Presidential debates and keeping themselves abreast of the candidates' various policy positions from the news media. What the news media also seems to provide these days is opinion, in a subtle way that says if you belong to "X, Y, Z" category or circumstances, it's in your interests to vote for this candidate and not the other. In the case of some issues, you will see the exact opposite recommendation. For example Fox viewers right now are being told that the President's tax cuts will lower their taxes. CNN and MSNBC viewers are being told that the tax cuts are primarily for the wealthy. On the very same issue, the President is painted favorably and unfavorably for the same category of people on the same issue, with the rhetoric held up by convenient facts. In some such cases both are half-true, in some cases only one is true.
If the voting public's faith in their own news media is constantly eroded by this sort of thing, they will naturally seek out new sources of information that claim to be unbiased. These will include Wikileaks - which only publishes primary source information, but may do so selectively, in theory. This breeds the perfect circumstances for foreign governments to invest in alternative media in the form of YouTube shows and other internet-based news agencies, or facebook pages, advertisements, email campaigns, etc. If the public trusted the mainstream media, this would not really be a problem, so before anything else, I believe the blame rests with them first and foremost.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. At moments like these you have to ask what the job of an intelligence agency is if they cannot inform the members of their own apparatus about an external threat coming from one of said institution's historic and biggest "enemies" (the Russians). If it matters, I say this as an European who has never set foot in the States, so I'm not directly involved with US politics.
Back in 2000 I woke up with an email in my box with the subject "I love you" with an attachment. I took one look at it and deleted it. I thought about calling my partner at the time and warning him about it but he'd been coding with me for a few years so I figured he'd know what he was looking at.
I was wrong. He clicked on it and it deleted thousands of photos off his computer. How people fall for that two decades later is not related to "warning" them. We've all been warned for decades.
"Dear X, This email is to set up a meeting to discuss Kaylee's performance in school. Please click here to sign in to our new parent conference scheduling software. Signed, Y, Kaylee's School, Principal"
The threat is so constant and pervasive though that it's hard for me to imagine that management in any government agency hasn't educated employees about how to deal with these kinds of threats, but not impossible because I don't have to imagine someone did bite.
I just can't make the leap that the FBI is to blame though. That's just a leap too far.
It's a difference between targeted attacking and fish net hacking or phishing without a target.
https://medium.com/@rsatter/the-notification-gap-69895c93b05...
If you were targeted by Russian hackers, and you happened to be a high level government official, would YOU admit to it? This is like asking a room full of thieves if they robbed the bank. I think it's more likely the FBI DID notify many of them that they had been targeted, but like the DNC, it either got lost through the cracks, was ignored, or possibly seen as some political ploy.
Its more like asking a bunch of banks if the FBI has warned them of plots by thieves.
Its more like asking a bunch of banks if the FBI has warned them of plots by thieves. Being targeted by hackers (or being informed of that by the FBI) isn't analogous to thievery.