On June 15, 2016, Russian intelligence—under the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0—dumped its first batch of documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee and other institutions in an effort to influence the presidential election. On July 27, the top Democrats on both congressional intelligence panels wrote to the Obama administration to ask for the declassification and release of intelligence assessments related to the DNC hack, “including any that might illuminate potential Russian motivations for what would be an unprecedented interference in a U.S. Presidential race, and why President Putin could potentially feel compelled to authorize such an operation, given the high likelihood of eventual attribution.”
The government finally released such an assessment in October 2016. The critical months in between were filled with debate over whether the intelligence community had a responsibility to warn voters about the foreign influence campaign as soon as possible. But the Obama White House had been reluctant to do so, reportedly because officials feared appearing to advance a partisan bias.
Officials are taking steps that they hope will prevent that from happening again. On Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the Justice Department’s new policy, intended to ensure the timely disclosure of election interference efforts when they are discovered and confirmed. “The American people have a right to know if foreign governments are targeting them with propaganda,” Rosenstein said at the Aspen Security forum in Colorado, according to the Washington Post. “Exposing schemes to the public is an important way to neutralize them.”
The new policy notes that partisanship must not play a role in disclosing election interference to victims, and that the U.S. government should only publicly attribute malign activity to a foreign government when there is “high confidence” in the assessment.
During a Washington Post event hosted by national security reporter Ellen Nakashima on Friday morning, Tonya Ugoretz, the director of the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said that the intelligence community is trying to apply the lessons learned in 2016 to its approach to election security in the future.
Asked why the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence waited so long to identify and warn the public of the Russian government’s intentions, Ugoretz said the decision had been up to political leaders.
“Public attribution and other response options are always a policy decision. The intelligence community is charged with — as DNI Coats put it the other day — seeking the truth, and then speaking the truth. We provide the best intelligence we have at the point of time that we have it,” she said.
The change comes nearly a week after DoJ charged 12 Russian military intelligence officials with hacking the DNC and arranging for the publication of thousands of stolen documents to alter the 2016 election process. And cyberattacks have not let up on American political institutions since — also during the Aspen conference on Thursday, Microsoft executive Tom Burt announced that hackers have set their sights on at least three political candidates this year, attempting to infiltrate their accounts through spear-phishing emails.
“Earlier this year, we did discover that a fake Microsoft domain had been established as the landing page for phishing attacks,” Burt said, according to Politico. “And we saw metadata that suggested those phishing attacks were being directed at three candidates who are all standing for election in the midterm elections.”
