White House Vows 'Proportional' Response For Russian DNC Hack (go.com)

After the Director of National Intelligence and Department of Homeland Security publicly blamed Russia for stealing and publishing archived emails from the Democratic National Committee on Friday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said today that President Obama will consider a "proportional" response. ABC News reports: "We obviously will ensure that a U.S. response is proportional. It is unlikely that our response would be announced in advanced. It's certainly possible that the president could choose response options that we never announce," Earnest told reporters aboard Air Force One. "The president has talked before about the significant capabilities that the U.S. government has to both defend our systems in the United States but also carry out offensive operations in other countries," he added. "There are a range of responses that are available to the president and he will consider a response that's proportional." The Wall Street Journal report mentions several different ways to response to Russia. The U.S. could impose economic sanctions against Moscow, punish Russia diplomatically, opt to allow the Justice Department to simply prosecute the hacks as a criminal case, and/or launch a U.S. cyberattack targeting Russia's election process. Of course, each response has its pros and cons. "They could escalate into a more adversarial conflict between both countries," writes Carol E. Lee for the Wall Street Journal. "But the absence of a response could signal that such behavior will be tolerated in the future."

Comments

Re:We're going to nuke Russia

[harrkev]

Whoops. Forgot to mention lying to the FBI. That would put common people like you or I in prison.

Whitewashing Clinton

[mi]

She did not intentionally leak any information.

Wow! Do we have to debunk this meme once again?

Lack of intent may be why she should get a reduced sentence. It does not absolve her of the crime. An NSA contractor was just arrested merely for taking some materials home — that in itself is highly illegal and qualifies him for jail time. If the investigation also proves he wanted to leak/sell the information, the charges will be upgraded.

She really does belong to jail over this — the Democrats have disgraced the US this year by nominating a bona-fide criminal.

Re:We're going to nuke Russia

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not allegations. FBI Director Comey stated that she broke the law by having then-classified documents on a public server and she didn't even turn all of them over. It's critical to understand that intent has zero basis in violating the law, nor does ignorance. Comey broke down the evidence in his own press release where he declared that they would not seek prosecution.

One is an accident that can be ignored (and that does happen). More than 30 times? That's a heavy jail sentence, apparently if your name doesn't end with "Clinton". This is made clear toward the end of the press release:

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.

Said differently: "We would prosecute her, if she wasn't Hillary Clinton. We will prosecute you, if you do it."

Quoting from his press release:

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later “up-classified” e-mails).

The way this is phrased is itself misleading. It suggests that there's possibly more than seven, but there were clearly at least seven classified at the top levels of classification at the time that they were sent. That is a crime, which is clear given the previous statement indicated that they didn't intend to violate laws. Intent has no basis in violating classification laws, particularly once you get past the informal "accident" level that gets swept away with minor breaches. Seven distinct TS/SAP email chains is not a minor breach.

With respect to the thousands of e-mails we found that were not among those produced to State, agencies have concluded that three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level and two at the Confidential level. There were no additional Top Secret e-mails found. Finally, none of those we found have since been “up-classified.”

Who knows what they didn't find since they found thousands that were work related and not given to them. Heavily classified documents often do not get sent electronically very frequently, so there wouldn't be many traces of them lingering on the networks.

Separately, it is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the sub