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:After all the manning, wikileaks and hack-leaks

[Holi]

Exactly how was the primary stolen? 16.9 million voted for Hillary and 13.2 million voted for Bernie. Seeing the divide between the two camps I really doubt any of the shenanigans that happened behind the scenes had any noticeable affect on the split. The people spoke, or at least the Democrats did. Nothing was stolen and you insult the majority when you make that baseless claim.

Re:We're going to nuke Russia

[mark-t]

Negligence isn't itself criminal... negligence that breaks the law is.

The funny thing is, here, that despite all of the allegations and investigation, and even despite how suspicious the whole damn thing looks... there's no real evidence of any actual criminal wrongdoing... because if there were, then she could be, you know, actually charged with a crime.

And I seriously don't think you'd want to live in a country where mere allegations that happened to get repeated often enough got to be used in a court of law as a basis for conviction.