Former FBI Director Predicts Russian Hackers Will Interfere With More Elections (nytimes.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times: James B. Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., testified that the Russians had not only intervened in last year's election, but would try to do it again... Russian hackers did not just breach Democratic email accounts; according to Mr. Comey, they orchestrated a "massive effort" targeting hundreds of -- and possibly more than 1,000 -- American government and private organizations since 2015... As F.B.I. director, he supervised counterintelligence investigations into computer break-ins that harvested emails from the State Department and the White House, and that penetrated deep into the computer systems of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet President Barack Obama's administration did not want to publicize those intrusions, choosing to handle them diplomatically -- perhaps because at the time they looked more like classic espionage than an effort to manipulate American politics...

Graham Allison, a longtime Russia scholar at Harvard, said, "Russia's cyberintrusion into the recent presidential election signals the beginning of what is almost sure to be an intensified cyberwar in which both they -- and we -- seek to participate in picking the leaders of an adversary." The difference, he added, is that American elections are generally fair, so "we are much more vulnerable to such manipulation than is Russia," where results are often preordained... Similar warnings have been issued by others in the intelligence community, led by James R. Clapper Jr., who has sounded the alarm since retiring in January as director of national intelligence. "I don't think people have their head around the scope of what the Russians are doing," he said recently.
Daniel Fried, a career diplomat who oversaw sanctions imposed on Russia before retiring this year, told the Times that Comey "was spot-on right that Russia is coming after us, but not just the U.S., but the free world in general. And we need to take this seriously."

Comments

Re: So

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of you seem like you don't even read the news you comment on. Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats when he found out, closed the embassies they were housed in and accused them of using the premises the conduct espionage.

Re:In Other News

[Lisandro]

As an outsider i'm quite shocked that this isn't a bigger scandal than it is in the US. I think the only reason is a group of people are in flat-out denial when it comes to anything that might tarnish Trump's image.

This is Cold War shit all over again.

I know it's crazy right?

[rsilvergun]

it's almost as if times can change, or that hindsight is 20/20. See, this is the trouble with the Right. Zero ability to adapt to change. If Russia was an Ally yesterday they're always gonna be an ally, right? Oh, and no shades of grey. Russia's either balls to the walls evil and needs to be exterminated or our ardent friend.

As for Iran, they were well on their way to modernizing before we put a bunch of religious nuts in power. There's pictures of girls in Iran wearing the sorts of skirts that wouldn't have been out of place in 1960s America before we screwed with 'em. And don't get me started on the shit we do and did in South America so Code can sell cheap sugar water.