The ominous Trump-Russia link: What happens if Moscow really is meddling in the 2016 race?
If Russian hackers are conducting a 2016 sabotage campaign, it would put massive strain on our political system
http://www.salon.com/2016/07/26/the_ominous_trump_russia_link_what_happens_if_moscow_really_is_meddling_in_the_2016_race/
The resignation of Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz over a series of embarrassing leaked emails is obviously a big political story, and it does not portend well for Democratic efforts at demonstrating unity over the next week. But the larger, much more significant story surrounding those emails is the growing pile of evidence that they were hacked and released by Russian intelligence agencies.
Vice News’ Thomas Rid
compiled all the publicly available evidence surrounding the hacking of the DNC, which was first reported last month. There’s a lot of technical jargon, but he writes that “the forensic evidence linking the DNC breach to known Russian operations is very strong,” while the evidence linking its dissemination to the Russians “is not as solid, yet a deception operation… is still highly likely.” The FBI is investigating the case, and as the
Daily Beast reported Monday, the working theory is that the operation was intended to sway the presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor:
The FBI suspects that Russian government hackers breached the networks of the Democratic National Committee and stole emails that were posted to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks on Friday. It’s an operation that several U.S. officials now suspect was a deliberate attempt to influence the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, according to five individuals familiar with the investigation of the breach.
Nothing has been concretely proven, but we have to consider the ominous ramifications of what we’re looking at here. The DNC hacking operation described by Vice was highly sophisticated and had been ongoing “since at least summer 2015.” One has to leave open the possibility that, given the proficiency of the hackers and the amount of time they spent undetected, they obtained access to information that hasn’t been released yet. And if we are indeed seeing an effort by Russian intelligence services to sow chaos in the 2016 presidential race, then you can’t rule out the possibility that we’ll see more targeted releases of stolen information that coincide with big political moments – the DNC emails dropped just before the Democratic convention, and we still have several debates to get through, not to mention Election Day itself.
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