Obama's counterterrorism advisor, Lisa Monaco, did an interview with Politico. It's not got any particularly new revelations about Russian involvement within the US election but it does confirm some more about why the Obama administration acted as it did during the election as well as why the evidence which directly points at Russia is somewhat hazy.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/obama-russia-hacking-trump-214976By going public before the election with evidence that the Kremlin was trying to help Donald Trump , the Obama team feared, they’d be accused of intervening to help Hillary Clinton. So they mostly kept quiet despite intense lobbying from fellow Democrats to say more before the voting.
“We treated it very much in the way that we have done other malicious activity by cyber actors,” Monaco says, choosing to turn the case over to the FBI and intelligence agencies to figure out how and when to “attribute” the attack publicly without giving away the evidence used to reach that conclusion. “We applied the same framework that we have in other contexts, whether it was China stealing intellectual property, whether it’s Iran committing denial of service attacks on our financial institutions, whether it’s North Korea in the Sony attack,” Monaco says. “We applied a framework and a playbook that we have done many times.”
There are also suggestions (eg
NYT) that GCHQ here were among the first to flag up to the Americans that the DNC hacks were being directed from Russia. GCHQ have certainly written to political parties offering them assistance with protecting their systems in light of what happened in the States and Germany and other places all linked to what is being labelled as Russian hacking. (
Reuters).
It's not often you get the
French,
the Germans, us and the Americans all on the same page about something. It would suggest either everyone has gone stark raving bonkers or that there is something there - no matter how coy Western intelligence agencies are being with the precise details of how they know.
