- Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified in House Intelligence Committee hearing on Russia June 21, 2017. Johnson, who served from 2013 to 2017 under former President Barack Obama, met with the Senate Intelligence Committee last week behind closed doors. In June 21st hearing before the House, Johnson will likely face questions about his agency’s reports about Russia’s hacking leading up to the 2016 election and before Inauguration Day, and about whether those assessments have changed. Johnson’s written statement came as part of the testimony Johnson prepared for his June 21st appearance before the House Intelligence Committee, which details when intelligence officials first detected interference into the country’s election infrastructure. Johnson’s written statement reads in part: “In 2016 the Russian government, at the direction of Vladimir Putin himself, orchestrated cyberattacks on our Nation for the purpose of influencing our election – plain and simple. Now, the key question for the President and Congress is: what are we going to do to protect the American people and their democracy from this kind of thing in the future?” Read Johnson’s full statement here.
The Russians interfered with our election to help Trump get elected by hacking into the DNC and other places. Leaked top-secret NSA report details Russian hacking effort days before 2016 election. On June 13th 2017 Bloomberg reported that Russia’s cyberattack on the U.S. electoral system before Donald Trump’s election was far more widespread than has been publicly revealed, including incursions into voter databases and software systems in almost twice as many states as previously reported. In Illinois, investigators found evidence that cyber intruders tried to delete or alter voter data. The hackers accessed software designed to be used by poll workers on Election Day, and in at least one state accessed a campaign finance database. Details of the wave of attacks, in the summer and fall of 2016, were provided by three people with direct knowledge of the US investigation into the matter. In all, the Russian hackers hit systems in a total of 39 states, one of them said.
The hacking of state and local election databases in 2016 was more extensive than previously reported, including at least one successful attempt to alter voter information, and the theft of thousands of voter records that contain private information like partial Social Security numbers, current and former officials tell TIME. In one case, investigators found there had been a manipulation of voter data in a county database but the alterations were discovered and rectified, two sources familiar with the matter tell TIME. Investigators have not identified whether the hackers in that case were Russian agents. The fact that private data was stolen from states is separately providing investigators a previously unreported line of inquiry in the probes into Russian attempts to influence the election. In Illinois, more than 90% of the nearly 90,000 records stolen by Russian state actors contained drivers license numbers, and a quarter contained the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers, according to Ken Menzel, the General Counsel of the State Board of Elections. Congressional investigators are probing whether any of this stolen private information made its way to the Trump campaign, two sources familiar with the investigations tell TIME.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at how the US voting system consists of thousands of individual precincts, making it harder to hack as a whole, but also more difficult to monitor and defend, making assessment of Russia’s 2016 hack tricky.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Congressman Adam Schiff, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, talks with Rachel Maddow about the effort to understand the extent and intent of the 2016 Russian election attack and preparing for what might come next. The Russians are not our friends, they are undermining our government. But this whole thing is much more involved and complicated than just that and it is not over yet there is a whole net of things still going on and we don’t know exactly where this ends yet.
And on top of Russians hacking us, now a Republican marketing firm has leaked personal data of 200 million voters. A data firm once contracted by the Republican National Committee exposed birth dates, emails, physical addresses, religion, race, and political leanings for more than half the US population. According to a Gizmodo report, the RNC and other GOP organizations contracted the conservative firm Deep Root Analytics to gather audience data from multiple sources, such as Republican super PACs and Reddit, that were intended to be used for targeted political ads. That aggregated data was found on an insecure server that wasn’t password protected and could be accessed by anyone with the URL. Cybersecurity analyst Chris Vickery with UpGuard found more than a terabyte of data Deep Root had gathered from multiple Republican-linked sources on an Amazon cloud server, along with other data, some proprietary, from several millions of dollars worth of GOP contracts, including the GOP Data Trust, Gizmodo reported. Deep Root claims the company wasn’t hacked and the data exposure was the result of a vulnerability in a recent security update. Vickery also discovered a trove of voter data belonging to 191 million people in 2015. Deep Root’s founding data scientist Alex Lundry used to work on Jeb Bush’s and Mitt Romney’s campaigns, and the company was one of three to work on Trump’s presidential campaign. Among the personal contact information found on the insecure server were how individual voters felt about certain hot button issues such as stem cell research, gun ownership, and abortion. The exposed data poses a privacy threat for voters, especially if it gets in the wrong hands before a security patch is released. And it provides easy access for Russians, just copy and paste and they’re all set for the next election.
