The Department of Homeland Security is under fire for waiting months to notify 21 states of the mostly unsuccessful efforts of hackers associated with the Russian government to infiltrate their election systems during the 2016 campaign.
Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) called the delay “unacceptable,” saying state election officials must be made aware of all such attempted intrusions, successful or not, so that they can strengthen their defenses.”
California’s Democratic Secretary of State, Alex Padilla, said that DHS ignored his office’s repeated requests for additional information.
“We shouldn’t have to learn about potential threats from leaked NSA documents or media reports,” Padilla said in a statement. “It is the intelligence community’s responsibility to inform elections officials of any potential threats to our elections. They failed in this responsibility.”
Padilla said that Jeanette Manfra, DHS’ Acting Undersecretary for Cybersecurity and Communications, falsely testified to Congress in June that all 21 states whose systems were targeted had already been informed.
“This was simply not true and DHS acknowledged they failed to contact us and ‘two or three’ other states,” Padilla said.
The hackers efforts’ did not affect election results or the systems themselves. They mainly consisted of attempts to scan the systems for vulnerabilities.
Besides California, other states that have confirmed being targeted include Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Washington, according to the Associated Press and states themselves.
This keeps being repeated - the idea that the efforts did not affect results or the systems, but never with sufficient information to explain how we verified this.
Given that the Administration has created a bogus election commission that pays no attention to these issues, but instead seems to serve 2 goals: fake evidence to “prove” that 3 million undocumented people voted illegally, and 2) fulfill Kobach’s dear desire of getting as many people who might vote for democrats disallowed from voting, given all that, it doesn’t seem wise to accept that assertion without any fact/verification.
And lying to congress about notifying states that their systems had been under attack by Russia? There would be a hectoring subcommittee, hoopla, a nickname + Gate which would be pushed across the rwing media had this happened during the Obama Admin (like with the $12 muffins), or if we had a H. Clinton Administration.
What was it Duncan Hunter said about Trump? Something like: He’s an Asshole (in real person), but he’s our asshole. Guess with the whole ‘45’ Administration its : Ya their incompetent/are acting with malfeasance, but their our incompetents/malefactors.
What? Not Michigan and Florida?
OK, here’s the elephant in the room: the DHS should not be notifying states about port-scanning intrusion attempts or reconnaissance. Anyone who has a site that is of national importance should have or hire the expertise to be looking at their own damn logs to see whether that kind of thing is going on. And it should be happening in real time. I bet TPM could tell you within a day how many connections they were getting from known-russian IPs.
According to tRUMP this is a hoax!
According to tRUMP Russia is OK!
tRUMP loves Russia and would never insult ol’ Pooty-poot!
Fake news!
What a parliament of whores, grifters and chiselers.
The DHS is a bigger, more expensive joke than the (Shrubya) administration that first dreamed it up. OTOH if you consider it the world’s largest Kabuki theater troupe on the planet it’s an unqualified (emphasis on unqualified) success.