MAY JUNE 2018 | MOTHER JONES 69hit America as election season heats up—
but what is certain, says Camille Stewart,
an Obama-era Homeland Security oicial,
is that Putin has every incentive to con-
tinue with his disinformation strategy. “If
there haven’t been enough precautions put
in place,” she says, “they’re likely to use the
same methods. Hacking the public confi-
dence has been very effective, and they are
likely to continue in that vein.”
Andrei Soldatov, a leading cybersecurity
journalist based in Moscow, agrees that
Putin has come to see cyberwar as high
reward and low risk. “That’s the explana-
tion of why [the Kremlin] has become so
adventurous,” Soldatov said. “They don’t
see any risks coming their way.”
Cybersecurity experts told me they fear
that Trump’s refusal to challenge Putin
will leave the United States exposed to
attacks even more devastating than what
happened in 2016. Michael Carpenter, the
former deputy assistant defense secre-
tary for Ukraine, Russia, and Eurasia, says
that because so much of America’s criti-
cal infrastructure is privately owned, the
govern ment can do little to standardize
security protocols, so levels of prepared-
ness vary wildly. And Americans are
just more dependent on digital systems,
period. In Ukraine, he notes, “the only
way those [nuclear] power plants got back
online is because they were so old they
had manual functionality. Had our plants
been hit by a similar virus, they would
have gone down, and the consequences
are enormous. I think a lot of Americans
haven’t woken up to this yet.”
In February, the House of Represen-
tatives passed Rep. Boyle’s US-Ukraine
cyber security bill, and the legislation is
now headed for the Senate. But if it be-
comes law, will the Trump administration
follow its directive? Carpenter told me
bluntly that he believes the president “is
turning a blind eye because he is beholden
to the Kremlin.” Boyle was more circum-
spect: The president, he told me, appears
to have reacted to every revelation about
Russia with a focus on self- preservation.
“This whole topic feeds into his insecu-
rity,” he said. “If we can take this outside
the realm of the 2016 election and couch it
as an issue of national defense, then I think
we have the prospect of being successful.”
But there’s the rub. To protect the
nation, Trump would have to acknowledge
that his success may have been buoyed by
Russian support. And that, it seems clear,
he refuses to do no matter what. QSecurity oicials warned that “Russian gov-
ernment cyber actors” had targeted compa-
nies and systems involved with America’s
water supply, nuclear plants, aviation, and
other key infra structure.
Still, the Trump administration appears
to have done little to counter these rising
threats. Since 2016, Congress has ear-
marked $120 million to counter foreign
interference, but the State Department
has spent none of it, according to the New
York Times. President Donald Trump has
dragged his feet on enforcing congressio-
nally mandated sanctions against Russia
and told the public he believes Vladimir
Putin’s assertions that there was no elec-
tion interference. Admiral Michael Rogers,
who heads the National Security Agency
and the Pentagon’s US Cyber Command,
told Congress in February that Trump had
not given any order to disrupt Russian
election interference. (Neither the Depart-
ment of Homeland Security nor the White
House would comment for this article.)
“I do not believe that we are prepared
and focusing nearly enough on bolstering
our cyberdefenses,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-
Pa.), who has introduced legislation that
would direct the State Department to study
the Ukrainian experience, told me. “Cyber
is the battlefield of the 21st century, and I
am deeply concerned that we are woefully
unprepared in this area.”
Junaid Islam, the chief technology of-
ficer and founder of Vidder, a California-
based cybersecurity firm, told me that
one of the most troubling aspects of the
NotPetya attack was that it involved next-
generation cyberweapons. Unlike mal-
ware activated when a user clicks an email
attachment or a link, NotPetya, once in-
stalled by an unwitting user in a single
computer, spreads by itself through the
network connected to the machine. That
kind of weapon, notes Islam, can target
one person (say, a candidate’s campaign
manager) and erase her hard drive as soon
as she logs in to the network. Or it can
target an entire organization, company,
or government agency.
Such a self-propagating piece of mali-
cious code, Islam points out, would move
even faster in America, where 90 percent of
the population has internet access, versus
just over half in Ukraine. “That to me is a
true cyberweapon,” he says.
There’s no telling how the Kremlin will
WEAPONS OF MASS DISRUPTION
(continued from page 31)
don’t want to be told that it does.
Marisa Weiss, a breast oncologist and
the founder of BreastCancer.org, gives
talks on college campuses, where she ex-
plains to young women the cancer risks
they face from drinking. “I see the same
people get completely trashed that night,”
she laments. But she understands why.
“It’s because life is a bitch,” she says. “We
work long hours, and alcohol becomes like
self-medication. It’s relaxing. It’s fun.”
I get it. But you know what’s not fun?
Watching your 10-year-old daughter keen
and hyperventilate after you tell her you
have cancer. Or having six-inch needles
full of radioactive dye plunged repeatedly
through your nipple, without anesthesia,
so a surgeon can see if the cancer has
spread to your lymph nodes. Or leaving
work early while awaiting biopsy results
because your hands are shaking so badly
you can’t type. Cancer isn’t fun, in ways far
beyond the obvious. And in relative terms,
I’ve had it easy so far. I’m still alive.
A few months ago, I plugged my data
into the National Cancer Institute’s breast
cancer risk calculator to see what my odds
had been before I discovered my tumor. The
bare-bones assessment showed I had a 1.1
percent risk of getting breast cancer in the
next five years. The calculator doesn’t ac-
count for my alcohol consumption (or the
protective effects of exercise and breast-
feeding), but the experts I’ve spoken with
say booze probably bumped up my risk.
I’ll never know for certain whether alco-
hol caused my cancer. There are so many
factors: Just in December, a Danish study
found that being on birth control raises the
risk of breast cancer more than previously
thought. What I do know is that cutting
back on drinking, particularly when I was
young, is virtually the only thing I could
have changed about my lifestyle to try
to prevent this cancer if I’d been fully in-
formed. Now I’ve mostly given up alcohol to
hedge my bets against a recurrence. I can’t
be sure I would have done the same thing
if someone had told me when I was 15 or 20
that drinking could give me breast cancer.
I’d like to think so—I never smoked—but
there’s no guarantee I wouldn’t have been
just like the students Weiss talks to. At least
they have a choice—they’ve been told the
risk they’re taking. Like most women, I didn’t
have that choice, and a powerful industry
worked to keep it that way. QBOTTLED UP
(continued from page 53)