February 2020 | Rolling Stone | 39
man, a cybersecurity aide to
the new national security ad-
viser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
(Steinman is now the cyber-
security adviser to the presi-
dent.) According to people fa-
miliar with the meeting, when
the Obama staffers told Stein-
man they wanted to talk about
Russian interference, they
were met with a blank stare.
Nothing happened, was
Steinman’s reply: Russia didn’t
interfere in the election.
The Obama team was
stunned. Inside the Trump
White House, the election se-
curity issue “was taboo,” says
Andy Grotto, an Obama-era
holdover who wrote Trump’s
cybersecurity executive order.
Grotto got calls from intelli-
gence agencies asking if they were still allowed
to work with their European counterparts on
inter ference issues. (The Trump White House
declined to comment for this story.) Ferrante
had seen enough. Three months into Trump’s
presidency, he handed in his resignation.F
OUR YEARS AGO, for an embarrassing-
ly modest price, Russia pulled off one
of the more audacious acts of elec-
tion interference in modern history.
The Internet Research Agency, the team of
Kremlin-backed online propagandists, spent
$15 million to $20 million and wreaked havoc
on the psyche of the American voter, creating
the impression that behind every Twitter av-
atar or Facebook profile was a Russian troll.
Russian intelligence agents carried out the dig-
ital version of Watergate, infiltrating the Demo-
cratic Party and the Clinton campaign, stealing
tens of thousands of emails, and weaponizing
them in the days and weeks before the election.
Russian- based hackers tested election websitesOBAMA’S
CYBER EXPERT
Anthony
Ferrante
worked from
the White
House to try to
secure the
2016 election.
Afterward, he
briefed the
Trump team on
the threat but
they refused to
admit Russian
meddling.
Ferrante was
told there’s no
“there” there.in all 50 states for weak spots, like burglars cas-
ing a would-be target. “The Russians were test-
ing whether our windows were open, rattling
our doors to see whether they were locked, and
found the windows and doors wide open,” says
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on
the Intelligence Committee. “The fact that they
didn’t interject themselves more dramatically
into our election was, I think, almost luck.”
Did Russia’s hack-and-leak operation and dis-
information blitz tip the election to Trump?
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications pro-
fessor at the University of Pennsylvania, argues
in her book Cyberwar that Russia helped Trump
win, but the debate over that question rages on
to this day. What’s not in doubt, however, is
how unprepared and vulnerable the U.S. was.
We can’t say we weren’t warned. European
allies raised the alarm for years about Russian
aggression and cyberattacks in Estonia and
Ukraine on internet infrastructure, election-
reporting systems, and the power grid. In the
spring of 2015, a panel of experts testified be-fore Congress about “Confronting Russia’s
Weaponization of Information.” One of the
witnesses was Peter Pomerantsev, a propagan-
da expert who experienced President Vladimir
Putin’s war on truth and reality from the inside
as a Russian TV producer. In the post-Soviet
global order, Pomerantsev explained, Russia’s
leaders knew they couldn’t compete militarily
or economically with the West, so they needed
“revolutionary powers and asymmetric re-
sponses,” as one Kremlin official put it. Rus-
sia’s mastery of propaganda dated back to
Stalin, but under Putin’s leadership, the coun-
try adapted these tactics for the digital era. It
would wage an information war on Western de-
mocracies. “We always ask, ‘What does Putin
want?’ ” Pomerantsev testified. “He sees the
21st century that is going to be like this — end-
less subversion, disinformation, economic ma-
nipulation — and he might be right.” He went
on, “This is permanent war.”
Any member of Congress who heeded
Pomerantsev’s warning would have seen Rus-
sia’s 2016 interference coming. But only five or
six out of 44 lawmakers attended the hearing.
C-SPAN didn’t bother to show it.
We were, in other words, caught with our
pants down. Four years later, other foreign na-
tions, including Iran, North Korea, Saudi Ara-
bia, and China, are getting in on the act. They’ll
be joined, analysts say, by domestic actors —
American consultants and candidates and
click merchants borrowing and adapting Rus-
sia’s tactics to influence an election or make a
quick buck. “The most important piece that I
tell every body,” Ferrante says, “is now that it’s
been done once, everybody can do it.”
Are we prepared going into the 2020 elec-
tion? After seven months of reporting, inter-
viewing more than 40 experts as well as current
and former government officials and review-
ing thousands of pages of records, the reali-
ty is this: We’ve made progress since the last
election — but we’re much less secure than we
TO should be. To use Sen. Warner’s analogy, the
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OCKWIKILEAKS
Days before the
Democratic Con-
vention, WikiLeaks
posts a trove of
20,000 DNC
emails that suggest
the party prefers
Clinton over rival
Bernie Sanders.
HELPING TRUMP
Russians, posing
as Americans,
coordinate with the
Trump campaign
to organize a yuge
pro-Trump flash
mob across Florida.
Thirteen IRA execs
are later indicted.MALWARE IN OUR VOTER ROLLS
Posing as election officials, GRU hackers
successfully spear-phish VR Systems, a
software company that manages voter rolls,
and install malware in its system.COUNTER ATTACK
WikiLeaks posts
Podesta’s emails,
distracting from
Trump’s bragging
about grabbing
women “by the
pussy” — and an
Obama warning on
Russian meddling.MORE DNC
DATA LEAKED
Two days before
the presidential
election, WikiLeaks
releases another
trove of 8, 000
emails stolen
by Russians from
the DNC.STIRRING HATE
Even after the
election, the
Russians continue
to foment dissent,
staging two com-
peting New York
rallies supporting
and opposing Presi-
dent-elect Trump.MUELLER WARNS
AMERICA
Robert Mueller
tells Congress
Russia is working to
influence the 2020
election “as we sit
here” — and “many
more countries” are
following their lead.JULY AUG. OCT. NOV. JULY 2019