In an age of political dysfunction, the Amazon founder has begun to subsume the powers of the state.

But instead of complacently enjoying its triumph, Russia almost immediately set about replicating it. The Russians had the capacity to cause far greater damage than they did—at the very least to render Election Day a chaotic mess—but didn’t act on it, because they deemed such an operation either unnecessary or not worth the cost. A physician describes the gap between well-resourced institutions and those struggling to prepare. Grenell immediately set about confirming the wisdom behind Trump’s choice.

His greatest fear is that an election official might inadvertently enable a piece of ransomware.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he replied, “and that bothers me.”Vladimir Putin dreams of discrediting the American democratic system, and he will never have a more reliable ally than Donald Trump. The emails come from a trusted source, and carry a plausible message.

BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic By POLITICO Staff 7/20/2020.

DHS, which has an acute understanding of the problem at hand but limited resources to solve it, accepted Stamos’s offer. As the political scientist Thomas Rid recounts in his powerful new history, The ruse was innocuous, but it proved a theory that could be put to far more nefarious ends: Social media had made it possible, at shockingly low cost, for Russians to steer the emotions and even movements of Americans. By Franklin Foer theatlantic.com — The best way to grasp the magnitude of what we’re seeing is to look for precedents abroad. Emails arrive from a phony address that looks as if it belongs to a friend or colleague, but has one letter omitted.

He collected enough cash prizes from the bug bounties to cover the costs of four years at Stanford.Though it wouldn’t have given the average citizen a moment of pause, Cable recognized the error message on the Chicago Board of Elections website as a telltale sign of a gaping hole in its security. It’s possible, however, to mistake a plot point—the manipulation of the 2016 election—for the full sweep of the narrative.Events in the United States have unfolded more favorably than any operative in Moscow could have ever dreamed: Not only did Russia’s preferred candidate win, but he has spent his first term fulfilling the potential it saw in him, discrediting American institutions, rending the seams of American culture, and isolating a nation that had styled itself as indispensable to the free world. These were the most basic lapses in cybersecurity—preventable with code learned in an introductory computer-science class—and they remained even though similar gaps had been identified by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, not to mention widely reported in the media. American incompetence had been confused for a plot against America.As the outlines of the IRA’s efforts began to emerge in the months following the 2016 election, In the spring of 2018, he invited executives from the big tech companies and leaders of intelligence agencies to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. But there is another reason for the government’s alarmingly inadequate response: a president who sees attempts to counter the Russia threat as a personal affront.After McMaster was fired, having made little if any progress on Russia, the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, took up the cause, installing in his office an election-security adviser named Shelby Pierson. When the Iowa Democratic Party struggled to implement new technology used to tally results for the state’s caucus, television panelists, Twitter pundits, and even a member of Congress speculated about the possibility of hacking, despite a lack of evidence to justify such loose talk. Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Within 15 minutes of poking around the Board of Elections website, he discovered that its old weaknesses had not been fully repaired. )When I asked Weintraub if she had a sense of how many such examples exist in American politics, she replied, “We know there’s stuff going on out there, and we’re just not doing anything.” Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 There was a moment that crystallized Schiff’s sense of this disjointedness. Rachel Martin talks to Franklin Foer of The Atlantic about Paul Manafort potentially tampering with witnesses in the Robert Mueller investigation. As he considered his answer, he leaned toward me. The biggest platforms are a new kind of monopoly. Having probed state voting systems far more extensively than is generally understood by the public, they are now surely more capable of mayhem on Election Day—and possibly without leaving a detectable trace of their handiwork.

First dog to test positive for COVID-19 in US has died. At last, lawmakers have figured out why that’s a problem.

In the middle of meetings, staffers would find their devices vibrating incessantly; strangers would fill their voicemails with messages like As Podesta revisited these painful moments, he claimed that he’d stoically persisted in their face: “I kept going on television. The contents were rather banal, filled with restaurant reservations and trivial memos. If a campaign consultant has told his circle of friends about an upcoming bass-fishing trip, the GRU will package its malware in an email offering discounts on bass-fishing gear.Many of these techniques are borrowed from Russian cybercrime syndicates, which hack their way into banks and traffic in stolen credit cards. Unlike Ukraine, the United States doesn’t have a central node that, if struck, could disable democracy at its core. The subject of voting divides Republicans and Democrats.

Across government—if not at the top of it—there was a panicked sense that American democracy required new layers of defense.