RED PHONE
This Hotline Could Keep the U.S. and Russia From Cyberwar
U.S. intelligence officials are looking to Washington-Moscow hotline as a last-ditch crisis channel that might just prevent a cataclysmic online showdown.
Erin Banco
National Security Reporter
Kevin Poulsen
Sr. National Security Correspondent
Updated 03.07.19 4:38AM ET Published 02.23.19 9:19PM ET
As concerns mount that Russia will unleash hackers and online disinformation brigades to wreak havoc in another American election, senior U.S. officials are taking a second look at a technology handed down from the age of Gorbachev and Reagan: an emergency “hotline” between officials in the U.S. and Russia that might someday pull both countries back from the brink of an all out cyberwar.
The secure messaging system, known colloquially in the White House as the “cyberhotline,” already exists. It was set up in 2013—building off a Cold War messaging system, in fact—in the hope that it might facilitate conversations between the two countries during a crisis in cyberspace, where the identities and intentions of attackers are often muddled. So far it’s been used only once, in the waning days of the Obama administration, when the White House’s cyberchief fired off a carefully worded warning to Moscow not to attack the “infrastructure” for the 2016 election.
Since then, the U.S. has invested in developing a Cold War-style deterrence capability in cyberspace, and military brass have publicly touted their willingness to respond to foreign cyberaggression in kind. But with that sharper stick comes greater risk of a misunderstanding that might lead to an escalating conflict online. So intelligence officials in the Trump administration are talking about using the cyberhotline as a last-ditch crisis channel that might just prevent the electronic equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to three U.S. officials.
“Everything has been laid out on the table, all sorts of options of dealing with this cybersecurity threat. The hotline is something that came up in the context of us needing to really face this issue head on—and to know that Russia has received the message,” said one senior intelligence official. “It’s the option we would use if we felt like all the other options weren’t working and if the crisis was escalating quickly. We’ve seen no signs that Russia has stopped meddling."
There are ongoing concerns in the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Russia, among other countries, is continuing to to stir trouble in U.S. politics and is actively planning to meddle in the 2020 presidential elections, according to three individuals with first-hand knowledge of reports drawn up within the last six months. (The FBI declined to comment for this story, and DHS didn’t respond to multiple written and telephone requests for comment.)
But while the Justice Department continues its prosecutions of Russian intelligence officers for their roles in the 2016 election and the military continues to prepare for a possible cyberwar, national security policymakers are grappling with a pair of beyond-thorny questions: How do we stave off another Russian attack on U.S. elections? And what do we do to keep any attack from becoming a cataclysm? Warning Russia directly through an official channel could provide at least some answers.
“I would expect to see some of that same Russian activity to occur again. I think the hotline is a useful tool to raise concerns,” said Michael Daniel, the former White House cybersecurity adviser and president and CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance. “I am certain at some point the U.S. will use it again.”
Daniel was there for the first and only time the hotline has been used so far.
It was October 2016, not long before the voting for president was set to begin. According to Daniel, the Obama White House decided to warn President Vladimir Putin that it had gathered intelligence that indicated Russia was attempting to disrupt the U.S. election.
"We didn’t have full knowledge and understanding of the scope of the social media and disinformation work,” Daniel said. “We were focused on the threats to the actual infrastructure.”
The decision to contact Russia through the established hotline included a slew of top-level cabinet secretaries, including then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice.
Discussions about when and how to contact Russia spanned weeks, according to four former National Security Council staffers.
“There was a process at the staff level to approve the actual content to make sure we were sending the right message,” Daniel said, adding that no one in the administration knew if or how Russia would respond to the communication.
“The fact that we were using it to communicate our concerns about the potential for Russia using cyber-means to disrupt the election,” he added. “We knew it would convey how serious we were about this issue.”
“It’s the option we would use if we felt like all the other options weren’t working and if the crisis was escalating quickly. We’ve seen no signs that Russia has stopped meddling.”
— U.S. intelligence official
The message, which was carefully crafted into an agreed template between the U.S. and Russia, eventually made its way to staffers at the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC) at the State Department.
The U.S. and Russia created the center in 1987 as a way to establish a direct line of communication in the event of looming nuclear war. More than a quarter-century later, Washington and Moscow signed an agreement to establish the cyberhotline—one tacked on to the old NRRC messaging system and an additional voice line that would extend between the U.S. Cybersecurity Coordinator in the White House and the Russian Deputy Secretary of the Security Council.
“It was a big deal… just like in the cold war, the way you handle nuclear, and now cyber, is to ease involuntary escalation,” said Chris Painter who served as the top U.S. “cyberdiplomat” at the State Department from 2011 to 2017.
Once the 2016 message left the NRRC system, Daniel and his team received notice that it had been delivered to the Kremlin.
“And then, we waited,” Daniel said, adding that everyone involved in the crafting of the message went back to their daily routines.
“It took a couple of days,” he said. “Then, we heard back. Their message was, ‘We need more information.’ That was the last of the communication.”
Two other former National Security Council staffers said that a voice hotline was also used to communicate with the Kremlin about election meddling.
The cyberhotline idea came to fruition in 2013 amid growing concerns in the U.S. administration that its relationship with Russia was on a crash course.
“The hotline was a symbolic gesture that could be used to help build a relationship with Russia and in the event of a real emergency, the administration and Moscow could… chat,” said one former State Department official.
The voice line, Painter said, “was something the Russians wanted… No matter how bad things get between Russia and the United States, it is always answered.”
But the discussions that led to the implementation of the cyberhotlines—the messaging systems and the actual voice line—took several rounds of official talks between the U.S. and Russia.
According to former officials, there was a fundamental disagreement on what cybersecurity meant to Washington and to Russia.
The Pentagon Has Prepared a Cyberattack Against Russia
Center For Public Integrity
“On our side, cybersecurity means protecting the integrity of information systems, protecting infrastructure that could be damaged through cyberintrusions,” one former official in the State Department said. “The Russians have a much broader definition of cybersecurity. That’s where you get things like monitoring communications of private citizens.”
A former staffer on the National Security Council told The Daily Beast that the voice lines between the White House and the Kremlin were open and at times active during the Obama administration. White House communications personnel conducted a radio check with Russia each day to ensure the lines were working, the source said.
“One of the things we were all trying to figure out at the time is how to get in touch with the Kremlin if anything ever happened or if there was an emergency,” a former official told The Daily Beast. “I remember one of the IT guys that worked in the White House telling me, ‘I can get you a line with anyone in Russia, you just have to tell me who you want to talk to.’”
But there were no real conversations until that day in October 2016.
“Even before we had full awareness of what Russia was doing, it was always going to be difficult to talk about,” said one former State Department official. “We use cyber against each other for espionage and other things. There’s not a lot of trust there to begin with.”
Today, the White House is insisting that it is doing everything it can to prevent a hack of the American political system.
“The Trump administration is working across all levels of government to help protect America’s elections from foreign interference,” said Garrett Marquis, a spokesman for the National Security Council. “These efforts build on the administration’s support to states during past elections.”
But officials inside the administration are worried that Trump might somehow interfere with or block the communications channels…
“There’s no one willing to bring up Russia in meetings with the president,” one former official from the intelligence community said. “Whether it has to do with elections or sanctions—it’s just not something that gets discussed with him in front of large intelligence briefings or meetings.”
“There’s no one who is willing to bring up Russia in meetings with the president. It’s just not something that gets discussed with him in front of large intelligence briefings.”
— Former U.S. intelligence official
For the most part, Russia has been uncooperative in cases of Russian hackers victimizing American companies and individuals, said Luke Dembosky, a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton. Dembosky is a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for National Security who was stationed in Moscow for nearly three years as the Justice Department’s cyberattaché to Russia.
And, he said, more needs to be done to establish a working relationship with Russia to avoid another cyberfiasco.
“There’s little-to-no cooperation on the day-to-day stuff. The relationships aren’t in place for when something really bad happens,” he said. “You can set up all the hotlines you want but unless there’s some trust between the two countries, it’s going to result in failure.”
—with additional reporting by Anna Nemtsova in Moscow
Erin Banco
National Security Reporter
Kevin Poulsen
Sr. National Security Correspondent
@kpoulsen
CONFUSION REIGNS
U.S. ‘Withdraws’ Forces to Let Turks Advance on America’s Allies
Spencer Ackerman
Justin Baragona
Barbie Latza Nadeau
Updated 10.13.19 3:08PM ET Published 10.13.19 11:18AM ET
In the latest surge of anti-war rhetoric from the Trump administration, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the U.S. is launching a “deliberate withdrawal” of American forces from northern Syria, but refused to say how long it will take.
“We want to conduct it safely and quickly as possible,” Esper told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning, adding, “I’m not prepared to put a timeline on it, but that’s our general game plan.”
Two knowledgeable U.S. officials told The Daily Beast that the troops are just withdrawing further away from the advance of Turkish forces massacring the Syrian Kurds whom America relied upon to destroy the so-called Islamic State’s caliphate.
There are currently 1,000 U.S. troops in Syria. A knowledgeable U.S. official said hundreds of those troops, without further specificity, will leave Syria for elsewhere in the Mideast. Following a pullout from two northern Syrian observation posts last week, the U.S. will now retreat further away from the area Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has invaded.
Esper said that President Donald Trump gave the withdrawal order because Turkish forces are pushing further south into Syria and Kurdish forces are trying to cut a deal with Syria and Russia to counter-attack.
“We have American forces likely caught between two opposing advancing armies and it’s a very untenable situation,” he said.
But as Esper made clear, the order affects only the north and there will still be American forces in the rest of Syria even as Trump—who separately has ordered about 14,000 U.S. troops to the Persian Gulf region over the past six months—rails against the disastrous, bloody and interminable U.S. misadventure in the Middle East over the past generation.
A U.S. official told CNN that U.S. policy “has failed” and that the campaign in Syria to defeat ISIS is “over for now,” giving the terrorist group “a second lease on life with nearly 100,000 [people] who will re-join their jihad.”
The mixed messaging by the Trump administration is making it difficult for even his most ardent supporters to help unravel his foreign policy on Syria as it spins out of control.
Just days after Trump announced the withdrawal of American troops from northern Syria where they have been providing weapons and cover to allied Kurdish fighters on the border between Turkey and Syria, Turkey began a military incursion that has sent the region into a level of chaos it has not seen in recent years.
The Daily Beast first reported Friday that claims made by the Trump administration that U.S. troops had been withdrawn were false. “We are out of there. We’ve been out of there for a while,” Trump said Wednesday. “No soldiers whatsoever.” Two officials told The Daily Beast that in fact the U.S. military had only pulled back–not completely out–of northern Syria. They had simply abandoned two small observation posts from which they supported Kurdish allies in the fight against Islamic State fighters.
ENDLESS
Trump Says U.S. Troops Have Quit Syria. It’s Not True.
Spencer Ackerman
Trump then tweeted that he had been talking with Senator Lindsey Graham (R–SC), who had been highly critical of Trump’s decision to remove troops. “Pray for our Kurdish allies who have been shamelessly abandoned by the Trump administration. This move ensures the reemergence of ISIS,” Graham warned Wednesday. “I urge President Trump to change course while there is still time by going back to the safe zone concept that was working.”
Graham later tweeted that any sanctions had to be serious. “The conditional sanctions announced today will be viewed by Turkey as a tepid response and will embolden Erdogan even more,” Graham tweeted Friday. “The Turkish government needs to know Congress will take a different path–passing crippling sanctions in a bipartisan fashion.”
But in a Sunday morning tweet, the president wrote that he was working with Graham “and many members of Congress, including Democrats, about imposing powerful Sanctions on Turkey.”
He then added: “Treasury is ready to go, additional legislation may be sought. There is great consensus on this. Turkey has asked that it not be done. Stay tuned!”
Turkey has warned that any threats of sanctions would be met with the release of millions of refugees along the border between Turkey and Syria into Europe. Trump told reporters at the White House earlier this week that it did not concern him. “Well they’re going to be escaping to Europe,” he said. “That’s where they want to go, they want to go back to their homes.”
- Here is a screengrab from a pro-ISIS channel on the app Telegram, as ISIS rejoices at the “bushra” (good news) regarding the liberation of their supporters at Ain Issa: pic.twitter.com/RyvI08ZDKR
— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) October 13, 2019
On Sunday, the Associated Press reported that up to 700 ISIS sympathizers did escape the Ain Eissa camp, which holds up 12,000 people caught up in years of unrest. Most of those who escaped are ISIS brides and children, but officials warn that they could be part of a resurgence of the so-called Islamic state. Several known ISIS fighters were also spotted fighting in the current conflict, according to CNN which said at least five fighters had escaped the notorious Ghuwairan prison due to heavy shelling in the area.
During an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)—who has been one of the president’s most vocal defenders regarding the Syria decision—called it a “messy, complicated situation” while saying the president was right to move soldiers out of the way because “Turkey was coming in one way or another.” When host Chuck Todd noted that U.S. soldiers near the Turkish border were serving as a deterrent to an Erdogan invasion, Paul retorted “they were until they weren’t.”
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin repeated Paul’s line that this is a “complicated situation” when asked on ABC’s This Week why the administration hasn’t imposed sanctions on Turkey yet.
“We are ready to go on a moment’s notice to put on sanctions,” Mnuchin said. “As I said, these sanctions could be starting small. They could be maximum pressure which would destroy the Turkish economy. The president is very focused on this. He’s offered to mediate the situation.”
Mnunchin also pushed back on criticism from those within the president’s own party. In response to Graham and others saying sanctions would be a tepid reaction to Turkey, Mnuchin stated that this is a “multi-step process” and the administration needs to make sure “we have the proper authorizations.”
The treasury chief, meanwhile, was asked what the president was talking about when he criticized the Kurds for not storming the beaches at Normandy alongside America. Mnuchin asserted Trump’s analogy was that he was pushing back on everyone “saying the Kurds are these long-standing allies” and that our role in Syria “was not to defend the Kurds.”
On CNN’s State of the Union, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) said that while he wished the president’s decision had “been different,” he feels that we tend to “oversimplify the complicated relationships” in the region. He went on to say this wasn’t a “binary choice” as both the Turks and Kurds are considered allies. As for whether the U.S. was retreating from the area and allowing the Turks to invade northern Syria, Cramer said “we can’t be in the middle of every skirmish in the neighborhood.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel (D-NY), meanwhile, told Meet the Press that while he is working on a bipartisan bill that will slap sanctions on Turkey and condemn the president’s policy as it relates to the Kurds, he acknowledges that “it’s not going to stop” the Turks now. Asked whether it’s too late to do anything at this point, Engel seemed to resign himself to that notion.
“We could mitigate the damage,” he told Todd. “Of course, it’s spiraling quickly. And what’s happened, of course, is a lot of ISIS prisoners, we’ve gotten reports that they have been released or they’ve escaped and so this is just the tip of the iceberg. And if we think this is terrible, I predict we will have many, many more days, weeks and months of terrible things like this.”
Elsewhere on Meet the Press, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis warned that we could see the revival of ISIS in the area, noting the Syrian Democratic Forces were the ones who largely fought the Islamic State in Syria. If we don’t keep pressure on, ISIS will resurge,” Mattis said. “It’s absolutely a given that they will come back.”
We also heard from one of the Democratic presidential candidates. During his State of the Union interview, South Bend Mayor and Afghanistan War veteran Pete Buttigieg insisted Trump was “systematically destroying American allies and American values.”
“What’s even more disturbing to me as a veteran is hearing from soldiers who feel they have lost their honor over this, who feel they are unable to look in the eye [of] allies who put their lives on line to fight with us,” he added. “If you take away a soldier’s honor, you might as well go after their body armor next, that is what the commander-in-chief is doing.
© 2019 The Daily Beast Company LLC
More troubling : Demonstrations in front of White House
U.S.
By Christina Zhao On 10/13/19 at 8:42 PM EDT
U.S. DONALD TRUMPPROTESTERS WHITE HOUSE
Protesters gathered outside the White House and loudly chanted “impeach Trump” as they held up signs condemning Donald Trump on Sunday, while other demonstrators greeted the president’s motorcade as he arrived at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.
Julio Rosas, a senior writer for conservative news website Townhall.com, on Sunday afternoon shared images and videos of the anti-Trump protest as it unfolded outside the White House. “Last Sunday it was the impeach Kavanaugh protest. Today it’s the Women’s March’s impeach Trump protest,” he tweeted.
The protest is part of a nationwide movement organized by The Women’s March and By The People, which aims to encourage elected congressional lawmakers to impeach Trump over his involvement in the Ukraine scandal. “Trump and his administration have been wielding the executive branch to undermine our democracy, divide Americans against each other, and enrich and empower themselves,” a websitefor the protests reads.
In another video, shared by Twitter user @debramayberry, a large crowd of protesters can be seen holding up signs and banging drums as they chanted “impeach Trump” to the beat.
“Repulsive. No dictators here,” one of the signs reads. Another said: “Congress do your jobs. Impeach now!”
Meanwhile, a smaller group of protesters gathered outside the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia to greet the president’s motorcade as it arrived at the location. United Press International (UPI), an international news agency, shared a photoof the event taken by Yuri Gripas which showed the protesters holding up signs that read “traitor” and “Trump’s despicable” as the president’s motorcade passed by. The New Yorker also confirmed the incident on Sunday.
The protests come amid an ongoing impeachment inquiry into Trump, announced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi late last month. At the heart of the proceedings is a July phone call made between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which the U.S. president asked his foreign counterpart to investigate the family of his 2020 domestic rival former Vice President Joe Biden.
A partial transcription of the conversation, released by the White House one day after Pelosi announced the formal impeachment inquiry, proved that Trump had urged Zelensky to probe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and revealed that he had even offered his own administration’s Attorney General to assist in the investigation.
As congressional Democrats continued to gather information for the ongoing impeachment inquiry, Trump abruptly shifted policy last week and withdrew some U.S. troops out of areas in northern Syria. The U.S. forces were deployed to support Kurdish troops in fighting the Islamic State (ISIS.) Shortly after Trump announced the decision, Turkey began its offensive against Kurdish forces in the area.
Trump’s decision has since evolved into another major controversy for the president’s administration, with bipartisan lawmakers in Congress—including some of Trump’s usually-staunch supporters—sharply criticizing the move.
This story has been updated to include information about the White House protest’s oragnizers.
On another front:
Trump says ‘treason.’ His fans invoke violence. How attacks against Schiff are escalating online.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) talks to reporters about canceling a session with Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, who was set to appear before the panel, which is investigating President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)
By Isaac Stanley-Becker
October 14, 2019 at 9:28 AM EDT
Hours after President Trump mused online about whether the Democratic lawmaker leading the impeachment inquiry should be “arrested for treason,” a 53-year-old mother of four in Wisconsin retweeted Trump’s post to her few hundred followers and added her own take.
“SHIFTY SHIFF NEEDS TO BE HUNG,” wrote Jean Spanbauer, a onetime supporter of President Barack Obama. She had adopted Trump’s epithet for Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), slightly misspelling his name.