At a news conference in Doral, Florida, on July 27, 2016, Donald Trump, then the Republican Party's presidential candidate, riffed on the hacking of the Democratic National Committee's computer server and emails deleted by Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state. "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," he said.
Less than six months later, a highly classified version of a report ordered by President Obama in December 2016 into potential hacking of the US presidential election was declassified. In it, 17 intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI and NSA, assessed that, "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for Trump."
Read more: GCHQ wants to protect the UK from cyberattacks with a government firewall
Since then, GCHQ in the UK has warned of a Russian hacking threat to future UK elections. Campaign managers for the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron have alleged that his campaign has been targeted by malicious fake news accounts originating in the Russian Federation. And during the US presidential election, Bruno Kahl - the head of Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst foreign-intelligence service - warned that the German election later this year could be targeted by hackers intent on undermining the democratic process. The recent launch of the National Cyber Security Centre made the threat to the UK clear. "We're seeing traditional state-sponsored espionage in our critical services," director Ciaran Martin told me. "And we're seeing the heightened threat from Russia that we've spoken about in terms of critical services against our allies and, of course, the well-documented attacks on other democracies."
Read more: Hunting the DNC hackers: how Crowdstrike found proof Russia hacked the Democrats
The internet promised to usher in an era of liberal democracy via the propagation of openness and freedom. Instead, the west has found itself on the back foot, outmanoeuvred by the state and criminal activity that has undermined the democratic process, compromised private businesses and eroded its institutions. The rhetoric about fake news coming out of the White House doesn't help. As Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor and author of the book On Tyranny, puts it: "People who are going for post-fact, people who are against the truth, they're taking the direct line to killing democracy."
With the help of a selection of high-level security experts such as Sir David Omand, the former director of GCHQ, and human-rights campaigner Garry Kasparov, WIRED decodes how digital tools are being deployed to achieve larger geopolitical aims – and, more importantly, how the west should respond to secure liberal democracy while maintaining a free and open internet. The stakes could not be higher.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
