Robert Mueller and the Russian Threat to American Privacy
The thoroughness of his investigation is both awesome and alarming.
These people are scary-good.
Photographer: AFP Contributor/AFPRobert Mueller's latest indictment in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election is chock full of extraordinary details. Its most breathtaking revelation, however, is just how scary-good America's cyberspies are.
Mueller's indictment shows how a dozen Russian military intelligence officers probed, hacked and pilfered the servers of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the campaign of Hillary Clinton. It lists their names and ranks. It details how they paid for things (in bitcoin) and what they researched, which programs they used and how they tried to hide their tracks. It reveals the phony personas some agents used in their online interactions – “Alice Donovan,” “Jason Scott” and “Richard Gingrey.” And it has a tantalizing detail about the campaign's timing: On the same day that then candidate Donald Trump publicly asked the Russians “to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” for example, the Russian hackers probed Clinton's personal servers.