News - The Atlantic

What Did the Senate Hearing Reveal About Russian Hacking?

| Jan. 05, 2017

A Q&A with cybersecurity expert Michael Sulmeyer on today’s Armed Services Committee hearing and the intelligence community’s response to foreign interference.

Overview

Following a 05 January 2017 Congressional hearing by the Senate Armed Services Committee on foreign cyber operations, The Atlantic's Vann R. Newkirk II interviewed Michael Sulmeyer, Director of the Cyber Security Project at Harvard Kennedy's Belfer Center. Excerpt from Article:

"Vann R. Newkirk II: After the hearing, it seems like most of the real revelations are going to be incorporated into briefings and a report. Did you learn anything from the hearing, and what should people take away from it?

Michael Sulmeyer: The next step here is that tomorrow, that report will get briefed internally in government and then next week an unclassified public version will be released. Right from the beginning of the hearing, Director Clapper said that he did not intend to get in front of that report, so they weren't going to be discussing new information today. They were very clear that they were not going to get into that business. There were some interesting soundbites on information and media especially, and I think implicit in that is an acknowledgement that the way you deal with "fake news" and an information campaign is by more competing news and information, as opposed to just hitting back.

Newkirk: So not just a cyber-security presence but the way we report information as well?

Sulmeyer: I think that the media has been improving how it covers these kinds of stories. One of the things that I'm hoping universities can do is to provide some trainings, and make it so that when you have more technically based questions, you have resources and you have some practical experience of actually getting on a computer and doing some ethical hacking yourself. But in general, cybersecurity is one of those few areas where because the government does not talk a lot about it, the only way the American people know about it is through the lens of a handful of journalists, so that's a really powerful and important role they have.

Newkirk: One of those technical things that was brought up during the hearing was the difference between espionage and interference. Is what Director Clapper said something that's widely accepted in the intelligence community?

Sulmeyer: I think it's fairly well-accepted. It's accepted that states are going to conduct espionage, and spies are going to spy. We should be giving as good as we're getting, if not more. When it comes to weaponizing the products and the outcomes of that kind of spying and collection, and when it becomes more "active measures," as Russians call it, that takes on a new color, and therefore warrants a different kind of consideration about how the United States would want to respond..."

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For Academic Citation:What Did the Senate Hearing Reveal About Russian Hacking?.” News, The Atlantic, January 5, 2017.