The Russian Information War

I usually like to read Gordon Crovitz but this week he got a little off track with an article on "Russia's Information War with the United States".  An Information War is complicated and the Russians have been doing it for years, so let's not think that they don't know what they are doing, or that they don't have plausible deniability for anything that might be done.  They are not as crude as they were in the Cold War, though they may be a little less competent than the Chinese.  That is relative. My second book, The New Cyberwar is mostly about Russia and their use of cyber.

His complaint, if we can call it that, is that the Russians are trying to interfere with the United States national elections by releasing e-mails from the stash at the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.  He, and most of the liberal end of the press, want retaliation for this theft of data.  This is similar to the US actions taken after the North Koreans stole e-mail from Sony.  The US took some actions after that, but nothing to speak of.  We have done nothing about the Chinese theft of security clearance data from OPM.

This is not really the kind of Information War that can be made with this kind of information, though I would agree that it is part of the way to fight.  The Russians have been doing this for years so they know how to use it.  Modification of documents, letters and content of e-mail is their stock in trade.  They did this to the Reagan Administration and they have done it since in international politics.  They plant articles that say something that isn't true, but has the format of other things that are true.  The problems for us is figuring out which ones are "originals" and which are fake.  This kind of thing has gone on for hundreds of years, so we have all seen it done.  So far, nobody from the campaign has said any of the emails are fake.  There is still time for that.

Intelligence services that steal information only rarely post it on the Internet.  Anonymous and similar groups with a political bent will do that kind of thing.  Even the Russians learned that the US electorate is very hard to influence, so this kind of effort, especially involving the loose cannons at Wikileaks, doesn't sound like something they would want to do.  All that work that they put into defeating Ronald Reagan failed, so they will think twice before paying for a lot of effort that gets nothing in return.