Who is Really Hacking the Elections?

It was a little strange yesterday to hear about John Bolton’s comments concerning election hacks by Iran, North Korea, and “maybe China” which got very little press coverage after it was said by an Israeli spokesman.  Either the press does not see this as credible, or it doesn’t fit their narrative that it was the Russians, and only the Russians.  

I have said a number of times that Russia was not the only country trying to hack the US elections.  The Chinese did it first, over 10 years ago, hacking the campaigns of both Obama and McCain.  Nobody seemed to care about this at the time, nor do any of the press outlets seem to remember.  As far as anyone knows, these were intelligence collection so the information they got was not published in newspapers or TV.  It seems to be the Russians who found favor in making the kind of information public, disrupting a lot of those who hacked and never talked about it.  They even disrupted their own intelligence service when they were caught in the Democratic National Committee.  That was clumsy.   I always thought there was something strange about that.  These kinds of operations are usually done by one part of the intelligence service and not by more than one, to avoid that very thing.  

Now we find out that several countries may have been involved.  This tends to cloud attribution, political narratives, and motivations.  We are looking so hard for Russians that we stopped looking for the others who are doing this.  It is so easy that any country can do it.  Our politicians need to devote a lot more money to computer security.  It isn’t a priority to them, and it should be.