Mike Conaway, the Republican who replaced Devin Nunes as head of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian meddling in the U.S. election, has described his mission simply: “I just want to find out what happened,” he’s said. The more urgent question elsewhere in the world, however, isn’t confined to the past. It concerns what is happening—not just in the United States but in European democracies as well. In the Netherlands, Dutch authorities counted paper ballots in a recent election by hand to prevent foreign governments—and Russia in particular—from manipulating the results through cyberattacks. In Denmark, the defense minister has accused the Russian government of carrying out a two-year campaign to infiltrate email accounts at his ministry. In the United Kingdom, a parliamentary committee reports that it cannot “rule out” the possibility that “foreign interference” caused a voter-registration site to crash ahead of Britain’s referendum on EU membership. And in France, a cybersecurity firm has just discovered that suspected Russian hackers are targeting the leading presidential candidate. “We are increasingly concerned about cyber-enabled interference in democratic political processes,” representatives from the Group of Seven—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.—declared after meeting in Italy earlier this month. Russia, a member of the group until it was kicked out for annexing Crimea, wasn’t mentioned in the statement. It didn’t need to be. The subtext was clear.
The Russian government has denied hacking these democracies, and in some cases the evidence for state-sponsored interference is very flimsy. There is no proof, for example, that the Brexit vote was marred by foreign cyberattacks. The voter-registration site was most likely downed by something much more mundane: a surge in visits from people hoping to … register to vote. If Russia really has been trying to shape the outcome of the French election, the impact so far appears minimal.
This story, moreover, is just as old as it is new. Foreign actors have sought to undermine democracies since Sparta’s King Cleomenes started meddling in the internal affairs of ancient Athens. (The king’s interventions were harder to deny, since they involved invading soldiers.) The United States has its own thorny history of messing with elections abroad.
Full Article: Russia’s Interference in the U.S. Election Was Just the Beginning – The Atlantic.