On June 13, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified to the Senate Intelligence committee about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Sessions was greeted by an unexpected change in focus from Senator John McCain after nervously taking hours of questions about his knowledge of the plot. “Quietly, the Kremlin has been trying to map the United States telecommunications infrastructure,” McCain announced, as he described a series of alarming moves, including Russian spies observing the implementation of a fiber optic network in Kansas and Russia’s creation of “a cyber weapon that can disrupt the United States power grids and telecommunications infrastructure.”
When McCain asked if Sessions had a plan to counter Russia’s attacks, Sessions reluctantly admitted that he “had not given it enough thought.”
In any normal year, McCain’s inquiries about acknowledged and documented, dangerous threats to U.S. infrastructure would have dominated the news. His concerns were apparently justifiable: in recent years, Ukraine’s power grid has been repeatedly hacked in what cybersecurity experts have declared was a test run for the United States. Russian hackers have also hacked many centers of U.S. power, including the state of Vermont, the State Department, the White House, and everyone with a Yahoo email address in 2014, the Department of Defense in 2015, and, of course, the Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee, state and local voter databases, and […]