Sometime in February, date unknown, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA, which is inside the DHS umbrella of three-letter agencies) sent a memo to staff that was, as The Guardian‘s Stephanie Kirchgaessner noted, a “radical departure” from decades of intelligence policy. The objective: let Russia be Russia.
A recent memo at CISA set out new priorities for the agency, which monitors cyber threats against US critical infrastructure. The new directive set out priorities that included China and protecting local systems. It did not mention Russia. A person familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity said analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency. The person said work that was being done on something ‘Russia-related’ was in effect ‘nixed.’
Another Guardian source warned this radical policy shift makes America vulnerable to “dozens” of disinformation campaigns run by the Kremlin: “There are dozens of discrete Russia state-sponsored hacker teams dedicated to either producing damage to US government, infrastructure and commercial interests or conducting information theft with a key goal of maintaining persistent access to computer systems.”
The most-strident retreat of all, The Guardian added, is that of Marco Rubio, who, in 2020, was chair of the Senate intel—the same body that concluded Trump cheated to win in 2016, with help from Russia.
Few lawmakers have previously been as outspoken on the issue as Marco Rubio when he was still a Florida senator. In 2020, as chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Rubio—who now serves as Trump’s secretary of state—said the US would retaliate for a massive and ongoing cyber-attack that had compromised companies and federal agencies, including the energy department’s National Nuclear Security Administration. At the time he said the attacks were ‘consistent with Russian cyber operations’
AUTHOR FOOTNOTE
What’s notable in this story is not Donald’s knocking down guardrails to help facilitate Kremlin’s current, and future, attacks. To my eye, the interesting synergy is between Kremlin objectives and what Leon Musky is doing with DOGE. Per AP, the goals are remarkably similar:
So then, in my view, the question becomes: Are those two groups of hooligans (Kremlin hackers and Elon/DOGE) prongs of the same operation? Above source speaking off-the-record stated that Russian hackers are “conducting information theft and maintaining persistent access to computer systems.” And Musk has, in open-source reporting, been linked to Putin himself.
That would be a remarkable coincidence that both entities are engaging in computer intrusions and, apparently, stealing data, without being linked in some way.
Finally, AP using “Commission” is an interesting (and false, since DOGE was not created via any proper channels) way to describe Musk’s band of thugs.
