The United States Should Be More Like Estonia
The solution, we are told-since the Republicans in the Senate, even the Republicans who are leaving the Senate, don’t have the balls to take up the suggestion I made on Monday-is to wait until the midterm elections and then to elect enough Democratic members of Congress to keep the resident tsarevitch in the White House from wrecking absolutely everything. I agree that this would be a noble effort and a glorious result. But it also depends on the elections being free, fair, and relatively unratfcked. And on that, I am not as optimistic as a lot of people are. If I were Estonian, I’d feel a little better.
In 2007, the little Baltic nation was subjected to a massive cyberattack by the Russian government for the crime of moving a Red Army memorial out of Tallinn, the nation’s capital city. The Russians warned the Estonians to leave the memorial up. From Foreign Policy:
Soon after, Estonians found that they couldn’t use much of the internet. They couldn’t access newspapers online, or government websites. Bank accounts were suddenly inaccessible. “It was unheard of, and no one understood what was going on in the beginning,” Toomas Hendrik Ilves, then Estonian President, told Foreign Policy.
Soon, he was informed that it was not an internal failure - but an attack from the outside. It was a Distributed Denial of Service Attack - an orchestrated swarm of internet traffic that literally swamps servers and shuts down websites for hours or days.
That was made crystal clear at the stroke of midnight on May 9 GMT, when Russia celebrates Victory in Europe day for World War II. Annoying cyber attacks dramatically intensified for exactly 24 hours, then trailed off as fast as they’d spiked. Ilves asked his cyber experts what happened. “Well, the money ran out,” he was told - the attack had been bought and paid for by someone - or some state - using criminal hackers to cripple one of the most internet-dependent states in the world. “Looking back on it, it was the first, but hardly the last, case in which a kind of cyber attack … was done in an overtly political manner,” Ilves said.
But you do not mess with Estonians, tovarich.
And, partly as a result of the big 2007 attacks, Estonia today has a world-class cybersecurity sector. The country is currently hosting Locked Shields 2017, the world’s largest and most advanced cyber defense exercise. More to the point, Estonia’s served to prove that even a coordinated, history-making cyber campaign won’t necessarily advance an adversary’s foreign policy goals if there is a strong enough defense, resilient enough digital infrastructure, and enough geopolitical will to shape one’s own narrative. Ten years after Russian hackers attacked, the Soviet statue is still exiled outside the capital. If Russia aimed at coercion, Healey said, “it absolutely failed. Estonia still moved the statue. They did what they were going to do.”
,>Of course, we are the Yew-Nited States of America, not some little Lionel train-set village in northeastern Europe. So this is part of how we responded. From Politico:
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The IRS will no longer collect names or addresses of those who contribute $5,000 or more to all tax-exempt Section 501(c) groups, some of which donate to political campaigns, other than charitable organizations registered under a different section of the tax code, according to new guidelines released late Monday…Wyden, the Finance Committee’s top-ranking Democrat, charged that President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have made it easier for anonymous foreign donors to funnel dark money into nonprofits. “It’s the latest attempt by Secretary Mnuchin and Donald Trump to eliminate transparency and keep officials and lawmakers from following the money,” Wyden said in a statement. “That’s why I’ll be opposing Charles Rettig, nominee to be IRS commissioner, unless Mr. Rettig commits to restoring this critical disclosure requirement.”
With the arrest of Russian gun-moll lobbyist Maria Butina fresh in the headlines, and with the revelations of her many friends in and around conservative politics only just beginning, this sounds like just the moment to create less transparency in our campaign-finance system. The Treasury Department, which obviously is not run by Estonians, tells us not to worry our pretty little heads. If a non-profit is engaging in prohibited political activity, and the IRS gets wind of it, it will wait for the non-profit to provide the data needed for the IRS audit. And then Steve Mnuchin will sell the Treasury Building for $24 worth of magic beads.
But, believe it or not, there’s something even more non-Estonian going on as regards the balloting itself, and the counting thereof, and which is hard for even the most cynical soul to believe. From Motherboard at Vice:
In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them. The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold. "None of the employees, … including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software," the spokesperson said. ES&S did not respond on Monday to questions from Motherboard, and it’s not clear why the company changed its response between February and April. Lawmakers, however, have subpoena powers that can compel a company to hand over documents or provide sworn testimony on a matter lawmakers are investigating, and a statement made to lawmakers that is later proven false can have greater consequence for a company than one made to reporters.
“Remote connection software”? On a freaking voting system? From this desk, I can hear generations of Boston ward politicians moaning in the Beyond that they were born too soon. I imagine this wailing is even louder in Louisiana and in Chicago. There is only one American corporation I trust with the security of my ballot and that is the Eberhard Faber Company of Greenpoint, New York. Until then, we are all Estonians.
If they’ll have us.
Which I doubt.
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