Russiagate is an Excuse for the U.S. to Interfere in Elections at Home and Abroad

UPDATE: Here's how my hipster hometown weekly encapsulates the Senate Intelligence Committee report:

A Senate Intelligence Report confirms "extensive" Russian election interference: The bipartisan report, issued a day after Mueller warned the Russians are currently working to interfere with our 2020 election, found that our nation's election infrastructure is unprepared to deal with the "extensive activity" by Russia.

Note how "extensive activity" becomes "extensive interference" in the header. The putative "underground" press operates almost completely in the orbit of mainstream politics. Since Russiagate is a mainstream political construct, it's no wonder that the urban elite are busy tub thumping about the Russia menace.

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The headline is breathtaking -- "Russia Targeted Elections Systems in All 50 States, Report Finds" -- but the accompanying story by David Sanger and Catie Edmondson about the Senate Intelligence Committee's release yesterday of the first volume of its report on Russian election interference is more of the same: More hype, more obfuscation and misdirection, more fear and loathing; all heavily redacted, with no guidelines offered in conclusion.

As to the hype, Sanger and Edmondson report that

The report — the first volume of several to be released from the committee’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference — came 24 hours after the former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III warned that Russia was moving again to interfere “as we sit here.”

While details of many of the hackings directed by Russian intelligence, particularly in Illinois and Arizona, are well known, the committee described “an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure” intended largely to search for vulnerabilities in the security of the election systems.

It concluded that while there was no evidence that any votes were changed in actual voting machines, “Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data” in the Illinois voter database. The committee found no evidence that they did so.

Aaron Mate's  point about Mueller's team being rebuked by a federal judge for conflating the Russian government with the Saint Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency is worth mentioning here. "Russian cyberactors" could be anyone. We know from WikiLeaks' release of Vault 7, the treasure trove of CIA hacking tools, that planting false flags in code is pro forma in cyber warfare. This speaks to the report's misdirection.

As Sanger and Edmondson note, the report, given the enormous existential threat to American democracy, can only list recommendations, not guidelines:

The committee’s recommendations ranged from the concrete — ensure a paper trail for voter machines and paper backups for registration systems — to the strategic, like adopting a doctrine of how to deter different kinds of cyberattacks.

While the committee suggested holding “a discussion with U.S. allies and others about new cybernorms,” it did not say what those norms should be — nor did it say election manipulation should be off limits for all nations. One reason for that hesitance, some government officials acknowledge, is the debate inside the administration over how much the United States itself is willing to forgo the option of using its own cyberabilities abroad.

[snip] 

But Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, appended an impassioned dissent to the report, arguing that the committee did not go far enough. “The committee report describes a range of cybersecurity measures needed to protect voter registration databases,” he wrote, “yet there are currently no mandatory rules that require states to implement even minimum cybersecurity measures. There are not even any voluntary federal standards.”

The committee found that the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. warned states in the late summer and fall of 2016 of the threat of Russian interference. But they did not provide election officials with “a clear reason” to take the threat more seriously than other warnings that are regularly issued, the report said.

Basically all of Russiagate is a farce. The Russians actually want to sign an international cyber agreement. But as The Nation pointed out this spring, the U.S. has refused, not wanting to blunt its attack capabilities: "[T]he Bush and Obama administrations rejected multiple Russian proposals for an international cyber code of conduct."

The conclusion I draw from Russiagate is that it is a U.S. Government effort to stifle dissent among its domestic population. U.S. internet censorship has accelerated since 2016 behind the screen of Russiagate. Google and Facebook are cracking down on "inauthentic" voices. Take the example of anti-war presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard. She's suing Google for pulling her ads out of the blue just at the time she was peaking right after the first Democratic presidential debate. According to The New York Times in "Tulsi Gabbard, Democratic Presidential Candidate, Sues Google for $50 Million":

Tulsi Now Inc., the campaign committee for Ms. Gabbard, said Google suspended the campaign’s advertising account for six hours on June 27 and June 28, obstructing its ability to raise money and spread her message to potential voters.

After the first Democratic debate, Ms. Gabbard was briefly the most searched-for candidate on Google. Her campaign wanted to capitalize on the attention she was receiving by buying ads that would have placed its website at the top of search results for her name.

The lawsuit also said the Gabbard campaign believed its emails were being placed in spam folders on Gmail at “a disproportionately high rate” when compared with emails from other Democratic candidates.

Google can't explain why Gabbard's account was suspended:

Gabbard campaign workers sent an email to a Google representative on June 27 at 9:30 p.m. once they realized the account had been suspended. In emails reviewed by The New York Times, the campaign sent Google a screenshot of a notice of suspension for “problems with billing information or violations of our advertising policies.”

The account was reactivated at 3:30 a.m. on June 28. In the email announcing that it had reinstated the account, Google wrote that the company temporarily suspended the campaign’s account to verify billing information and policy compliance, but offered no other explanation for what had happened.

The campaign said it had opened the Google advertising account in February and had bought ads on Google search before the suspension. It said there was no problem with its billing information and that it had not violated Google’s terms of service.

“To this day, Google has not provided a straight answer — let alone a credible one — as to why Tulsi’s political speech was silenced when millions of people wanted to hear from her,” the lawsuit said.

The most likely reason, one that Google will never publicly acknowledge, is that Gabbard's account was suspended because she's been tarred by U.S. intelligence agencies as a Russian agent.

Russiagate is an excuse for the U.S. Government to brazenly interfere in elections both at home and abroad in order to manufacture electoral consent for the broadly unpopular neoliberal-perpetual-warfare Washington Consensus.