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According to Glenn Greenwald, “one has to be drowning in endless amounts of jingoistic self-delusion to believe that” the SolarWinds hack of numerous U.S. government agencies and businesses “is a radical departure from international norms as opposed to a perfect reflection of them.”
The former Intercept editor — once seen on the right as the crank whose work with Edward Snowden harmed America’s national security — has gained cachet in conservative circles for his commentary on how the media have attacked Donald Trump and defended Joe Biden using baseless claims about the extent of Russian operations in the United States.
His latest essay on Substack shows that even while he has gained a reputation of late for telling it as it is, his perspective on broader U.S.–Russia issues is still blinkered, leading him to some odd, though characteristic, conclusions that ignore the nature of the Russian regime. He downplays the seriousness of the cyberattack, says that the alarm is a product of intelligence community lies, and writes that it’s nothing abnormal because the United States does the same things.
Of course, people with knowledge of the situation would disagree that it’s something to be brushed off. Here’s a brief, though incomplete, summary of the damage from the Wall Street Journal:
The hacking operation exposed as many as hundreds of thousands of government and corporate networks to potential risk and alarmed national-security officials in the Trump administration as well as executives at FireEye, some of whom view it as far more significant than a routine case of foreign cyber espionage, people familiar with the matter said.
While those familiar with the hack couldn’t precisely specify its scope or the resulting damage to the U.S. government, several described it as among the most potentially worrisome cyberattacks in years, because it may have allowed Russia to access sensitive information from government agencies, defense contractors and other industries. One person familiar with the matter said the campaign was a “10” on a scale of one to 10, in terms of its likely severity and national-security implications.
But the alarm around SolarWinds, Greenwald writes, has been manufactured by Democratic politicians (some Republicans, too) who have likened Russian political interference and to acts of war against the United States:
For those keeping track at home: that’s two separate “Pearl Harbors” in less than four years from Moscow (or, if you prefer, one Pearl Harbor and one 9/11). If Democrats actually believe that, it stands to reason that they will be eager to embrace a policy of belligerence and aggression toward Russia. Many of them are demanding this outright, mocking Trump for failing to attack Russia — despite no evidence that they were responsible — while their well-trained liberal flock is suggesting that the non-response constitutes some form of “high treason.”
Indeed, Democrats are wrong to mock Trump for failing to take a tougher stand against Russia, but not for the reason that Greenwald would suggest. Notwithstanding the president’s outrageous pro-Putin rhetoric, his refusal to speak out about Russian government perfidies (SolarWinds included), and his attempt to hold up lethal defensive aid to Ukraine, he has presided over a Russia policy that is decidedly tougher than that of his predecessor. From using expansive sanctions to kill a trans-European Russian pipeline, to initially deciding to send arms to Ukraine, to tightening the screws on the Assad government in Syria, the Trump administration hasn’t hesitated to do exactly what the previous one avoided for fear of entering an escalatory spiral.
And that’s an essential problem with Greenwald’s point here. He has set out to argue that Democratic Party-media collusion with faulty intelligence community assessments is bolstering the latest claims about SolarWinds. But he’s elided the fact that Trump loyalists, such as Mike Pompeo and Bill Barr have blamed Russia for the attack. His only explanation is that Pompeo said that Russia is “pretty clearly” to blame, leaving some room for doubt.
And while bad-faith actors in the media have used baseless claims of Kremlin disinformation as a political instrument for the past four years, this doesn’t mean that Russia’s conduct here is normal.
Greenwald would have you believe that, though:
Just as was true of 2016 fake Facebook pages and Twitter bots, it is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. Government engages in hacking attacks of this sort, and ones far more invasive, against virtually every country on the planet, including Russia, on a weekly basis. That does not mean that this kind of hacking is either justified or unjustified. It does mean, however, that depicting it as some particularly dastardly and incomparably immoral act that requires massive retaliation requires a degree of irrationality and gullibility that is bewildering to behold.
The crucial thing here is “of this sort.” Although Greenwald furnishes some examples of U.S. cyber espionage, he offers no episode that seems to approach the potential scale of the SolarWinds operation. In addition to the still-unclear but apparently growing number of compromised U.S. government agencies, this also includes several large companies, such as Microsoft and IBM.
And he fails to reckon with just what foreign adversaries can do with it. It’s looking like SolarWinds could end up being a more damaging incident than the Office of Personnel Management hack discovered in 2015 in which the Chinese government got ahold of tens of millions of files on U.S. government employees. Greenwald rarely engages with the idea that an event damaging to the intelligence community could have disastrous consequences, but as it happens, we are starting to understand the consequences of these events.
Reporting in Foreign Policy this week, Zach Dorfman broke a huge story about how, almost a decade after discovery of the OPM breach, certain U.S. intelligence-community capabilities have been crippled. By using the personal information of U.S. operatives stolen from OPM, Chinese intelligence officials have been able to preempt American efforts to cultivate informants in China and around the world. But the Chinese weren’t the only ones playing this game:
There were other bad omens. During this same period, U.S. officials concluded that Russian intelligence officials, likely exploiting a difference in payroll payments between real State Department employees and undercover CIA officers, had identified some of the CIA personnel working at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Officials thought that this insight may have come from data derived from the OPM hack, provided by the Chinese to their Russian counterparts. U.S. officials also wondered whether the OPM hack could be related to an uptick in attempted recruitments by Chinese intelligence of Chinese American translators working for U.S. intelligence agencies when they visited family in China. “We also thought they were trying to get Mandarin speakers to apply for jobs as translators” within the U.S. intelligence community, recalled the former senior counterintelligence official. U.S. officials believed that Chinese intelligence was giving their agents “instructions on how to pass a polygraph.”
Of course, that doesn’t matter to Greenwald (as if this wasn’t made clear by his work with Snowden), who views the United States as morally equivalent to Russia and China:
What we have here, yet again, is the classic operation of the intelligence community feeding serious accusations about a nuclear-armed power to an eagerly gullible corporate media, with the media mindlessly disseminating it without evidence, all toward ratcheting up tensions between these two nuclear-armed powers and fortifying a mythology of the U.S. as grand victim but never perpetrator.
But one need not watch MSNBC to understand why Trump administration officials who rebuked Russiagate are alarmed by SolarWinds. Greenwald won acclaim on the right for his skepticism of specious media narratives on Trump and Russia, but he probably has more in common with other left-wing journalists — who share his mythology of the U.S. as grand perpetrator — than he’d care to admit.
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