David Sanger

A serial leak of the National Security Agency’s cyberweapons has damaged morale, slowed intelligence operations and resulted in hacking attacks on businesses and civilians worldwide.

[Commentary] In the end, what kind of change did Edward J. Snowden bring about? In the realm of privacy protection, not much—at least so far. For all the talk on Capitol Hill in the summer of 2013—immediately after the Snowden leaks—about a reassessment of the balance between security and privacy rights, no significant legal changes to the authorities of the National Security Agency or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have passed Congress since the Snowden leaks...

In the end, Snowden’s legacy will be mixed. He wanted to be known for the changes he would bring about in altering the government’s monitoring of American citizens. That seems unlikely. But he opened the world’s eyes to a new world of surveillance and cyberwarfare. There, what he revealed cannot be stuffed back into a black box—and will change the way we view American power over the next decade.

[David E. Sanger is chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times.]

American intelligence officials have concluded that Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” and turned from seeking to “denigrate” Hillary Clinton to developing “a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” The conclusions were part of a declassified intelligence report, ordered by President Barack Obama, that was released Jan 6.

Its main conclusions were described to Donald J. Trump by intelligence officials earlier in the day, and he responded by acknowledging that Russia sought to hack into the Democratic National Committee, but said nothing about the conclusion that Putin had sought to aid his candidacy, other than that it had no effect on the outcome. The report, a damning and surprisingly detailed account of Russia’s efforts to undermine the American electoral system and Hillary Clinton in particular, went on to assess that Putin “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

An investigation reveals missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of a campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.

Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing e-mails and zeros and ones.

An examination by The Times of the Russian operation — based on interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama Administration officials who deliberated over the best response — reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack. The DNC’s fumbling encounter with the FBI meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks undercut efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully meant the Russians have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks.

The low-key approach of the FBI meant that Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months before top DNC officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyberexperts to protect their systems. In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the DNC, including Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, whose private e-mail account was hacked months later.

President Barack Obama has ordered American intelligence agencies to produce a full report on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. He also directed them to develop a list of “lessons learned” from the broad campaign the United States has accused Russia of carrying out to steal e-mails, publish their contents and probe the vote-counting system. “We may have crossed a new threshold here,” said Lisa Monaco, one of President Obama’s closest aides and the former head of the national security division of the Justice Department. “He expects to receive this report before he leaves office.”

The report, according to senior administration officials, will trace the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and on prominent individuals like John D. Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But it is unclear that the contents of the report will be made public. Intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which still has an active investigation of the hacking underway, have been reluctant to make public any of their findings; they fear it will reveal sources and methods of how the incursions were traced back to Russia. After past investigations involving sensitive intelligence information, declassified versions of reports were sometimes published, with a classified version sent to congressional committees and some agencies.

Ecuador cut off Julian Assange’s access to the internet in his exile in the country’s London embassy, making clear that it feared being sucked into an effort to “interfere in electoral processes” in the United States by the activities of the WikiLeaks founder.

Ecuador is not evicting Assange from its embassy, where he sought asylum four years ago. It said that its “temporary restriction” of internet services to Assange “does not prevent the WikiLeaks organization from carrying out its journalistic activities.” But it was clearly intended to keep the embassy from being the control center for that leaking operation. “The government of Ecuador respects the principle of nonintervention in the affairs of other countries,” it said in a statement, “and it does not interfere in the electoral processes in support of any candidate in particular.”

The Obama Administration formally accused the Russian government of stealing and disclosing e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and from a range of prominent individuals and institutions, immediately raising the issue of whether President Barack Obama will seek sanctions or other retaliation for the cyberattacks. In a statement from the director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr., and the Department of Homeland Security, the government said the leaked e-mails that have appeared on a variety of websites “are intended to interfere with the US election process.” The e-mails were posted on the well-known WikiLeaks site and newer ones that have run under the names DCLeaks.com and Guccifer 2.1. “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the statement said. It did not name President Vladimir Putin, but that appeared to be the intention.

For weeks, aides to President Obama have been debating a range of possible responses to the Russia action, from targeted economic sanctions to authorizing covert action against the computer servers in Russia and elsewhere that have been traced as the origin of the attacks. The White House has not said whether President Obama has reviewed those options, or decided on any. The statement said that the recent “scanning and probing” of election systems “in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company,” but did not say the Russian government was responsible for those probes.

American officials insist, when speaking off the record, that the United States was never acting on behalf of specific American companies. But the government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage, which is part of its broad definition of how it protects American national security. In short, the officials say, while the National Security Agency cannot spy on Airbus and give the results to Boeing, it is free to spy on European or Asian trade negotiators and use the results to help American trade officials -- and, by extension, the American industries and workers they are trying to bolster.

Now, every one of the examples of NSA spying on corporations around the world is becoming Exhibit A in China’s argument that by indicting five members of the People’s Liberation Army, the Obama Administration is giving new meaning to capitalistic hypocrisy.

In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes “legal” spying and what is illegal. That definition, the Chinese contend, is intended to benefit an American economy built around the sanctity of intellectual property belonging to private firms. And, in their mind, it is also designed to give the NSA the broadest possible rights to intercept phone calls or email messages of state-owned companies from China to Saudi Arabia, or even private firms that are involved in activities the United States considers vital to its national security, with no regard to local laws. The NSA says it observes American law around the globe, but admits that local laws are no obstacle to its operations.

In the months before Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s arrival in Beijing, the Obama Administration quietly held an extraordinary briefing for the Chinese military leadership on a subject officials have rarely discussed in public: the Pentagon’s emerging doctrine for defending against cyberattacks against the United States -- and for using its cybertechnology against adversaries, including the Chinese.

The idea was to allay Chinese concerns about plans to more than triple the number of American cyberwarriors to 6,000 by the end of 2016, a force that will include new teams the Pentagon plans to deploy to each military combatant command around the world. But the hope was to prompt the Chinese to give Washington a similar briefing about the many People’s Liberation Army units that are believed to be behind the escalating attacks on American corporations and government networks. So far, the Chinese have not reciprocated -- a point Hagel plans to make in a speech at the PLA’s National Defense University. The effort, senior Pentagon officials say, is to head off what Hagel and his advisers fear is the growing possibility of a fast-escalating series of cyberattacks and counterattacks between the United States and China.

This is a concern especially at a time of mounting tensions over China’s expanding claims of control over what it argues are exclusive territories in the East and South China Seas, and over a new air defense zone. In interviews, American officials say their latest initiatives were inspired by Cold-War-era exchanges held with the Soviets so that each side understood the “red lines” for employing nuclear weapons against each other. President Obama told the Chinese president that the United States, unlike China, did not use its technological powers to steal corporate data and give it to its own companies; its spying, one of President Obama’s aides later told reporters, is solely for “national security priorities.”

But to the Chinese, for whom national and economic security are one, that argument carries little weight. For that reason, the disclosures changed the discussion between the top officials at the Pentagon and the State Department and their Chinese counterparts in quiet meetings intended to work out what one official called “an understanding of rules of the road, norms of behavior,” for China and the United States.