Scott Shane

The Russian attempt at long-distance choreography was playing out in many cities across the United States. Facebook has disclosed that about 130 rallies were promoted by 13 of the Russian pages, which reached 126 million Americans with provocative content on race, guns, immigration and other volatile issues.

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.

The guilty plea of a 30-year-old campaign aide — so green that he listed Model United Nations in his qualifications — shifted the narrative of the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia: Court documents revealed that Russian officials alerted the campaign, through an intermediary in April 2016, that they possessed thousands of Democratic emails and other “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. That was two months before the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee was publicly revealed and the stolen emails began to appear online.

Even if President Trump’s wiretap claim was groundless, as seems all but certain, it has unexpectedly renewed a debate on the left as well as the right over whether security agencies invade Americans’ privacy and could undermine democracy.

Whether the president intended such a discussion or even welcomes it, his repeated undercutting of the spy agencies has been striking. Some of his vocal critics believe that the wiretap gambit is a deliberate attempt to create a distraction from the many challenges facing his young presidency. It could also be that by pre-emptively discrediting the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency, he is hoping to undermine any damning evidence they may produce of his associates’ contacts with Russia. In the domestic sphere, after all, he and his aides denigrated the Congressional Budget Office in anticipation of the office’s dismal projections on his health plan. Or possibly the president’s repeated battering of the intelligence agencies is not so different from his attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency or the State Department. He may view the spy agencies as just additional targets in what his adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, calls the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

WikiLeaks released thousands of documents that it said described sophisticated software tools used by the Central Intelligence Agency to break into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions. If the documents are authentic, as appeared likely at first review, the release would be the latest coup for the anti-secrecy organization and a serious blow to the CIA, which maintains its own hacking capabilities to be used for espionage.

The initial release, which WikiLeaks said was only the first part of the document collection, included 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments, the group said. The entire archive of CIA material consists of several hundred million lines of computer code, it said. Among other disclosures that, if confirmed, would rock the technology world, the WikiLeaks release said that the CIA and allied intelligence services had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

It was early fall 2016, and Donald J Trump, behind in the polls, seemed to be preparing a rationale in case a winner like him somehow managed to lose. A few weeks later, Cameron Harris, a new college graduate with a fervent interest in Maryland Republican politics and a need for cash, sat down at the kitchen table in his apartment to fill in the details Trump had left out. In a dubious cyberart just coming into its prime, this bogus story would be his masterpiece.

Harris started by crafting the headline: “BREAKING: ‘Tens of thousands’ of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse.” It made sense, he figured, to locate this shocking discovery in the very city and state where Trump had highlighted his “rigged” meme. Within a few days, the story, which had taken him 15 minutes to concoct, had earned him about $5,000. That was a sizable share of the $22,000 an accounting statement shows he made during the presidential campaign from ads for shoes, hair gel and web design that Google had placed on his site. The money, not the politics, was the point, he insisted.

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.