Jake Braun - Democracy in Danger: How Hackers and Activists Exposed Fatal Flaws in the Election System

Jake Braun is executive director of the University of Chicago Harris Cyber Policy Initiative, where he works at the center of politics, technology, and national security to advance the field of cyber policy. He is also cofounder of Cambridge Global Advisors, a national security consulting firm. He has more than 15 years of national security and cybersecurity expertise. Previously, he served in the Obama administration as White House liaison to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He is cofounder of the only public third-party inspection of voting equipment in the world, the DEF CON Voting Machine Hacking Village. He has appeared extensively on TV, radio, print, and online media, including CNN, NBC, CBS radio, NPR, CSPAN, USA Today, WIRED magazine, Wall Street Journal, the HBO documentary Democracy Hacked, and many others. He is co-author of two award-winning reports on election security (DEF CON 25 Voting Machine Hacking Village: Report on Cyber Vulnerabilities in U.S. Election Equipment, Databases, and Infrastucture (2017) and DEF CON 26 Voting Machine Hacking Village: Repart on Cyber Vulnerabilities in U.S. Election Equipment, Databases, and Infrastructure (2018). He teaches at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and resides in Chicago with his wife, Jena, and two children, Alex and Cordelia, and their dog Athena.

I would like to thank my DEF CON Voting Village co-organizers Harri Hursti and Matt Blaze and DEF CON founder Jeff Moss for harnessing the collective power of the hacker community to improve election security. I would also like to acknowledge the tireless work on the frontlines of election security of dedicated election administrators like secretary Alex Padilla, Noah Praetz, Barb Byrum, Neal Kelley, John Odum, and others like them.

Thanks to Kendra Albert and the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School for their sound advice to the Voting Village.

Thanks to Chris Burnham, Jane Holl Lute, and Doug Lute for their support and guidance. Thanks also to Jon Carson, Colin Bishopp, Laurie Moskowitz, Chris Button, Sherri Ramsay, John Rendon, and Phil Stupak.

Thank you to Dean Katherine Baicker and the University of Chicago.

Im grateful to Diane Stockwell, my book agent, and Jon Sisk, my editor at Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, for bringing this project together.

Many thanks to Mary Hanley for her perseverance in research, fact-checking, and editing through many drafts.

Finally, I am most grateful to my wife Jena, our children Cordelia and Alex, and our dog Athenathank you for putting up with this whole process.

O bama was wrong. I remember laughing watching the presidential debate in 2012, between President Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. Romney had said in a previous interview that Vladimir Putins Russia was the United States number one geopolitical foe. Needless to say, Bush and Obama differed greatly on foreign policy. So, if they both agreed on Putin and Russia, who was I to disagree?

But after speaking with dozens of national security leaders and reading thousands of pages on the topic since the 2016 Russian attacks on our democracy, it is clear Russian experts are in agreement that Putins Russia is a grave threat to the United States, specifically our democracy. That seemingly hyperbolic claim is made by these traditionally measured national security leaders because while the loss of life and property was tragic and devastating in 1941 and 2001, we are a resilient nation and were able to bounce back. More than just bounce back, we came out of those tragedies swinging in ways that annihilated our enemies and even reshaped geopolitics as we know it.

Conversely, the 2016 attack killed no one and destroyed no physical property that we know of. Rather, it struck at the core of every Americans relationship to our government: the integrity of the ballot. It placed at risk our trust in the outcome of the election, and more than just one election, it began to undermine public trust in our democracy. Beyond Donald Trump and, to some degree, Hillary Clinton claiming the election in 2016 was rigged, we have already seen this trust continue to erode in the subsequent 2018 midterms as candidates from both parties in Georgia and Florida made claims that the democratic process was rigged or hacked.

Attacking this ethereal belief that our democracy is both free from corruption and fair for both voters and candidates is a larger danger to our nation. As the most recent former U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), General Douglas Lute told me, Putin has decided he doesnt have to beat us with conventional means, tanks and guns. So, he is going to try to erode our democracy from within. He is attacking our civil institutions, first among them being the democratic election infrastructure. He is further exploiting existing fissures within our society, like those between the left and the right in the country.

In short, Russias cyberattacks on our voting infrastructure are a national security threat to the United States and its allies. It is not simply conjecture or rhetoric to say the 2016 attacks were a national security threat. The attacks themselves fit the definition of a true threat in national security parlance; Russia has both the capability and intent to attack.

In a conversation with Ambassador Lute, he explained the national security community perspective with five key criteria:

First, these election attacks are a national security issue because Putin has already executed a successful attack against our elections with cyberweapons. This isnt hypothetical. Its something he has already done. Second, election security is a national security issue because Russia is here to stay. Putin will be in power until 2024 and perhaps longer. This is not a one-shot deal where Putin decided he didnt like Hillary Clinton and decided to hack our elections. Third, this is a national security issue because other potential adversaries are watching and devising ways to further undermine our democracy. The 2016 attack could inspire copycats, for example perhaps China, Iran and North Korea. Fourth, this is a national security issue because the opportunity for Russia to attack again is right around the corner in 2020. We know they probed the election systems in about one-half of our states in 2016 and did modest attacks in 2018. It only serves to weaken the United States hand abroad when our best allies are made weak as well.

A key question one must ask here is, Why? Why would Putin take such risks to weaken the United States and its allies? What happened to the late 1990s Russia that was transitioning toward democracy and a market-based economy, as favored by most of the developed world?

Again, I turned to former U.S. ambassador to NATO Douglas Lute. His answer was as striking as it was concise: Very simply, Putin has one overriding objective: to stay in power. But he knows he has a weak hand in the long run. Russia is a state in steady decline: Economics, health, demographics, and political-social indicators are all in decline. To overcome these challenges, Putin must keep potential rivals close like the military, intel services, and oligarchs. So he points to external enemies, like the West and especially the United States, to align with these power brokers. Furthermore, he suppresses domestic opposition and stokes nationalism by emphasizing the threat of external enemies that justify his authoritarian grip on power.

To counteract this perceived external threat, he is doing what every Russian czar since the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century has attempted to do, which is to fortify Russias position with a buffer zone of friendly or at least weak and compliant states along his borders. So what are the threats to this buffer zone? Encroachment of the European Union (EU) and NATO. The EU and NATO represent the two most powerful multilateral institutions promulgated by democracies of the West. Indeed, they are the most powerful multilateral institutions both economically and militarily on the planet.