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>> c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979 c-span was created as a public service by america's cable it's companies -- it's companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. >> host: james lewis is a former state department official and is cybersecurity expert who now serves as the senior vice president of the center for strategic and and international studies, and he's our guest this week on "the communicators." the topic, cyber attacks and cybersecurity. mr. lewis, what proof, if any, is there and what is it that the russians are behind the recent cyber attacks in the united states? >> guest: at this point there's three kinds of proof. the first is forensic evidence found by a commercial company. you know, when you hack into a computer, very often something

will be left behind that points to the perpetrator. not intentionally, it's just like a footprint. and be in this case the footprints lead back to moscow. the second source of evidence is our own intelligence agencies which now are fully confident that it was the russian government behind these hacks using their own sources and technologies. and the third one is the smirk on vladimir putin's face. i mean, he has not denied this. he seems to be enjoying it. so the evidence is pretty solid it was the russian government. >> host: how did they get this information? >> guest: it was -- >> host: how does the attack happen? >> guest: oh. well, it, it's pretty straightforward. most people still suffer from the illusion that e-mail is somehow private when it's actually like a postcard. and most people don't secure the data that they keep on their own networks. and and that's largely what happened.

the russians got in through one of the traditional techniques, probably a phishing e-mail, and then were able to get control of the network, sit there for a period of time and extract data including e-mails. >> host: joining our conversation today is mark hosenball who's with reuters, an investigative reporter. >> thank you. my understanding, by the way, is that -- and we reported this a while ago -- that the intelligence agencies briefed congress, or the gang of eight, i guess it's called, the leaders of both houses of congress and the leaders of the intelligence committees. last summer. i mean, not this past summer, a year ago this summer, that this was going on the. so the u.s. government has known about this for quite some time, but oddly enough, i've spoken to people in the democratic party about this, and they said they were approached by the fbi some months after the congress was briefed by about maybe a year

ago, and then the fbi were kind of very to pick in the way that -- opaque in the way that they broached this to the people in the democratic party. so they were asking questions but didn't actually tell the democratic party, we know you've been hacked. the democratic party and its organizations didn't even realize they had been hacked until, i think, march or april. and finally they called a consultant and found out they had been hacked. and as you may or may not know, the clinton campaign as an organization still denies that as an organization it's been hacked, although i had heard and reported that leading figures in that campaign have been, had their personal e-mails hacked. we now know clearly that's the case given that my understanding is that literally the russian ares got 50,000 of podesta's, the campaign chairman i guess he is, e-mails. and they're dribbling it out which gives them enough to dribble out every day 2 or 3,000

a day between now and the election which they seem to be doing via wikileaks. >> guest: yeah. wikileaks has become the favorite tool for the russians, and there's some questions about the relationship between the russian government and julian assange. i don't think he can be called an unwitting agent anymore. he knows what he's doing. he knows where the stuff coming from. but, no, it took a while for the u.s. to decide when to go public with this, because they didn't want a confrontation with russia. and they had -- >> well, they also didn't want to compromise intelligence methods. >> guest: but they had the pious hope that maybe they could get some sort of deal on syria. >> host: it sounds like the fbi knew prior to the dnc knowing that they had been hacked. >> oh, yeah. >> host: how did the fbi know about that ahead of time? >> the fbi and other u.s. intelligence agencies, it's my

understanding, knew well before they told the dnc because they had intelligence be information. >> guest: that's a little different from my experience because they've come, the fbi's come to csis and told us we've been hacked by the russians, and they're usually pretty forthright about who is responsible for it. but, yeah, they have their own sources. they monitor russian activity. and then when they see it coming in, they -- usually, i'm a little surprised at that. i think the victim not knowing for months is, that's common place. but normally the fbi's pretty straightforward. i know that they were very explicit in briefings to the hill some months ago. so why the delay? they may not have known. >> i mean, it's clear to me that what i told you i is true, the reasons behind it, i think have to do with sources and methods. it's absolutely clear to me because i've spoken to the democratic who actually directly

dealt with them. they were confused for several months as to what this was about. >> guest: it's not that unusual because the russians hacked into both campaigns in both 2012 and 2008. what's different time is the release of the data. before they took e-mail donor lists, campaign strategy, opponent research. this is the third time they've done that. what's different now is the overt political use. >> host: but i don't mean to beat this, but, mr. lewis, you said that the fbi's come to csis and said, hey, you've been hacked. was csis surprised to learn this? >> guest: maybe the first time. [laughter] >> host: right. you didn't have any knowledge it was happening, correct? >> guest: no. this is one of the interesting things about this incident, is the russians are, it's not the best in the world. -- if not the best in the world, they're at least tied for being best in the world. and in the past, prior to these

incidents they were very, very discreet, very, very determined not to be caught. one of the things that was a hallmark of russian activity was not seeing them doing things for months as it turns out. and in this case they're very alert. they're sending us a signal, and it's not a very polite one. >> host: vice president biden brought up the potential of a cyber attack back on russia. and you laugh, but what would that entail? >> guest: oh, they've gone through a lot of scenarios. almost all of them are silly. one was leak the records of vladimir putin's botox treatments, and it's like pictures of his girlfriend or his bank account, and it's like you're not going to embarrass vladimir putin. and then there's this, well, we should unplug their networks. that one's probably not going to work. so it looks to me like it will be sanctions and perhaps some

sort of covert activity against the attacking infrastructure. >> my sense is also that obama, that the white house -- which has not said anything about this, they've left it up to the intelligence community, although they're as involved in this as anybody, that obama's not that interested in this stuff and, in fact, any such retaliation, if that's what you want to call it, may have to await the, you know, swearing in of presumably her, anticipated swearing in of president hillary clinton. >> guest: although i would like to see the botox pictures. i think that would be great. >> host: is the u.s. conducting on a regular basis cyber warfare, for lack of a better word, against other countries? >> guest: currently where you could call it cyber warfare would be the decision to use cyber command against isis or daish, and that is the only place where you could say the military is engaged that we've publicly admitted. the intelligence community, both cia and nsa, are routinely

engaged largely in espionage efforts though. so it would be unusual and perhaps unwise to start a cyber war with russia. >> and interestingly enough, i mean, i've actually looked at this a little bit, the real power of islamic state or daish, whatever you want to call it, in cyberspace is not so much to their hacking or whatever because, in fact, their hacking is known to be pretty pathetic, but it's their use of social media for recruit arement purposes. and the state department and british government as well are set up, you know, fairly extensive efforts to try can counter -- try and counter that messaging. and generally, the western efforts including the american efforts are just terrible. they're pathetic, in fact, arguably they're counterproductive. so in terms of social media use, the bad guys in this case, from what i've seen, are way, way, way ahead of the governments.

which is sort of a little bit disturbing. >> guest: traditional, we've always been bad at propaganda, it's not our thing. >> host: can you put a dollar figure on how much the u.s. government spends on cybersecurity or cyber intelligence gathering? >> guest: the last number i saw was $14 billion, i think, and that might be -- that includes both network defense and some of the, it probably underestimates the intelligence spending, because that would be part of other intelligence budgets. >> host: is it well allocated, in your view? >> guest: i think so. the problem we have is largely political which is how much can we, unlike the u.k., for example, how much can we tell critical infrastructure companies that they must do something? that, of course, leads to angst among those who like reading ayn rand. it just -- we have a hard time with that. but on the intelligence side, on the military side, we've done quite well. >> host: mark hosenball of reuters, you had one of your

e-mails was involved in the john podesta -- >> yeah. one of my e-mails turned up and has now been, become the subject of trolls attacking me on the internet. [laughter] i, apparently because i didn't remember the e-mail until i saw it in -- but it's a totally genuine e-mail, so i don't suggest it's forged or anything. i sent john podesta an e-mail, i guess it was in the winter of 2015 saying i'd run across some document related to the benghazi committee which seemed to suggest the benghazi committee was not operating necessarily honestly. and i wanted to ask him, i wanted to show him the document and ask him what he thought of it. again, i'm almost positive i never showed it to him. i'm not even sure what the document is. it's not a document of consequence, although some of thing toes accused -- trolls accused me of getting a secret document and feeding it to the clinton campaign. well, i didn't do that.

i did write a story about that a few days later after this e-mail about how the benghazi committee was getting some more e-mails from the state department, and they didn't prove of that hillary clinton knew or was making huge decisions about the security situation in benghazi right around the time of the attack there. and insofar as i could tell, the public record and history has vindicated that story. there's still no evidence of that. and, i mean, i wrote a lot of really tough stuff about benghazi. i reported literally within hours of the attack that it was a terrorist attack, not that it was a protest against the film that went out there. and i stayed, stuck with that story even though the administration tried to tell a different story. so, i mean, the problem is these things are taken out of context, or at least that one was -- >> guest: it would be a badge of honor to have russian and trump's trolls go after you, so i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

>> and nobody, literally nobody outside that kind of circle has attacked me. >> guest: one part of this that hasn't gotten as much attention is the russians hire hundreds, if not a few thousand people to go on to western web sites, go on to newspapers here and put pro-putin, anti-obama comments. so you can't always tell, is it russian? is it a trump supporter? who is it? but they have an active disinformation campaign. >> and bots as well. >> guest: yeah. >> they've used bo to ts at least to try to swing some of these post-debate polls, although as i understand it, it was actually done from inside the united states in terms of the majority of the botting, although the russians were involved. >> guest: it's a new kind of politics. >> host: james lewis, what does that forensic evidence you referred to look like? >> guest: you know, we haven't

seen it, it hasn't been released. one, perhaps, apocryphal story is that perhaps the code was written in russian that was left behind, and it had references that would point back to the russian intelligence service. that's usually what it is, is there's fragments or traces that point to the identity of the attacker. you can also, to some extent, trace back the command and control network to find out the computers from which the attack was launched and to which the data was sent. those also point to the fsb. so there's both remnants left behind and pathways leading back to moscow. >> and also julian assange has some fairly obvious links with russia in the sense that, i mean, i know witnesses, for example, who are involved in the original discussions with edward snowden in hong kong when he went there, and then he went to moscow, and they said julian

assange personally arranged for edward noden to go to -- snowden to go to moscow in the company of this woman, sarah harrison who was, in fact, julian assange's girlfriend. and julian as imaginesanqe at ot had a talk show, he claims i guess that he didn't get money directly from the russian government. i don't know. >> guest: that just means it went through a middleman. >> right. >> host: so let's say all this information that we're seeing, if it were in the u.s. postal service in a sealed letter, would with it be illegal to publish it? >> guest: the internet has given the russians and others opportunities they did not have are before. if you think about pre-internet elections, they would have had to send dozens or even hundreds of agents with bags of money. they would have been easily detectable. they would have had to do a watergate-style break-in which we know didn't work out so well. so the internet makes it so much easier.

you can hack in, you can get data, you can cover your traces to some extent. it would not have worked without the internet. >> well, to use the watergate analogy, i mean, what's happened here -- and, again, you know, we haven't seen the court proof that the russians did it -- but whatever's happened here, whoever did it and i'm perfectly willing to believe the russian ares did it -- >> guest: there should be no doubt the -- >> right. you know, i certainly have been reporting that myself. >> guest: yeah. >> the amount of data involved is much bigger than watergate. >> guest: ing sure. >> i mean, it just -- >> guest: they didn't have to rent a truck. >> right. watergate is literally tiny by comparison. >> host: is it illegal in any way to publish this information? >> guest: that's a good question. it's clearly illegal to break in and take it, and then the argument has been, well, wikileaks is receiving stolen goods. i don't think that would stand up. so if you got a mysterious

document, the times with the trump tax returns, for example, it's probably not illegal. one of the complications in trying to determine what an appropriate or proportionate response would be is the u.s. wants to be very careful not to do anything that would appear to compromise people's first amendment right ares. a complication we have and russians don't. >> host: why could we not, as you say, shut down their internet? >> guest: well, we could shut down the internet. the questions that i think senior policymakers ask at the white house, they ask two questions; are you sure it's them on the attribution front. we're sure it's the russians. and the second question they ask is tell me how you will keep this from escalating out of control, and that one is some risk here. i mean, the president of russia, perhaps not one of your more stable actors although certainly better than kim of north korea, he could do something violent or

unpleasant in response. he's not bound by the same constraints we are. so i think they're being very careful to do manager that is both supported -- something that is both supported by fact and does not lead to a greater conflict. >> i mean, our concern as journalists is not so much the law, you know, is it legal to print this stuff. our concern much more importantly is, is it real. and, again, you know, oddly enough, the united states government has at least tried to put out stories saying be very careful, there could be fake documents planted in there. well, that's entirely true. there could be fake documents planted by russia or assange or anybody, but insofar as i've seened in terms of the -- seen in terms of the wikileaks and the john podesta e-mails, it's all real. >> guest: it's the russian tactic to tweak or amend, but as you say, there's no evidence so far. >> it's been suggested to me that maybe what we're seeing is just selective stuff and that there's other stuff in there

that somehow mitigates the meaning of some of these things. again, that could be true, but i haven't seen any evidence of that. most of the stuff seems to be in the context. i looked at my own e-mail archive, and that was the only e-mail from me and john to podesta that i found. >> host: are there any dangers to the u.s. electoral system at this point? illinois, arizona have experienced hacking of their public file. >> guest: probably not because one advantage of being a disorganized federal system is that you have dozens of actors hat the state level. -- at the state level. you have the 50 states plus the district, and then you have thousands of counties, each of which does its own thing, and they have different systems. so it woulda very hard target to break in and change the vote count. what you can do is you can create doubt, uncertainty. you can perhaps mess up the ability to vote on election day. but we're not going to see --

it's not going to turn out that one candidate will appear with 98% of the vote. things like that are only possible in russia. but our system is too complicated to be easily hacked. but our politics are such that they lend themself to this kind of disruption. >> well, russia, uzbekistan, kazahkstan, whatever, there's, in fact, at this point the investigators literally zero evidence that any actual voter, voting systems have been compromised in my way. d in any way. but as you say, in fact, my understanding is that 20 state voter registration databases have been at least faced with hacking attacks. >> guest: yeah. >> more than the two you mentioned, illinois and arizona, but less than six have been actually attacked. but, again, it's not clear -- >> guest: you could see that on election day if people show up to the polls and there's difficulty in verifying their legitimacy as a voter, that would add complications or delays that could affect the vote. that's probably the most you're

going to get out of it. >> and the republicans have a history, in fact, openly engage in, you know, efforts to increase voter id -- >> >> guest: right. >> -- or voter registration hurdles. and, you know, the democrats say, and i think there's some justification to this, these are voter suppression efforts. that has nothing to do with the russians. >> guest: to be fair, i think the russians have identified and exploited patterns in american politics. i don't think it's that one party or the other is in any way witting or cooperating with the russians. so the russians know how our politics works, they take advantage of it. >> host: have the republicans been hacked? >> guest: ing they said, chairman mccaul of the house homeland security committee said they were hacked. certainly they were hacked in the two previous presidential elections, so it wouldn't surprise me at all. >> we've reported that the republicans, that multiple republican organizations and

individuals have been hacked. we report ared even somebody in the trump campaign got hacked. there's no evidence -- well, in fact, the only evidence that i know of offhand of hacked republican materials being made public is some e e-mails, i believe, belonging to or related to two people named lindsey graham, senator lindsey graham and senator john healthcare cane have a-- mccain, have appeared on the internet, and believe it or not, they're not friendly to donald trump. [laughter] >> guest: there does seem to be a pattern. >> on the other hand, in terms of large scale, i mean, i do believe that the republicans have been hacked in the sense probably for intelligence-gathering purposes. there's no evidence of anything like this sort of publication of material like is happening to the democracy. >> host: james lewis, i want to go back to this, and i don't mean to beat this, but how is it that the fbi knew before the organizations that were hacked?

what's the evidence that they saw? specifically? >> guest: in some instances the fbi has gotten the authority to monitor some networks not always in the u.s., but you could monitor, say, a russian network and see outgoing traffic. you could monitor with the help of nsa some domestic networks to see if they were being hacked. but if there's -- it's hard to explain in an open setting, but if you knew what a russian attack looked like, you could look for that attack on the network and then trace it back to where it might live. >> host: a few weeks ago there was a story in "the new york times" about this young man up in siberia who has a is set of servers in -- a set of servers in his office and that he's been kind of the source of this. and he was very open talking about it. >> well, it's kind of a switchboard more than -- >> guest: yeah. he'll sell a server to anyone.

i mean, dutch pornographers, you name it. he'll, so he's just, he's just the mailbox. >> host: so does a lot of traffic go through him? a lot of this kind of traffic that we're talking about? >> guest: no. the russians are good, they use multiple individuals like that around the world. some of which they've used in the past, and that was one way that, one thing that pointed to them being responsible this time is they had previously -- now, to be -- look, the fsb does not call itself fuzzy bear. something that an american pr firm made up. it's hard to see these very thuggish guys saying, i'm fuzzy bear. they're not fuzzy bear. but they do have units and a collection program that has a global scope that goes after politicians, intelligence targets that emanates from the fsb, and this was part of that. and that is what is detectable.

if you're going after 30 countries, you're going to leave some kind of footprint. >> it's also worth noting that the government of ecuador confirmed the other day that they've cut off, allegedly cut off julian assange's access to the internet because, remember, he's been hanging out in the ecuadoran embassy in london since june of four years ago. but, but the wikileaks twitter feed is still going, and my understanding is that's principally, he's the principal, if not sole proprietor of that. and moreover, wikileaks is continuing to publish these podesta e-mails that are, you know, several thousand a day which suggests one way or another he's found outside mechanisms that can do all this stuff. i mean, i think he had servers in sweden, but maybe other places as well, iceland. so, you know, there are ways around this for both, again, you know, people like assange, but the russian government. >> guest: within the limits of the law, there's not a lot you

can do to assange. and so we could fry his devices, but that would probably not be legally justifiable. >> host: would a stuxnet-like attack against russia be considered an act of war? >> guest: well, act of war is a political decision. it's not actually, the legal terms are that it's supposed to be an armed attack that triggers your inherent right to self-defense. and no one has defined what an armed attack is. so it would be up to vladimir putin to decide that. now, stuxnet probably was the use of force. it caused destruction. he could be justified in calling it an act of war. but it's a political decision when the russians -- pardon me. when the united states allegedly hacked the iranian nuclear facility, the iranians chose not to call it an act of war. when the russians hacked a

german blast furnace last year, the germans chose not to call it an act of war. it depends how much you want to have a fight, and he might be in the mood to have a fight. he could benefit from that. >> it's also true that the law and for that report in -- that matter the u.s. constitution were not drafted to account for the issues of cyberspace. and, you know, particularly in the united states government. i'm talking to lawyers about this recently in a slightly different context. they believe that, basically, the constitution of the united states in terms of dealing with some of these cyber issues is out of date, it's obsolete. >> guest: ing those weren't government lawyers, were they? >> they were, actually. >> guest: okay. >> and they're trying to figure out ways to, you know, somehow alter statute or, for that matter, convince the courts to help them get around this issue. >> guest: i think the president probably feels like he has the authority he needs if he wanted either under title l or title x,

the military authorities, he has the authority to do some sort of retaliatory act. but the politics of whether to do that, the wisdom of doing that are -- >> and i'm talking a little bit more about surveillance activities than offensive activities. >> guest: ing sure. >> host: mark hosenball is with reuters, and james lewis, our guest, is senior vice president with the center for strategic and international studies. thank you, gentlemen. >> guest: thank you. >> thank you very much. >> c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979 c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. ..

the three face one another during a recent debate focused on energy, infrastructure, national security and the economy. this is 30 minutes. >> welcome to prairie public coverage of election 2016. i'm matt olien. ♪