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As President-elect Joe Biden weighed options to punish Russia for its alleged hacking of US government agencies and companies, a prominent Republican accused Moscow of “acting with impunity” and others called for retaliatory attacks.
Biden’s options once he takes office on January 20 range from financial penalties to revenge cyberattacks against Russian interests, according to transition team sources. Donald Trump, meanwhile, argues that piracy could be China work, despite the certainty of his own secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, that Russia was behind the attacks.
On Sunday, Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, a frequent critic of Trump, said that Vladimir Putin’s government had effectively invaded the United States.
“What this invasion underscores is that Russia acted with impunity,” Romney told NBC’s Meet the Press. “They were not afraid of what we could do from a cybernetic capacity. They did not think our defense systems were particularly adequate. And apparently they didn’t think we were going to respond in a very aggressive way.
“This demands a response, and the response that you would expect to occur would be a cyber response. I don’t know if we have the capacity to do it in a way that is on the same scale or even larger than Russia has applied to us, but this is something that we need to address as soon as possible. “
John Barasso, a Republican senator from Wyoming, told Fox News Sunday that the United States had been “caught off guard.”
“Six different agencies have been attacked in our government and this has been going on since March,” he said. “We need to have a strong and effective punishment response so that people will pay a price for this and think twice before doing it again.”
A response is unlikely in Trump’s 31 days remaining in the White House. Aside from a critical tweet on Saturday, Trump has been silent on the attack.
“I think we’ve come to recognize that the president has a blind spot when it comes to Russia,” Romney, a member of the Senate national security committee, told CNN’s State of the Union. “But I think the president-elect is an intelligent and lucid-eyed person, and he is going to assess Russia and its capabilities appropriately.”
Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, told ABC’s This Week: “When the president of the United States tries to deflect or is unwilling to call the adversary while we make that attribution, our country is not doing safer.
“Sometimes I think we spend disproportionately on tanks, ships and weapons when we should better protect ourselves from cyber. And there are also international implications of this attack. We need to be very clear with an affirmative cyberdoctrine that says [if] If you make this kind of indiscriminate, broad-based attack, you will suffer the consequences. “
A Biden source told Reuters that the new president could step up the fight against cyber espionage, with the aim of deterring and diminishing the power of Russian cyber espionage. But Biden’s team will need better intelligence. Access to presidential briefings was delayed until about three weeks ago when Trump questioned the election results.
On Sunday, incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain told CBS’s Face the Nation: “We should hear a clear and unequivocal assignment of responsibilities from the White House, from the intelligence community. They are the people in charge. They are the ones who should make those messages and convey the determination of responsibility.
Instead, what we’ve heard is a message from the secretary of state, a different message from the White House, a different message from the president’s Twitter feed. We have been informed about this. But again, I think that in terms of publicly communicating the position of our government that it has to come from the current government and it should come with a clear and unequivocal voice.
Romney compared the alleged attack by Russia to the American assault on Baghdad during the Iraq war in 2003.
“You saw the videos of the rockets going through the city and hitting various buildings and the places they hit, of course, were communication centers and public service centers,” he told NBC. “You can bring a country to its knees if the people don’t have electricity, they don’t have water and they can’t communicate.
“Basically what Russia seems to have done [is] get into those systems in our country. They don’t need rockets to get those things out. They potentially have the ability to remove all of that stuff remotely at a very low cost. “
Christopher Krebs, fired by Trump last month as director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) for publicly debunking the president’s false claims about voter fraud, agreed that the hack was likely the work of the Russian foreign intelligence service SVR. But he doubted Romney’s assessment of what Russia could do with the collected data.
“The [SVR] they are intelligence gatherers, ”Krebs told CNN. “They are looking for political decisions, they are looking for diplomatic negotiations in federal agencies. They are usually not the ones to run the destructive attack types, and they usually don’t work with the other parts of the Russian government.
“That doesn’t mean they can’t pass access, but for now I think it’s more of an intelligence gathering operation. What really worries me about this particular campaign by the Russians was the indiscriminate nature of the supply chain targeting, the fact that they have potentially compromised 18,000 companies. That to me is off limits to what we’ve seen recently about spying activities. “
Klain echoed Krebs’ caution about what Russia might be hoping to accomplish, but added: “In terms of the steps a Biden administration would take in response to an attack like this, I want to be very clear. They are not just sanctions. They are also steps and things that we could do to degrade the ability of foreign actors to repeat this type of attack. “
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