While speaking with some of the people interviewed in this book, I wondered if our government had a playbook. The Russian hackers may have been operating from a playbook that was grounded in decades of history. As we learned from experts like Michael Hayden, we aren't exactly novices at this. We too have committed acts of cyber espionage. How do we draw on that history and create a playbook that guides the United States in how to respond?

I asked Laura Rosenberger of the Alliance for Securing Democracy if the country had a plan.1

Rosenberger: It's hard to have a plan when the president doesn't acknowledge that there's a problem. I don't think that we have [a] responsive playbook, because I don't think we really yet fully understand the threat that we're facing. If you think about other kinds of warfare, you have to understand the weapons systems that are being used against you. You have to understand the different domains they're operating in. And you need to be able to build your own defensive and offensive strategies based on a full understanding of all that. The Russians and Putin certainly see this as a new kind of warfare. We need to understand the weapons systems and the domains in which they're operating in a new and different way in order to really be able to respond comprehensively.

We're trying to build the understanding and the playbook to be able to do [that]. I think until that point, we're just not going to be able to really get ourselves organized around it. That being said, in the last few years there's no question that key parts of our national security apparatus have really started to take on this challenge in a serious way.

Pegues: But it seems to me that this is an arms race that America is losing.

Rosenberger: That is certainly one way of thinking about it.

Pegues: And it's still happening, as [your] Hamilton 68 [website dashboard] points out. This is an ongoing Russian operation.

Rosenberger: Right. That's, I think, the other thing that is lost on a lot of people. This isn't just something that happened in 2016, and maybe they'll come back in 2018 and 2020. They never left. This is an ongoing thing. And it's not just about elections. This is about undermining and weakening democracy and democratic institutions and viewing that as a weapon. This is a weaponized assault on our democracy. Elections are the premier crown-jewel institution in democracies.

A man I speak with regularly at CBS News is former acting director of the CIA Michael Morell. He was traveling with President George W. Bush on September 11, 2001, and he briefed the president on the terrorist attack. Morell has a remarkable reservoir of knowledge and experience, which is why presidents, senators, and many others rely on his counsel.

Morell associated the Russian cyberattacks with an act of war: “We need to see this for what it is. It is an attack on our very democracy. It's an attack on who we are as a people. A foreign government messing around in our elections is, I think, an existential threat to our way of life.”2

He recommended steps we might take to respond to these attacks in such a way that the results of the attack can be seen. That would serve as a deterrent to the Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians, and anyone else thinking about their own version of the Russian influence campaign.

As for Putin, Morell says, “He has to feel some pain, he has to pay a price here or again, there will be no deterrence, and it has to be seen by the rest of the world as being significant to Mr. Putin so that it can be a deterrent.”³

In the final weeks of the Obama administration, according to the Washington Post, officials debated dozens of options for punishing Russia, including a “covert measure that authorized planting cyber weapons in Russia's infrastructure, the digital equivalent of bombs that could be detonated if the United States found itself in an escalating exchange with Moscow.”4 It's unclear whether that action was ever taken. During that period I kept asking US intelligence officials what the response may be, and I was always warned about the uncertainty of an offensive cyber response. “You just don't know where that ends,” I was told. As for the Kremlin, it has always denied any involvement. After Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted thirteen Russian nationals in connection with the influence campaign, one of the men spoke out, dismissing the charges. “They have one-sided justice,” said Mikhail Burchik. “It turns out that you can hang the blame on anyone.”⁵

The United States’ response to the Russian cyberattack has been haphazard. The attack was unprecedented, and there are no real rules. Hayden, the former director of the NSA and CIA, noted that he didn't believe the Russian cyber-espionage attacks constituted an act of war. He also noted that there was no formal definition for an act of war in the cyber realm.⁶ Jim Lewis says that the only real rule in cyberattacks was that you don't do anything to cause physical damage or human casualties.⁷ Beyond that it is still the Wild West of cyberspace.

For the most part. Although the rule book has not really been written, there are some rough guidelines in place. As aggressive Russian cyberattacks wreak havoc on a global scale, we are beginning to develop new strategies. These are still in their rudimentary stages.

The hefty, 1,220-page Department of Defense Law of War Manual was developed over a quarter of a century ago and contains only a fifteen-page section pertaining specifically to cyberspace.⁸ However, as Duke law school professor Charlie Dunlap writes, “Though some may complain about its relative brevity…the cyber chapter nevertheless represents another step in DoD's growing transparency about cyber operations generally. It was not long ago that most aspects of cyber operations beyond defensive measures were classified.”⁹

In the nearly two years since the 2016 election, Putin has not paid a significant price for the influence campaign. In fact, partisan bickering in Washington has allowed the Russian leader to continue his poisonous social media operations with unfettered access to the hearts and minds of the American people. His “patriotic” hacking units continue to poke and pierce computer networks in the United States and across the globe.10

Whether there was coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives will ultimately be decided by a judge and jury. But the verdict on the Russian intelligence operation to create doubt and uncertainty in the US election is already in. Now, state election officials are unsure about what they are doing to secure the upcoming elections against the Russian cyber menace. As former president George W. Bush said in February 2018, “It's problematic that a foreign nation is involved in our election system. Our democracy is only as good as people trust the results.”¹¹