The Russian Army has been busy, but not the one you might imagine. They don’t drive armored tanks or fire mortar rounds at their enemy. They sit in darkened rooms with their military-issued weapons. Computers and keyboards.
Russia’s highly sophisticated computer hacking division managed to earn their pay by recently breaking into the networks of a slew of U.S. government agencies.
The U.S., as a whole, has remained fairly silent concerning the issue. This wasn’t the first time the Russians have busted in uninvited and it certainly will not be their last. But at least one U.S. senator thinks staying quiet is not the proper way to handle the intrusion.
Utah’s controversial Republican Senator Mitt Romney said the hack “demands a response.” He believes the U.S. should launch a retaliatory “cyber-response” to show those pinheads what we’re capable of.
Yet in the same breathe Romney alluded to having doubts that America could pull it off such a counter-attack. He said he wasn’t sure if the U.S. even has the “capability to do that in a way that would be of the same scale or even a greater scale than Russia has applied to us.”
Romney did not hesitate to express his vast disappointment with President Trump’s lack of any substantial reaction concerning the data breach. But just one day prior to his saying this, Donald Trump had explained how a lack of being 100% certain it was Putin and the boys led to his decision of letting it go for now.
The first and only comments Trump has made thus far have served to downplay the incident as not being as serious as the media is claiming, and to say how the impact of the intrusion had been minimal at best.
But Romney doesn’t see it this way. He said the president “has a blind spot when it comes to Russia.” He believes Trump has never been able to admit, or even see, Russia for being the “extraordinarily bad actor they are on the world stage.”
Romney’s head must have exploded into a thousand fine particles when he read Trumps’ tweet that said the breach was “far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality.”
The presidents’ tweet further indicated that it may be the Chinese who are responsible. Who really knows? If past and more recent history have taught us anything, retaliating against the wrong bad guy never goes well.
Romney insisted that Russia goes against the grain of the U. S. “on every front.” He said the Trump administration has “not been serious enough about how damaging an adversary Russia can be.”
Romney said experts on U.S. cybersecurity made the firm determination it was Russian hackers. He further indicated how the breach had not been minimal in the least as Trump had suggested.
He noted how the hackers intruded the agencies responsible for housing data on the U.S’s research into nuclear weapons, and the one responsible for keeping track of our nuclear capacity.
“What this invasion underscores is that Russia acted with impunity,” said Romney. “They didn’t fear what we would be able to do from a cyber capacity. They didn’t think that our defenses were particularly adequate and they apparently didn’t think that we would respond in a very aggressive way.”
If Romney’s words sound opinionated, it’s only because they are. None of this has been proven. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who’s been skating on thin ice himself for a while, said the United States “can say pretty clearly” it was the Russians. “Pretty clearly” still does indicate 100% though.
As one would most rightly expect, the Kremlin has denied any knowledge of the hack. Would you have done things any differently?