This is sad, pathetic and laughable.
Obama Inc. did nothing about serious Chinese and Russian hacking and espionage operations until they became personally inconvenient for his political ideology. That's somewhere between selfishness and treason. Now this sad story is trying to pretend that Obama got tough on Russia.
The White House sent a secret “hotline”-style message to Russia on Oct. 31 to warn against any further cybermeddling in the U.S. election process. Russia didn’t escalate its tactics as Election Day approached, but U.S. officials aren’t ready to say that deterrence worked.
... because it didn't.
But Obama sent a secret decoder ring message to Russia. How could that not have worked?
The previously undisclosed message was part of the high-stakes game of cyber brinkmanship that has been going on this year between Moscow and Washington. How to stabilize this relationship without appearing to capitulate to Russian pressure tactics is among the biggest challenges facing President-elect Donald Trump.
No that's a challenge for Obama. Trump could just put the ball in Russia's court instead of worrying about how to appease Putin without looking weak.
The message was sent on a special channel created in 2013 as part of the Nuclear-Risk Reduction Center, using a template designed for crisis communication. “It was a very clear statement to the Russians and asked them to stop their activity,” a senior administration official said, adding: “The fact that we used this channel was part of the messaging.”
Because the Russians hadn't gotten the message before. So we sent it via the special channel. And the Russians made a special point of laughing about it. Sending a message via that channel from a guy who might actually use nukes (the type of accusation the media made about Trump and Reagan) would be scary. Obama doing it is just pathetic.
According to several other high-level sources, President Obama also personally contacted President Vladimir Putin last month to caution him about the disruptive cyberattacks. The senior administration official wouldn’t comment on these reports.
The private warnings followed a public statement Oct. 7 by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, charging that “Russia’s senior-most officials” had authorized cyberattacks that were “intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”
Well no doubt the Russians were very scared.
The Obama administration has grappled with how to establish norms of deterrence in cyberspace that check destabilizing actions by an aggressive, risk-taking Russia. The White House thought it was making progress with a joint statement at the November 2015 G-20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, which affirmed that “international law applies to state conduct in cyberspace.” The U.S. argues that this commitment includes observing laws of armed conflict that require proportionality and limited collateral impact, in whatever battlespace. But the Obama administration fears that Russia is ignoring these limits.
Please relay to Vladimir that Obama will have more flexibility to fetch him his slippers after the election.