How lessons learned from the 2016 campaign led US officials to be more open about Iran hack

In this file photo taken on January 23, 2018 a person works at a computer during the 10th International Cybersecurity Forum in Lille, France. (AFP)
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Updated 28 August 2024
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How lessons learned from the 2016 campaign led US officials to be more open about Iran hack

  • They accused Iranian hackers of targeting the presidential campaigns of both major parties as part of a broader attempt to sow discord in the American political process

WASHINGTON: The 2016 presidential campaign was entering its final months and seemingly all of Washington was abuzz with talk about how Russian hackers had penetrated the email accounts of Democrats, triggering the release of internal communications that seemed designed to boost Donald Trump’s campaign and hurt Hillary Clinton’s.
Yet there was a notable exception: The officials investigating the hacks were silent.
When they finally issued a statement, one month before the election, it was just three paragraphs and did little more than confirm what had been publicly suspected — that there had been a brazen Russian effort to interfere in the vote.
This year, there was another foreign hack, but the response was decidedly different. US security officials acted more swiftly to name the culprit, detailing their findings and blaming a foreign adversary — this time, Iran — just over a week after Trump’s campaign revealed the attack.
They accused Iranian hackers of targeting the presidential campaigns of both major parties as part of a broader attempt to sow discord in the American political process.
The forthright response is part of a new effort to be more transparent about threats. It was a task made easier because the circumstances weren’t as politically volatile as in 2016, when a Democratic administration was investigating Russia’s attempts to help the Republican candidate.
But it also likely reflects lessons learned from past years when officials tasked with protecting elections from foreign adversaries were criticized by some for holding onto sensitive information — and lambasted by others for wading into politics.
Suzanne Spaulding, a former official with the Department of Homeland Security, said agencies realize that releasing information can help thwart the efforts of US adversaries.
“This is certainly an example of that — getting out there quickly to say, ‘Look, this is what Iran’s trying to do. It’s an important way of building public resilience against this propaganda effort by Iran,’” said Spaulding, now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Aug. 19 statement by security officials followed a Trump campaign announcement that it had been breached, reports from cybersecurity firms linking the intrusion to Iran and news articles disclosing that media organizations had been approached with apparently hacked materials.
But the officials suggested their response was independent of those developments.
The FBI, which made the Iran announcement along with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in a statement to The Associated Press that “transparency is one of the most powerful tools we have to counteract foreign malign influence operations intended to undermine our elections and democratic institutions.”
The FBI said the government had refined its policies to ensure that information is shared as it becomes available, “so the American people can better understand this threat, recognize the tactics, and protect their vote.
A Wholesale Reorganization
A spokesperson for the ODNI also told AP that the government’s assessment arose from a new process for notifying the public about election threats.
Created following the 2020 elections, the framework sets out a process for investigating and responding to cyber threats against campaigns, election offices or the public. When a threat is deemed sufficiently serious, it is “nominated” for additional action, including a private warning to the attack’s target or a public announcement.
“The Intelligence Community has been focused on collecting and analyzing intelligence regarding foreign malign influence activities, to include those of Iran, targeting US elections,” the agency said. “For this notification, the IC had relevant intelligence that prompted a nomination.”
The bureaucratic terminology obscures what for the intelligence community has been a wholesale reorganization of how the government tracks threats against elections since 2016, when Russian hacking underscored the foreign interference threat.
“In 2016 we were completely caught off guard,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “There were some indications, but nobody really understood the scale.”
That summer, US officials watched with alarm as Democratic emails stolen by Russian military hackers spilled out in piecemeal fashion on WikiLeaks. By the end of July, the FBI had opened an investigation into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to tip the election. The probe ended without any finding that the two sides had criminally colluded with each other.
Inside the White House, officials debated how to inform the public of its assessment that Russia was behind the hack-and-leak. There was discussion about whether such a statement might have the unintended consequence of making voters distrustful of election results, thereby helping Russia achieve its goal of undermining faith in democracy.
Then-FBI Director James Comey wrote in his book, “A Higher Loyalty,” that he at one point proposed writing a newspaper opinion piece documenting Russia’s activities. He described the Obama administration deliberations as “extensive, thoughtful, and very slow,” culminating in the pre-election statement followed by a longer intelligence community assessment in January 2017.
“I know we did agonize over whether to say something and when to say it and that sort of thing because it appeared in the case of the Russians that they were favoring one candidate over the other,” James Clapper, the then-director of national intelligence, said in an interview.
A Bumpy Road

In 2018, Congress created CISA, the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber arm, to defend against digital attacks. Four years later the Foreign and Malign Influence Center was established within the ODNI to track foreign government efforts to sway US elections.
Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a Washington-based organization that analyzes foreign disinformation, said he’s pleased that in its first election, the center doesn’t seem to have been “hobbled by some of the partisanship that we’ve seen cripple other parts of the government that tried to do this work.”
Still, there have been obstacles and controversies. Shortly after Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Trump fired the head of CISA, Christopher Krebs, for refuting his unsubstantiated claim of electoral fraud.
Also during the 2020 elections, The New York Post reported that it had obtained a hard drive from a laptop dropped off by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop. Public confusion followed, as did claims by former intelligence officials that the emergence of the laptop bore the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign. Trump’s national intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, soon after rebutted that assessment with a statement saying there were no signs of Russian involvement.
In 2022, the work of a new office called the Disinformation Governance Board was quickly suspended after Republicans raised questions about its relationship with social media companies and concerns that it could be used to monitor or censor Americans’ online discourse.
Legal challenges over government restrictions on free speech have also complicated the government’s ability to exchange information with social media companies, though Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a recent address that the government has resumed sharing details with the private sector.
Earlier this year, Warner said he worried the US was more vulnerable than in 2020, in part because of diminished communication between government and tech companies. He said he’s satisfied by the government’s recent work, citing a greater number of public briefingsand warnings, but is concerned that the greatest test is likely still ahead.
“The bad guys are not going to do most of this until October,” Warner said. “So we have to be vigilant.”

 


Former Minneapolis police chief recalls ‘absolutely gut-wrenching’ moment of seeing George Floyd video

Updated 8 sec ago
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Former Minneapolis police chief recalls ‘absolutely gut-wrenching’ moment of seeing George Floyd video

  • What he saw conflicted with what his own people had told him about the deadly encounter
  • The video shows Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, pinning him to the pavement
MINNEAPOLIS: Former Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo vividly remembers receiving a call around midnight from a community activist. The caller told him to watch a video spreading on social media of a white officer pinning a Black man to the ground, despite his fading pleas of “I can’t breathe.”
The dying man was George Floyd. The officer was Derek Chauvin. And Arradondo was the city’s first Black police chief.
“It was absolutely gut-wrenching,” Arradondo, 58, recalled in an interview ahead of the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s murder.
What he saw conflicted with what his own people had told him about the deadly encounter, and he knew immediately it would mean changes for his department and city. But he acknowledged he didn’t immediately foresee how deeply Floyd’s death would reverberate in the US and around the world.
“I served for 32 years,” he said. “But there’s no doubt May 25th, 2020, is a defining moment for me in my public service career.”
The video shows Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, pinning him to the pavement outside a convenience store where Floyd had tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes. Chauvin maintained the pressure for 9-1/2 minutes despite pleas from onlookers to stop, even after an off-duty firefighter tried to intervene and another officer said he couldn’t find a pulse.
‘Remnants of pain and anger’
Arradondo sat for the interview in a public library that was heavily damaged in the unrest that followed Floyd’s death. It’s on Lake Street, a major artery that saw some of the worst destruction, a street that he says still bears “remnants of the pain and anger of what occurred five years ago.”
Just down the block, there’s the empty shell of a police station that was torched during the riots. And within sight is a Target store and a Cub Foods supermarket that were looted. Storefronts remain boarded up. While some businesses were rebuilt, empty lots sit where others did not.
Arradondo still stands by his and Mayor Jacob Frey’s decision to abandon the Third Precinct and let it burn. Protesters breached the building, and police — who were spread thin — didn’t have the resources to hold it. So he ordered his officers to evacuate.
“During the most significant crisis we’ve ever experienced, arguably in the state, when it’s life or death, I’ve got to go on the side of keeping people alive and safe,” he said.
Police reform
Arradondo subsequently helped launch an overhaul of policing in the city despite a resistant police culture and a powerful officers union. He testified against Chauvin in his 2021 murder trial, a rare breach of the “blue wall” that traditionally protects officers from being held accountable for wrongdoing.
Five years on, Arradondo, who retired in 2022, said he believes law enforcement agencies nationwide have made progress on police accountability — albeit incremental progress — and that police chiefs and sheriffs now move faster to hold officers responsible for egregious misconduct.
Arradondo was promoted to chief in 2017, and his elevation was greeted with hope among local African Americans who affectionately called him “Rondo.” But his department had a reputation for being too quick to use force and many were angry about police killing young Black men in Minnesota and beyond.
Arradondo said he wishes he had made more changes to the police department before Floyd was killed.
“I would have pushed harder and sooner at trying to dismantle some of the toxic culture that allowed that indifference to exist that evening, on May 25th, 2020,” he said. “I certainly would have invested more time elevating the voices in our community that had been pleading with police departments for decades to listen to us and change.”
Making amends
Arradondo just published a book, “Chief Rondo: Securing Justice for the Murder of George Floyd,” that explores leadership, justice and race, the broader impacts of policing, and the challenges of working within a flawed system. He closes it with a letter dedicated to Floyd’s daughter, Gianna.
“I never had an opportunity to meet Gianna, but I wanted her to know that, even though I was not out there that evening, at that intersection when her father was pleading for help, that I heard him, and I was going to do everything I could to bring him justice,” he said.
He wanted to say the words that she has not heard from the four former officers who were convicted for their roles in George Floyd’s death:
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for your father being taken from you.”

Fire in Nairobi informal settlement kills eight

Updated 1 min 35 sec ago
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Fire in Nairobi informal settlement kills eight

NAIROBI: A fire tore through an informal settlement in the Kenyan capital Nairobi on Saturday, killing at least eight people, police said.

The fire in the city’s Makina area began at around 5:00 am (0200 GMT), said police official Patricia Yegon.

“Eight people were burnt to death, while several others were injured,” she said, without specifying how many were hurt.

The cause has not been established, but fires frequently occur in the capital’s overcrowded and impoverished informal settlements.

The Kenyan Red Cross said 40 houses were affected before firefighters contained the blaze with the help of the local community.

Bangladesh sounds alarm as ‘extreme desperation’ drives Rohingya into deadly sea journeys

Updated 30 min 14 sec ago
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Bangladesh sounds alarm as ‘extreme desperation’ drives Rohingya into deadly sea journeys

  • UNHCR says 427 Rohingya died in accidents off Myanmar’s coast in early May
  • Thousands of refugees have attempted perilous sea voyages in past few years

DHAKA: Bangladeshi authorities on Saturday raised the alarm over increasing numbers of Rohingya refugees taking risky boat journeys to flee the coastal district of Cox’s Bazar. 

Bangladesh hosts more than 1.3 million Rohingya Muslims, who, for decades, have fled neighboring Myanmar to escape persecution, especially during a military crackdown in 2017. The majority of them live in Cox’s Bazar in eastern Bangladesh, which has become the world’s largest refugee settlement.

Over the years, humanitarian conditions in Cox’s Bazar’s cramped refugee camps have been deteriorating, with aid continuously declining since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nearly one in five people attempting to flee the settlement by sea have been reported as dead or missing so far in 2025, according to UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency.

Two boats which capsized on May 9 and 10 were carrying a total of 514 Rohingya refugees from Cox’s Bazar and Myanmar’s Rakhine state, according to UNHCR, which estimates that at least 427 of them died.

“The ongoing funding crisis for the Rohingya is severely hampering the lives of Rohingya in the camps in Cox’s Bazar, which fueled the desperation for the perilous sea journey,” Mizanur Rahman, refugee relief and repatriation commissioner in Cox’s Bazar, told Arab News.

“Every aspect of their lives — food, livelihood, health, and so on — has been severely impacted. Most importantly, it has darkened their future also. They are at a loss what to do. The uncertainty in their lives triggered many of them to (undertake) the risky sea journeys towards unknown destinations.”

Over the past few years, UNHCR has documented thousands of Rohingya refugees embarking on deadly sea journeys from Bangladesh — and, to a lesser extent, from Myanmar — and reported hundreds dying or going missing.

The Rohingya, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority, lived for centuries in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state but were stripped of their citizenship in the 1980s. Since then, many of them have fled to Bangladesh, where they are almost entirely reliant on humanitarian aid.

Despite multiple attempts by Bangladeshi authorities, the UN-backed repatriation and resettlement process of the Rohingya has so far failed to take off.

In 2025, aid for the Rohingya faced another cut after US President Donald Trump’s administration announced it was eliminating most US aid globally. Washington was the largest donor of foreign aid to the Rohingya last year, contributing $301 million — 55 percent of all foreign aid received.

UNHCR requires $383 million in 2025 to “stabilize the lives of refugees and their host communities” across Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, as well as those displaced inside Myanmar. But, as of Friday, it had secured only 30 percent of that amount.

The deadly boat accidents earlier this month may have been fueled by “extreme desperation,” UNHCR said, highlighting that it occurred during the monsoon season, which is a particularly dangerous time for boat travel in the region.

“The dire humanitarian situation, exacerbated by funding cuts, is having a devastating impact on the lives of Rohingya, with more and more resorting to dangerous journeys to seek safety, protection and a dignified life for themselves and their families,” said Hai Kyung Jun, UNHCR director for Asia and the Pacific.

“The latest tragedy is a chilling reminder that access to meaningful protection, especially in countries of first asylum, as well as responsibility sharing and collective efforts along sea routes, are essential to saving lives.”


South Africa rescues all 260 miners stuck underground alive

Updated 40 min 3 sec ago
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South Africa rescues all 260 miners stuck underground alive

  • The miners were trapped underground on Thursday at the Kloof gold mine, 60 kilometers west of Johannesburg
  • The gold mine is one of the deepest operated by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed company

WESTONARIA, South Africa: Rescuers on Friday pulled out all 260 mine workers who had been stuck for more than 24 hours in an underground shaft in South Africa, the mine’s operator said.
The miners were trapped underground on Thursday at the Kloof gold mine, 60 kilometers (37 miles) west of Johannesburg, after a hoist used to access the shaft was damaged in an accident, the mining company Sibanye-Stillwater said.
The first phase of the rescue brought 79 people to the surface by 1:30 p.m. (1130 GMT) while the rest were rescued six hours later, it said in a statement.
“At no point was there any risk of injury to employees during the incident,” it said. A decision had been made against using the emergency escape routes which would have involved the miners walking longer distances, it added.
The gold mine is one of the deepest operated by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed company.
Desperate relatives of the miners waited outside the site during the rescue efforts, most of them expressing shock at the incident, local television footage showed.
“All affected employees will also undergo thorough medical examinations, if required, while support has also been extended to employees’ families,” the mining company said.
The National Union of Mineworkers said the incident happened around 10:00 a.m. (0800 GMT) on Thursday. It expressed concern for the miners who had been “underground for almost 20 hours.”
Sibanye-Stillwater had said earlier that the miners would be brought to the surface around midday Friday.
“The employees are not trapped; it was decided to keep them at the sub-shaft station for now,” spokesperson Henrika Ninham said.
Mining employs hundreds of thousands of people in South Africa, which is the biggest exporter of platinum and a major exporter of gold, diamonds, coal and other raw materials. But accidents are common.
Dozens of mineworkers are killed each year, though the numbers have been falling as safety standards have been stepped up over the past two decades.
According to industry group Minerals Council South Africa, 42 miners died in 2024, compared to 55 the previous year.
Sibanye-Stillwater chief executive Neal Froneman said Friday they would not resume operations “until we are confident that all the necessary remedial actions have been implemented.”


Hungarian opposition leader Magyar walks to Romania, courting ethnic Hungarians

Updated 55 min 15 sec ago
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Hungarian opposition leader Magyar walks to Romania, courting ethnic Hungarians

  • Hungarian opposition leader Peter Magyar walked across the border to Romania on Saturday to try and win the support of ethnic Hungarians in Romania
  • Magyar says he is not going to cause trouble, rather to express solidarity with his Hungarian "brothers and sisters"

BUDAPEST: Hungarian opposition leader Peter Magyar walked across the border to Romania on Saturday after a week-long journey, in a attempt to win support of the ethnic Hungarians in Romania and appeal to conservative voters in the run-up to the 2026 elections.
Magyar’s center-right Tisza party emerged last year to mount the most serious challenge to nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban since he rose to power in 2010.
Most opinion polls now put Tisza ahead of Orban’s Fidesz party with the next parliamentary elections due in early 2026. No date has been set yet.
Carrying Hungary’s national flag, Magyar walked across the border on Saturday morning with a group of supporters.
“We are not going (to Romania) to escalate tensions or to cause any harm to our Hungarian brothers and sisters living there. We are going there to express our solidarity,” Magyar said on May 14 when he set out on foot in hiking gear.
On his way to the border, Magyar stopped in small towns to talk to rural voters, who have traditionally supported conservative Orban.
Orban’s government provides financial support to ethnic Hungarian communities in Romania and in 2014 granted the right to vote to Hungarians living abroad. In the last election in 2022 94 percent of these voters supported Fidesz.
The latest poll by the Publicus think tank, published on Friday, showed Tisza with 43 percent support among decided voters in Hungary while Fidesz had 36 percent.
Magyar announced his march on May 12 after Orban flagged he could cooperate with Romanian hard-right presidential candidate George Simion ahead of the May 18 election there.
The RMDSZ party representing ethnic Hungarians in Romania, said Simion’s win would pose a threat to minorities’ rights and urged its voters to support centrist Nicusor Dan who ended up winning the vote.