More overestimation of Russian hacking--from USA Today below---and more of the smartest posts on the possible effects before those words.

[Mark Kohut]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-trump-election-timeline.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-07-24/russian-meddling-helped-trump-win-in-2016

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections
RUSSIAN HACKERS INDICTED

Prosecutors working for Mueller offered more details on the hacking in
July, when a grand jury indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4599178-Indictment.html> for
breaking into Democratic political organizations to steal troves of
internal records that they then made public.

The 29-page indictment
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4599178-Indictment.html>hinted at
the depth of the information the government assembled about the hacking
campaign.

Prosecutors named 12 officers in Russia’s military intelligence service, known
as the GRU
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/07/19/guide-gru-and-other-russian-agencies-spy-america/800334002/>.
They
detailed where the officers worked, who was in charge, and which ones sat
at the keyboard as particular parts of the hacking operation were carried
out. They alleged that one officer, Ivan Yermakov, assigned to one of the
service's hacking units, started probing the DNC’s networks in March 2016.
They said a different officer in the same unit, Aleksey Lukashev, composed
the “spearphishing” emails that obtained Podesta’s password.

Prosecutors also hinted at still broader knowledge. They described the
computer network through which hackers moved documents stolen from the DNC
and DCCC. They detailed the dates on which hackers activated specific parts
of their malware, which recorded users’ keystrokes and took digital
pictures of what was on their screens. And they logged the search terms on
a Russian computer server used by a separate Russian intelligence group in
charge of leaking the stolen emails.

“That is incredibly detailed. They’ve given a lot away,” said Mary Carney,
a former Justice Department lawyer. Prosecutors aren’t required to share
that level of detail to bring a criminal case, “but the point is telling
the story,” she said.

Mueller’s office did not say how the government gathered that information.
Tait said some of it — particularly details about some of the searches the
officers carried out — was so specific that it likely required real-time
surveillance of the Russians' computer networks.

A spokesman for Mueller’s office declined to comment.

“The level of specificity was pretty remarkable,” said Sen. Mark Warner,
D-Va., the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee. “There is an
important education function, honestly. Not to relitigate 2016 but just to
point out the fact that we’re still vulnerable.”
THE SOCIAL CAMPAIGN

Prosecutors offered a similarly detailed assessment in February of Russian
nationals and businesses, some with ties to the Kremlin, that orchestrated
a social media operation that appeared in millions of Americans’ Facebook
and Twitter feeds as the 2016 campaign entered its final months.

A grand jury charged that 13 Russian nationals and three businesses sought
to “interfere with the U.S. political and electoral processes.” The
indictment included the names of low-level employees who worked for one of
the companies, the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, who
churned out social media posts preying on Americans' political
divisions. Officials
saw little need to guess at their motives; they quoted internal
communications in which the company said its goal was to “spread distrust
toward the candidates and the political system.”

Prosecutors tracked the PayPal accounts the company used to purchase social
media ads, sometimes using the stolen identities of real Americans. (A
California man separately pleaded guilty
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4626633-Pinedo-Statement.html> to
trafficking in the stolen names.) They detailed visits by Internet Research
Agency workers to the United States, and contacts with “unwitting members,
volunteers and supporters of the Trump campaign.”

They identified the specific Facebook ads the company had placed.
(Democrats on the House intelligence committee released an archive of all
3,500 this year, revealing an effort largely focused on dividing Americans
along racial lines
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/05/11/what-we-found-facebook-ads-russians-accused-election-meddling/602319002/>.)
And they knew how the company tracked its posts to see which messages were
hitting their mark.