3 When to Hack

Troll farms. Twitter bots. Dark posts. Fabricated Americans. Email dumps. Fake news. The multipronged, multiyear, and technologically varied nature of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election is difficult to map. As the declassified report released by the National Intelligence Council noted, the Russian strategy blended “covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian government agencies, state funded media, third-party intermediaries and paid social media users or ‘trolls’” (2017, ii). The campaign drew extensively from the toolkit and tactical array of hackers, hacktivists, transparency activists, and resistance groups. It skillfully exploited democratic openness to critique and debate, the media and blogosphere's long-term cooperation with leakers and whistleblowers, and the emergent counterfactual politics of suspicion among citizens to disrupt the elections and paralyze the democratic process.