Addition to a lot of noise we should find around town. This sadis this is a distinguished group. I will introduce chairman of the board, charles byte who has distinguished experience. And also with us the Congressional Commission on u. S. Nation interests. The commission which actually made the recommendation before september 11th. Recommendati recommendations which were praised but not entirely accepted. And roberts, member of our board. Republican from kansas, chairman of the Cultural Committee and former chairman of the committee on intelligence. A person with a very strong Foreign Policy, Nation Security ba background relevant to our discussion today. We have two speakers. Paul saunders, he is the executive and he is running the Russian Program and Senior Advisor at the state department during the george w. Bush administration. Paul has expertise in u. S. Russia relations. At that time, i have to say if there was american democracy promotion in russia, not russian interference in the United States but it provides you with a certain perspective. George beebe is truly one of the most insightful and serious american experts of russia. George was a Foreign Service officer, stationed in moscow, became a member, i think it is called Senior Intelligence service; right . Was also director of russian analysis of the cia and before that was special advisor to Vice President cheney who has many of you know was not suspected of particular ways as par as russia was concerned. And george published a very powerful piece several weeks ago where he was raising some questions about how reliable was our involvement in russian interference and not so much if the russian interference existed and what level it was trying to accomplish. Most of our speakers will speak for ten minutes. Thanks, dimitri and to the center for the invitation. I would like to keep my remarks brief and focus on what we know, dont know and what we might m sumise about russias role in the president ial election. The reaction to the report has been quite striking and quite divided. The new york times, i think, was representative of one general reaction. They called the report surprisingly detailed and damming. People that work in the Information Technology industry, cyber experts on the other hand had quite a different reaction. They often use words i cannot repeat in the family environment about the report but they generally found it sloppy and weak in the u. S. Of evidence. This leaves the general public with a question. Are we dealing with a report that is surprisingly detailed and damming or is it weak and sloppy . Interestingly enough this is the kind of question intelligence agents are paid to answer. Where does truth lie amid controversy and conflicting claims and incomplete information. This is not an easy thing to do. Why is that . Smart people are generally not good at answers questioning like this. The human mind is not designed to answer these kinds of things. We are prone to conformation bias, seeing what we expect to see in sets of information, we are not particularly good at putting ourselves in the shoes of other people and seeing things from their perspective particularly the perspective of foreign actors which makes it hard for us to understand their intentions a lot of times. We have a bias toward expecting the future to look like the prese present. Status quo bias if you will. When we approach a question like this, we have to make conscious effort to account for all those tendency. I want to do that briefly in the evidence we have in the case of russias role in the election. I would like to focus only on information that is in the Public Domain. I obviously dont know what classified information there might be out there. It is certainly possible that the Intelligence Community has conclusive diagnostic evidence about what happened and why. What we do have in the Public Domain, i think, raises red flags we really need to center. I want to look at some of them. The first is an area of attributi attribution. The report says this is an operation that is explicitly ordered by president putin with specific goals in mind. The forensic evidence we have in the Public Domain is not particularly impressive in this regard. First of all, it is it is there are a couple things i want to address in this. One is the number of intrusions sthevenlz. According to the forensic beta there were two separate intrusions in the Democratic National committee email servers. The first occurring in the summer of 2015. This is around the time that now President Trump was first announcing his running for the presidency and the second occurred in march of 2016. They each took roughly the same sets of information. This is unusual. If you are looking to maintain operational security, the more often you penetrate a target the more often you are likely to be caught. The fact they went after the same information raises questions about if they were centrally directed. This is the fruit of bureaucratic rivalry. We have the gru that penerated on one occasion and the fsb on another that penetrated on a seco second occasion. That is a possible situation. We ought to consider an alternative hypothesis and these were not centrally directed intrusions. Could this have been a false flag operation . The evidence we have is consistent with all of these hypothes hypothesis. The second is the sloppiness. The chinese had a reputation for being sloppy in their intrusions. The analogy might be an intruder who breaks in the home and leaves muddy fingerprints everywhere. Almost as if we didnt care china was behind the operation. The russians have been more like there intruder that you dont even know they entered your home and two years after the fact you figure out something is missing how did that happen . They are quite stelt. They left all kinds of indicators that would point toward russian. The compiling all took place during moscow business hours. That is an easy thing to fix. Even entry level hackers figure out how to program compiling so it doesnt leave that kind of clue. Some of the emails that were leaked contained meta data put in using silk keyboards. One of the users behind the leaks had a code name of felix mune vich which apparently was a clear reference to the founder of the soviet checaw. These are not typical of russian Cyber Operations making you wonder was it really them . Or did they want to be found which is another possibility we ought to consider. The last thing is the level of sophi sophistication on the intrusions not very high. The experts looked at the malware used and said it was off the shelf, widely available, anybody could have done this. It is not customcrafted code that you would say you need a sophisticated intelligence level operation to undertake this. All of these are not to say this shows the russian government isnt behind it. I think that is a plausible hypothesis. There are big implications behind the judgments we are talking about. Before we go down the saying we are concern, i think we owe to ourselves to think hard about the facts we have in front of us can be explained in other ways. I hope we can learn lessons prom that case and apply them here so we dont make them again. That is attribution. The other part is intent. Intent is an even harder not to crack than attribution and attribution in the cyber world is slippery thing. It is a rare you get definite intelligence that allows you to understand the motives driving the conduct you are seeing. It instruct me in the ic report on this that it was categorical about the extend it was describing. Nothing less than undermining the u. S. Led democratic order. Are the other ways of attributing intent . I think there are. There are a couple plausible explanations. One is Cyber Espionage. The penetration of the dnc servers can be explained as a simple attempt at espionage information gathering. It is reasonable to say the Russian Intelligence Services have a standing list of collection priorities it would include plans and intentions of foreign governments, the Technical Specifications of weapons systems, what is likely to occur in elections and change of governments are very logical things for russia trying to gather information in this area. They stumble upon information that has relevance in the context of u. S. Elections. It is one thing to gather that information available. Once you do that you cross the line from espionage and interference in an election. I think that is a fair point. However, to cross that line you dont have to have a goal of undermining the National Order or destroying our faith in our electoral system. One simple explanation might be tit for tat. The russians, i think, rightly or wrongly, believe that the United States habitual interferes in elections abroad. Not just in spaces of the former soviet union and elsewhere including russia. The record of their perception is clear. It is fairly easy thing for me to imagine they might have looked at this information and said lets give them a dose of their own medicine here. And the goals for doing that might have been simple retrob o retrobution. Perhaps we can Reach Agreement on cyber treaties this way. The things they talked about wanting to do in the past. I am not sure, necessarily, you have to go all the way to that very stark judgment of attempting to undermine the liberal democratic order internationally although that is a plausible explanation of intent. One final thing on this question of intentions. This is something that is at the root of policy disputes. Different perceptions of foreign actors. It is very much at the heart of current controversies about russia right now. What i would argue is this is something we really need a Genuine National discussion about. I bring about this by proxy, by talking about russian Cyber Operations in the election is really not getting at the heart of the matter. As we consider where we have going to go in our dealings with russia we really need to be talking very candidally about what is driving russian ambitions. Are they in fact as stark as undermining u. S. Democracy and the liberal democratic order . Are they somewhat less than that . Because this is something we need to get right. It has enormous implications for our policies toward russia. I think it really needs to be addressed directly and candidally. I have question before we move forward. What happened in russia over the last several weeks related to this discussion it says fsb, for cyber computer and nen a couple days ago they arrested number one in the division. Then they have arrested somebody outside the government about this kind of matters but it is considered postkbg contractor. The russians didnt make public announcements but the information in the media said the officials are being investigated for treason. This is somehow connected to this whole scandal. Do you know anything about that . I am aware of the publication about this. A couple of points and reaction. It is tempting to look at this and connect dots and say the u. S. Intelligence Committee Accuses of interference and russia realizes this and arrests officials in this specific area. That may be true. This may be connected. A couple things about the press report caused me to stand out. In commenting on this, he said the arrest was based on activities that the official engaged in prior to joining the labs. He apparently joined the operation in 2012. If we accept that as true, what they said was this was for something that occurred almost five years prior to this. It made be wonder when that individual worked for the russian government. I suspect what we are really talking about is probably related to corruption and not to interference in the u. S. election but we will have to see. Thank you very much. Paul . Okay. I am going to talk a little bit about our policy responses for a few minutes and then maybe say a word or two about the Political Climate here in washington. As we think about policy responses i think we have to ask ourselves three questions. Whau are woe responding to . What are we trying to accomplish through our response and what are the costs and benefits of particular courses of action. In this case, i think we have come to, i think, a fair conclusion that russia was interfering in our elections. We dont have a full understanding of the actions that russia took. Certainly relatively little of this has made it into the Public Domain. To my mind, accept one is investigating the whole issue very thoroughly and trying to develop a much better understanding of what happened including both what russia did and what we think they were hoping to achieve. As we are doing that, i think we also mead to place our thinking about this incident in the context of the u. S. Russia relationship which is a 25yearold relationship. It didnt start with hacking into the election computers or getting into the dnc or do the other things we are talking about. It started 35 years ago and has done through a long, complex and mutually frustrating history. We arrived at a particular point last year when many of these things took place and i think we need to think about what led up to that. Second question, you know, what is our objective in responding one side of objectives and that is we want to punish russia or discourage or deter russia from conducting this kind of activity in the future. From that point of view, i think what the Obama Administration did in december is a little bit puzzling. This responded to russian treatment to american diplomats in moscow than to a response for this matter. They sanctioned officials and by that i mean putting thep on a list of people that cant get american visas and are subject to having their assets in the United States seized and i wonder how many gru or fsb officials have significant russian intelligence. I wonder how many of these people have significant assets in the United States. And then they shutdown these two creational facilities as described. One in new york and one in maryland where Russian Diplomats would go to get away from washington, d. C. Or new york or whatever. Maybe they had intelligence gathering capabilities there but i expect that that action was rather limited impact on russias Intelligence Services and probably its greatest impact was creating a lot of angry russian diplomates. I dont have a problem with making Russian Diplomats angry. Is that really the objective of u. S. Policy and should it be an objective in u. S. Policy in this case . That kind of leads me to a couple other questions. One question is if the Previous Administration really had solid evidence that russia had engaged in extremely serious conduct that threatened the integrity of our election why didnt they do more and why didnt they do it sooner . Conversely, if they couldnt really come to that conclusion and didnt have that evidence why was there this rushed process of putting out the document that george described and this kind of effort to impose what i would consider basically symbolic punishment on russia just three weeks before a new administration would come into office and would be able to take a look at that issue in a very deliberate way together with the congress and to respond. Respond appropriately. I am sure there were a variety of different factors in the prior administrations Decision Making on that issue. But it is very difficult to exclude politics as one of those factors. I think it is very difficult to exclude that. Then, you know, this leads to the third question about cost and benefits. Obama officials have who have been quoted in the press on this, some by name but not most, said more than once they were concerned about russias potential retaliation and specifically concerned about retaliation before the election and the consequences that might have. There was also a concern expressed that the United States could be disproportionally vulnerable and there was a certain caution. I think those are valid things. We an always need to think about potential cost when maintaining policy. There was an explicit but the logic and approach by nbc news which said multiple high level government officials saying the administration not to do more was based on really three things. We didnt want to look like we were interfering in the election, we thought Hillary Clinton was going to win anyway, and therefore it wasnt really worth it. That according to nbc attributed to multiple high level government officials. That gives us a little window into the Decision Making process on that issue. I am not sure i understand some of their concern and factors in that Decision Making process i am not sure that is necessarily the way we would want our government to go about thinking about an issue that is serious like that. I think moving forward, i see two different risks that we really have to navigate in between. One is having a thorough investigati investigation, discovering what happened and failing to response in an adequate way to whatever possible attributing motives and understanding other things like this to russian Decision Making and responding on the basis when actually the evidence for that may be less persuasive than meets the eye. Then i think there is a question of proportionality and what i mean by that is i think we need to separate out some of these different activities and think of them discreetly. If russia hacked into election com