Trump’s Cyber-Appeasement Policy Might Encourage More Hacks

President-elect Donald Trump at a news conference, Jan. 11, 2017. It was his first as President-elect.

Seth Wenig/AP

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That’s why the Obama administration made a habit of publicly attributing cyberattacks, like North Korea’s attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, or, less formally, China’s theft of sensitive records from the Office of Personnel Management. For the past several years, the Justice Department also has brought charges against a bevy of state-sponsored hackers from places like China, Iran, and Syria, in a name-and-shame campaign aimed at outing the perpetrators of smaller hacks.

Related: Here’s Why Trump’s Intel Bashing Matters


The erosion of public confidence in analysts’ ability to identify hackers is dangerous.

Trump appears to put far less stock in public attribution. He’s repeatedly called into question the possibility that digital investigators—whether from intelligence agencies or private companies—could piece together a cyberattack after it’s over with enough accuracy to know where it came from, despite the fact that experts regularly track down attackers by gathering digital evidence.

This attitude has trickled down to the general public. Over the weekend, two reporters for The New York Times asked Trump supporters in Louisiana and Indiana for their reactions on the intelligence community’s hacking report. Their responses ranged from skepticism (“It seems silly”) to total rejection (“I don’t believe it”).


That mistrust spread quickly. Two years ago, the only people who concerned themselves with fact-checking cyberattack attributions were top security experts like Bruce Schneier, who wrote an article in The Atlantic arguing that the government didn’t have enough evidence to connect the Sony hack to the North Korean government. (He was convinced later that month, when the Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies were also relying on secret evidence from the NSA and from sources inside North Korea to back up its claims.) Now, Trump’s public disavowals of hacking analyses have made it popular to question Russia’s involvement.

Healthy skepticism has turned to toxic, blanket cynicism.

The increase in public mistrust in cyber-attribution mirrors the way that the language of doubt has taken hold around climate science and the trustworthiness of mainstream news reports. Fewer than half of Americans believe that climate change is the result of human activity—the conclusion of the overwhelming majority of scientists—and just below a third say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the news media. A third is about the same proportion of Americans who say they believe Russia influenced the 2016 election.

Last week, danah boyd, a scholar of online communications and the founder of Data & Society, wrote that a generation of media-literacy teachings encouraging Americans to question sources and do their own research may have backfired. “Doubt,” boyd says, “has become [a] tool.”




Without a shared basis of facts, climate-change denial and suspicion toward modern medicine flourish. Thorough, fact-based news reporting gets slandered as “fake news” and discounted by large portions of the population. And now, legitimate attributions of blame for cyberattacks are brushed aside as half-baked, untrustworthy, and politically motivated.


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