The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

by David E. Sanger

Jeh Johnson, the former Defense Department general counsel who was by then the secretary of homeland security, began making the case, in private and in public, that America’s election system was “critical infrastructure” and deserved special protection—the way the power grid did, or the Lincoln Memorial. It seemed a convincing argument: if the undergirding of American democracy, its ability to conduct free and fair elections, didn’t constitute “critical infrastructure,” what would? But when Johnson arranged a conference call with state election officials around the country, the disconnect was obvious. He described “troubling reports” he had on his desk of probing and scanning of the election systems in Arizona and other states. But he encountered a wall of suspicion; if he hoped to get support for a federal emergency initiative to help the state election boards address their cyber vulnerabilities, he was badly mistaken. “Let’s just say I didn’t hear much enthusiasm,” he told me when I went to see him with my colleague Charlie Savage at the old naval base that serves as the department’s headquarters and emergency operations center. The secretary of state of Georgia, Brian Kemp, told Johnson that he was certain the so-called evidence of hacking was a pretext for the federal government to try to take over the state-run election systems. (Kemp later accused the Department of Homeland Security of hacking into his state’s systems to scan them for vulnerabilities and left the imp...