Obama kicks out Russian diplomats in hacking counter-strike
Barack Obama has struck back at Russia for hacking the US presidential campaign with a raft of punishments including the expulsion of 35 diplomats accused of spying.
The US said Russia must pay for its actions, but Moscow dubbed the Obama administration “losers” and threatened retaliation.
A month after an election that the US said Russia tried to sway for Republican Donald Trump, Mr Obama sanctioned leading Russian intelligence agencies the GRU and FSB, said to have been involved.
But the sanctions could be rolled back by president-elect Mr Trump, who has insisted that Obama and Democrats are merely attempting to delegitimise his election and on Thursday urged the US to “move on”.
In an elaborately-co-ordinated response by at least five government agencies, the Obama administration also sought to expose Russia’s cyber tactics with a detailed technical report and hinted it might still launch a covert counter-attack.
“All Americans should be alarmed by Russia’s actions,” Mr Obama said. “Such activities have consequences.”
He said the response was not over and the US could take further, covert action - a thinly veiled reference to a counter-strike in cyber space America has been considering.
Mr Trump issued a statement saying it was “time for our country to move on to bigger and better things”, but in the face of newly public evidence, he also suggested he was keeping an open mind.
“In the interest of our country and its great people, I will meet with leaders of the intelligence community next week in order to be updated on the facts of this situation,” he said.
As part of the punishment, the US kicked out 35 Russian diplomats who it said were actually intelligence operatives and shut down a pair of Russian compounds, in New York and Maryland.
The US said those actions were in response to Russia’s harassment of American diplomats, calling it part of a pattern of aggression that included the cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.
It is the strongest action the Obama administration has taken to retaliate for a cyber attack and more comprehensive than last year’s sanctions on North Korea after it hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment.
The new penalties add to existing US sanctions over Russia’s actions in Ukraine, which have impaired Russia’s economy but had limited impact on President Vladimir Putin’s behaviour.
Russia, which denied the hacking allegations, called the penalties a clumsy, yet aggressive attempt to “harm Russian-American ties”.
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia would take into account the fact that Mr Trump would soon replace Mr Obama as it drafted retaliatory measures.
The day marked a low point for US relations with Russia, which have suffered during Mr Obama’s years as he and Mr Putin tussled over Ukraine, Edward Snowden and Russia’s support for Syrian president Bashar Assad.
Maria Zakharova, a Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, took to Facebook to call the Obama administration “a group of foreign policy losers, angry and ignorant”.
It was unlikely the new sanctions, while symbolically significant, would have a major impact on Russian spy operations. They freeze any US assets and block Americans from doing business with them. But Russian law bars the spy agencies from having assets in the US and any activities they undertake would probably be covert and hard to identify.
“On its face, this is more than a slap on the wrists, but hardly an appropriate response to an unprecedented attack on our electoral system,” said Stewart Baker, a cyber security lawyer and former National Security Agency and Homeland Security Department official.
