A real possibility exists that foreign hackers could throw a monkey wrench into the outcome of the U.S. presidential election in the fall, a Stanford expert says.

Herbert Lin, senior research scholar for cyberpolicy and security at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, said that electronic voting could be affected by hackers in the presidential race, especially if a candidate claims tampering. In recent months, hackers from outside the country reportedly infiltrated the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign computer networks, leading to data breaches that made headlines worldwide.

The Stanford News Service interviewed Lin on this subject:

How worried are you about possible cyberattacks that could influence the outcome of the November elections in the U.S.?

There are two kinds of things to worry about. One is an actual cyberattack that, for example, alters vote counts in a way that tilts the election away from the will of the voters. That kind of attack is hard to pull off, and I’m not very worried about that – though I worry about it some.

A second worry – much more serious in my opinion – is the possibility that an election loser might challenge the outcome of the election, alleging that the results were altered by a cyberattack, especially if the election were close. How would anyone ever prove that ballots, electronically cast with no permanent and auditable record, were accurately counted?

If the evidence that Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign proves to be legitimate, how should President Obama respond to Russia and Vladimir Putin?

Herbert Lin (Image credit: Rod Searcey/CISAC)

The U.S. has many response options, ranging from private diplomatic conversations to military action and everything in between. There are many things we could do to exact a price. But some of these things may be wise and others may be unwise. For example, an unwise option would be to threaten overt military action and otherwise do saber-rattling in response. The balancing act is calibrating a response that exacts a penalty but does not provoke a response that is unacceptable to us – and that’s a hard thing to do.

Would the U.S. ever hack back at Russia in some way?

I would be utterly amazed if the U.S. were not hacking Russia, and every other major power in the world for that matter. And I would be amazed if every other major power in the world were not hacking the U.S. There’s a baseline level of hacking that is going on all the time by everyone.

So, the question isn’t hacking or not hacking, the question is hacking back versus hacking. And on that point, I suspect it would be really hard for the recipient – in this case, Russia – to distinguish between hacking that almost surely is going on already and hacking that was conducted in response to any putative Russian involvement in the Democratic National Committee hack.

Is the hacking symbolic of a poor relationship between the U.S. and Russian governments?

I would not say symbolic – but it’s entirely consistent with a poor relationship.

In this 2015 video, Herb Lin talks about how U.S. policy on offensive cyber operations should be declassified.

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the worry in the West was what would happen to that country’s thousands of nuclear weapons. Would “loose” nukes fall into the hands of terrorists, rogue states, criminals – and plunge the world into a nuclear nightmare?

Fortunately, scientists and technical experts in both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union rolled up their sleeves to manage and contain the nuclear problem in the dissolving Communist country.

One of the leaders in this relationship was Stanford engineering professor Siegfried Hecker, who served as a director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory before coming to Stanford as a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is a world-renowned expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction and nuclear security.

Hecker cited one 1992 meeting with Russian scientists in Moscow who were clearly concerned about the risks. In his new book, Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian scientists joined forces to avert some of the greatest post-Cold War nuclear dangers, Hecker quoted one Russian expert as saying, “We now need to be concerned about terrorism.”

Earning both scientific and political trust was a key, said Hecker, also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The Russians were proud of their scientific accomplishments and highly competent in the nuclear business – and they sought to show this to the Americans scientists, who became very confident in their Russian counterparts’ technical capabilities as they learned more about their nuclear complex and toured the labs.

Economic collapse, political turmoil

But the nuclear experts faced an immense problem. The Soviets had about 39,000 nuclear weapons in their country and in Eastern Europe and about 1.5 million kilograms of plutonium and highly enriched uranium (the fuel for nuclear bombs), Hecker said. Consider that the bomb that the U.S. dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945 was only six kilograms of plutonium, he added. Meanwhile, the U.S. had about 25,000 nuclear weapons in the early 1990s.

Hecker and the rest of the Americans were deeply concerned about the one million-plus Russians who worked in nuclear facilities. Many faced severe financial pressure in an imploding society and thus constituted a huge potential security risk.

“The challenge that Russia faced with its economy collapsing was enormous,” he said in an interview.

The Russian scientists, Hecker said, were motivated to act responsibly because they realized the awful destruction that a single nuclear bomb could wreak. Hecker noted that one Russian scientist told him, “We arrived in the nuclear century all in one boat, and a movement by anyone will affect everyone.” Hecker noted, “Therefore, you know, we were doomed to work together to cooperate.”

All of this depended on the two governments involved easing nuclear tensions while allowing the scientists to collaborate. In short order, the scientists developed mutual respect and trust to address the loose nukes scenario.

The George H.W. Bush administration launched nuclear initiatives to put the Russian government at ease. For example, it took the nuclear weapons off U.S. Navy surface ships and some of its nuclear weapons off alert to allow the Russians to do the same. The U.S. Congress passed the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction legislation, which helped fund some of the loose nuke containment efforts.

While those were positive measures, Hecker said, it was ultimately the cooperation among scientists, what they called lab-to-lab-cooperation, that allowed the two former superpower enemies to “get past the sensitivity barriers” and make “the world a safer place.”

Since the end of the Cold War, no significant nuclear event has occurred as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its nuclear complex, Hecker noted.

Lesson: cooperation counts

One lesson from it all, Hecker said, is that government policymakers need to understand that scientists and engineers can work together and make progress toward solving difficult, dangerous problems.

“We don’t want to lose the next generation from understanding what can actually be done by working together,” he said.  “So, we want to demonstrate to them, Look, this is what was done when the scientists were interested and enthusiastic and when the government gave us enough room to be able to do that.”

Hecker said this scientific cooperation extended to several thousand scientists and engineers at the Russian sites and at U.S. nuclear labs – primarily the three defense labs: Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia national laboratories. Many technical exchanges and visits between scientists in Russia and the United States took place.

He recalled visiting some of the nuclear sites in Russian cities shrouded by mystery. “These cities were so secret, they didn’t even appear on Soviet maps.”

Change of threat

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the nature of the nuclear threat changed, Hecker said. The threat before was one of mutual annihilation, but now the threat changed to what would happen if nuclear assets were lost, stolen or somehow evaded the control of the government.

“From an American perspective we referred to these as the ‘four loose nuclear dangers,'” he said.

This included securing the loose nukes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; preventing nuclear materials or bomb fuel from getting into the wrong hands; the human element involving the people who worked in the Soviet nuclear complex; and finally, the “loose exports” problem of someone trying to sell nuclear materials or technical components to overseas groups like terrorists or rogue nations.

For Hecker, this is not just an American story. It is about a selfless reconciliation with a longtime enemy for the greater global good, a relationship not corrupted by ideological or nationalistic differences, but one reflective of mutual interests of the highest order.

“The primary reason,” he said, “why we didn’t have a nuclear catastrophe was the Russian nuclear workers and the Russian nuclear officials. Their dedication, their professionalism, their patriotism for their country was so strong that it carried them through these times in the 1990s when they often didn’t get paid for six months at a time … The nuclear complex did its job through the most trying times. And it was a time when the U.S. government took crucial conciliatory measures with the new Russian Federation and gave us scientists the support to help make the world a safer place.”

CISAC senior fellow Scott Sagan decodes the enduring lessons and secret messages hidden in the hauting battlefield drawings of the Lakota Chief known as Red Horse, who fought against Lt. Col George Custer and his Seventh Cavalry forces during their infamous defeat in 1876, in this story for the New York Times' Sunday Review section.

CISAC senior fellow Martha Crenshaw challenges statements from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump that “thousands upon thousands of people” are entering the United States, “many of whom have the same thought process” as the Orlando shooter, and his assertions that they are forming “large pockets” of people who want to “slaughter us” in an OpEd for The Washington Post.

You can read Crenshaw's full article here.