If Vladimir Putin is half as clever as his demonizers make him out to be, he must have figured out a long time ago that, to get inside Donald Trump’s head, clinical psychologists with expertise treating male adolescents would be more useful than the Russian hackers, real or imaginary, that Western media obsess over.
Why even bother with hackers? The little that goes on between Trump’s ears is all there in his tweets.
But, of course, if the idea is to develop capabilities for waging wars in the cyber sphere, good hackers are worth their weight in gold. If Putin isn’t working on that, he is not doing his job.
These days, hackers are everywhere — including Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. The United States has more than its fair share too, as do the UK and other Western countries. Some work for intelligence services, directly or indirectly; many, probably most, do not.
When governments do the hacking themselves, or sponsor others who do it for them, it is usually because they want to hone their countries’ offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. In short, they are developing weapons and testing them.
Sometimes, though, they do more than that. The best known example occurred some ten years ago when the United States and Israel introduced the Stuxnet virus into Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, destroying roughly a fifth of that country’s nuclear centrifuges by causing them to spin out of…