Russia Did It...

The CIA has purported that the 2016 election process was subverted by Russia. Social media is aflame with claims and counter-claims that all revolve around unnamed, anonymous sources. I spent a lot of years in the network security business and, to be honest, I don't have a lot of confidence in the abilities of our government employees. But I have a solution.

I propose a panel of thirteen experts on network security, most of whom either already possess a top secret clearance or should be easily approvable for one. The CIA only needs to hand them the data and then let them tell the World whodunit.

I even have a proposed list of candidates:

1) Joanna Rutkowska, Founder, Invisible things Lab

2) Charlie Miller, Principal Analyst, Independent Security Evaluators

3) Sherri Sparks, Co-founder, Clear Hat Consulting

4) Joe Stewart, Director of Threat Analysis, SecureWorks

5) Marc Maifftret, Chief Security Architect, FireEye

6) Greg Hoglund, CEO, HBGary

7) Robert Hansen, CEO SecTheory, Ltd.

8) Dino Dai Zovi, Independent Security Researcher

9) Dan Kaminsky, Director of Penetration testing at IOActive

10) Zane Lackey, Senior Security Consultant, ISEC Partners

11) HD Moore, Chief Security Officer, Rapid7

12) Christopher Tarnovsky, Research Principal Engineer, Flylogic

and as Chairman...Bruce Schneier, Chief Technology Officer, Resilient

These 13 people represent the cream of the crop in White Hat Hacking and Internet Security. There are others with reputations as good, but none better, certainly not within the employ of the CIA. If they cannot tell us the election was hacked, no one can.

Of course the most this will accomplish is to determine what hacking group, if any, perpetrated the hack. It still leaves open the whole question of whether it was ordered by the Russian government or not. Some questions are best left unanswered.