The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Where Are All the Russian Hackers? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

Since the onset of the Ukraine War, everyone's been checking under their bed and looking in their closet for the boogeyman - a.k.a Russian Hackers - but they haven't been there. Today's video is coming to you from Wānaka, New Zealand. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/where-are-all-the-russian-hackers

Everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Buonika, New Zealand, and this video goes out to Fly, who we just met on the trail. Thanks for the happy birthday message. We're going to talk about Russian cybercrime, which is something that has been kind of the boogeyman in the room when it comes to issues that are related to Ukraine and general collapse of relations. You know, this is a former superpower, and a lot of the intelligence apparatus is still in some ways intact. You take that kind of scale, you throw it against the civilian system and er-huh. But we haven't seen that. It's been a year into the war. Hasn't happened yet.

So there's kind of three things going on simultaneously, two that are really simple, one that's a little bit more wordy. So number one, practice. The Russians have been hitting certain NATO countries over the last several years that they have found annoying for whatever reason with Estonia, you know, country of the population of less than a million and a half, being at the forefront, which means at Estonia, tiny Estonia has probably the best counter cyber in the world.

They've moved most of their government services online, they're relatively hackproof, and the Estonians have been very forward in cooperating with other European countries, most notably Ukraine, in building up their own cyber defenses. So number one experience. Number two, time. The Russians have been pulling this for years, and so everyone has had a bit of exposure, and we're not nearly as exposed today as we were five years ago or 10 years ago. And the fact that we're now a year into the Ukraine war, and everyone realizes that the Russians are active, a lot of companies, a lot of countries have been to get a lot more forward stance when it comes to cyber defense. But the third one deals with kind of the backdrop. So in the United States, when cyber first became a thing in the 1980s, Reagan was president, and he made the executive decision that we would have no cyber defense, that all cyber offense would be concentrated under the National Security Council, sorry, the NSA, the National Security Agency. And that they would basically go out and hack everybody every day that wasn't one of the close allies of New Zealand.

Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada. Everyone else would be hacked every day. They learn the architecture, put in backdoors at the can, make a list of all the password, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So if we ever had a war, they could just, you know, drop the hammer and go. The downside of that is there was no national defense. And even with the NSA, they only defended themselves. So everyone is really on their own.

And that's the weakness of the American system by far. So if we ever get in a real fight, you know, the power's going to go out, the water's going to stop, the stock murder's going to crash. But the NSA will come in and just obliterate the opposing side and they will never have electricity again. But we're not in a hot war right now. We're in kind of this middle ground. And so the NSA strategy has been to keep dry powder, keep dry powder, keep dry powder, keep dry powder. That changed a little bit under Donald Trump.

Donald Trump gets a lot of crap from a lot of people, myself included, for a lot of things that are very well deserved. But one of the most interesting things that he did from my point was on cyber. And after he was elected, and at first election, he ordered the NSA to send cease and desist letters to the Russian hackers working for the Russian government with personal details included in the letters. So they knew exactly who was in play here. Okay, so put that to the side. The Russian hacking system is not like ours. There is a state agency, there is the bot arm that has really been playing with religious fanatics and environmental activists and anti-vaxxers. So basically if you think that nuclear power is bad for the environment or if you think that COVID has been a conspiracy or if you think that Donald Trump lost the last election,

Russian hackers been very active in the bot farm at all three of those spaces. Also, Blue Live Matters, Black Life Matters. If you ever found yourself at the protest for the wrong one that you were trying to go to, that was probably the Russians. But that's bots. That's fraud. Most of the cyber capacity in Russia is private. It's organized crime groups who are trying to crack your credit cards and get control of your bank account or shut down a hospital in order to get ransom. It's a different sort of system.

Well, when the war started, what we found out is that the state power in Russia wasn't as much as we thought and the cyber was more. And the second thing that happened is the Biden administration very unlawful. unofficially dropped the hammer on a lot of those groups. And so a cyber group that is crime-oriented doesn't have the same sort of defense capability as a state, and the state group turned out to be not as hard. So very early in the war, the first couple of weeks, a lot of this got shattered by U.S. cyber capabilities, unofficially, of course. And that has made it very difficult for them to do more than kind of picket the edges of

the Ukrainian system or the Western system. So take that for what it is. It's not that it's everything is kunky dory. It's that the U.S. government actually is using some of those tools in a very real way that we haven't seen before in the last 40 years. All right. That's it for me. Catch you guys later.