IG Investigating Obama Admin Cyber

Attacks On Georgia Election System

Richard Pollock
Reporter
10:33 PM 01/25/2017
923

A U.S. Department of Homeland Security employee stands inside the National

Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center as part of a guided media tour in
Arlington, Virginia June 26, 2014. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Federal officials have launched an investigation into why the Department of Homeland
Security hacked into the Georgia state governmental network, including its election

John Roth, inspector general for DHS, wants to know why the agency broke protocol on its
way to 10 unprecedented attacks on the system overseen by Georgia Secretary of State

Brian Kemp
attempt to designate local and state election machinery as par

A Jan. 17 letter from

ries of

originated from DHSattempt.

Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and Kemp have clashed over a federal government

Johnson sparked a firestorm among state-level secretaries of state Democrat and

Republican alike when he announced Jan. 6, two weeks before leaving office, that he was
unilaterally issuing the designation.

cybersecurity resources to penetrate a state election system in order to pressure a state

official over a policy dispute, it could represent a significant scandal for Johnson and for
the outgoing Obama administration.

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or on a darker side, to send

a message to a recipient.
Georgian IT specialists traced 10 such scans back to a DHS IP address. DHS officials
confirmed the attacks came from an unnamed contractor attached to the Federal Law
Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, a part of DHS.
FLETCO officials have refuse to identify the contractor and the agency did not respond to
a DCNF inquiry about the intrusions.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, asked Roth to investigate the matter in a Jan. 11
letter.
Chaffetz, who also is the chairman of the powerful House Committee on Oversight and
sovereignty laws and various other constitutional issues, as well as federal and state
Rep. Jody Hice, a Georgia Republican, co-signed the letter to Roth. Hice
sits on the national security subcommittee.
Title 18

nowingly accessed a

data, a program, a system, or information. The penalty could be a fine and up to 20 years
for each offense.
Georgia also has several computer fraud and abuse statutes that could apply to the DHS
contract employee and to other officials in Georgia who are implicated in the effort. Four
of the 10 attacks against the Georgia network occurred as Kemp was about to talk to DHS
officials, or coincided with his public testimony about his opposition to the critical
infrastructure designation.
Kemp
said he hopes the Inspector General gets to the bottom of the attacks and determines if
there is a possibility the hacks were timed to intimidate him.

Kemp wrote President-elect Donald Trump

to request that you task your new Secretary of Homeland Security with investigatin g the

ow
what was going on. The explanation they (DHS) have been giving us leaves a lot of holes

Johnson has given several explanations for the attempted intrusion. One was that an
professional licenses.

The former secretary hedged his response in a Dec. 12 letter

interim response to your inquiry, sub
Kemp said the DHS answers have continued to change over time, and the department has
been unwilling to identify the contractor.

that had a bug in his Microsoft software that was causing it. And then they moved off of
that, and said that it was somebody in Georgia at FLETCO down in Gleynn County on the

to

DHS cannot launch scans without the permission of state officials. Kemp, in a December 8
letter

which also contains corporate information of

registered companies in the state as well as professional licenses
began on Feb. 2.

occurred Nov. 15, a week after the election but before the state certified its results.