How Obama's policies left the US government vulnerable to Russian hackers

The real story with Russia was not the series of stupid meetings between Trump campaign officials and diplomats who were trying to set them up, playing on Trump's admiration of Putin. The story that should have been all over the front pages then, and now, is the complete lack of security infrastructure across our government, Obama's complete inability to protect the country from cybersecurity threats, and the way Russians were able to easily take advantage of all our vulnerabilities throughout the last 8 years to make a series of devastating blows that are only coming out to public awareness now.

Many of these issues came up during the last two years of the administration when he was busy crying "Russian hackers", while Russian hackers were having a ball right under his eye. This combination of lack of situational awareness, recklessness, arrogance, and ignorance of even the basic factors to take into consideration was evident in Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's watch at the DNC, among Democratic Congressmen in the Pakistani IT staffer scandal, with Hillary's various misuses of email, with John Podesta falling easy bait to a phishing trick, and so much more. But all of that turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg, as we are now learning, mere red flags compared to the utter disaster that was taking place behind the close doors, with Edward Snowden being but the first red flag and warning sign of just how unprepared was our counterintelligence for the combination of cybersecurity threats and social engineering from Russians and other actors.

Much of it has come out within this past year, and with regards to cybersecurity, in the last couple of weeks, with the story of the NSA breach and access to Pentagon source code. Meanwhile our own reaction has been belated and laughable. Over two years after Kaspersky was used to retrieve NSA data, the government finally advised its agencies not to use that software. I don't even want to know what happened after the Russians got the source code and whether that software is still in place, but my guess is, not much has changed. The pervasive problem of such proportions should be a national scandal. Obama left the front door open while looking for boogeymen out in the back. Thanks to the atrocious decisionmaking throughout his administration, the country has been vulnerable, basically naked, to Russian hacking. But the press, instead of thoroughly investigating the extent of the damage and excoriating the officials responsible for it, are dripping their findings, while covering up who's really at fault.

The cybersecurity breaches of the past 8 years deserve a thorough, competent investigation. If Mueller is anything other than a political hack with an agenda, he should be looking at this main stage event, while also investigating whatever improprieties came out from last year's election and the financial shenanigans from some of the actors. I am afraid, however, that most people are not interested in the "whole truth". They just want to be fed stories convenient to propping up their preconceptions.