http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/250871-kerry-russia-china-very-likely-reading-my-emails By Katie Bo Williams - 08/11/15 04:44 PM EDT
Secretary of State John Kerry told "CBS Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley that “it is very likely” China and Russia are reading his emails — and that he drafts his correspondences accordingly.
The remarks, part of an interview set to air Tuesday night, come in the wake of yet another high-profile infiltration of administration officials' emails.
"It is very likely,” Kerry said. “It is not ... outside the realm of possibility, and we know they have attacked a number of American interests over the course of the last few days."
In late July, Russian hackers cracked the Pentagon’s Joint Staff unclassified email system in a “sophisticated cyberattack” that officials believe originated in Moscow. Earlier this week, a NBC News report revealed that Chinese hackers have infiltrated the private email accounts for “many” top Obama administration officials. The Beijing-backed sweep targeted "all top national security and trade officials” and included the theft of email address books.
The National Security Agency (NSA) has not named the officials whose private emails were taken, but most of the fallout has focused on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who continues to come under fire for using a private email service hosted on her own server during her time in the State Department. The hackers are believed to have been accessing officials’ private accounts since April 2010, coinciding with Clinton’s use of a private email server from 2009 to 2013.
Security experts have said that Clinton’s server failed to follow best practices for encryption and that foreign intelligence agencies almost certainly knew about the account and would have tried to exploit it.
But while the Democratic presidential front-runner may be under the most public scrutiny for her email practices, the risk of foreign surveillance has not gone unnoticed by the current occupant of Clinton’s former post.
“It's very possible ... and I certainly write things with that awareness,” Kerry said.
Kerry compared fighting digital espionage and hacking to "the Wild West," noting that "spying has taken place for centuries and the latest means of spying is to be going after peoples' cyber." He indicated that China's "consistent" cyberattacks on the United States is "an issue that we recently raised very, very strongly in our dialogue with the Chinese."
"It’s on the agenda for the discussions between President Obama and President Xi [Jinping] when they meet in September," Kerry said. "We have agreed to begin to have a working group dig into this more directly because it is an enormous concern."
