Thread by @michaeldweiss

"And so we leaked it to the New York Times": nytimes.com/2021/03/07/us/…

Re: this White House walk-back, I see one of two things here, neither of them particularly good for the NYT:

https://twitter.com/EamonJavers/status/1368912832469884928?s=20

1. The term "cyberstrike" could be interpreted as "cyberattack," which wouldn't be reciprocal given that SolarWinds was an espionage operation (so far as we know!). It didn't shut down computer systems the way NotPetya did. So the WH wants to clarify it's not "striking."

(These terms do matter to cybersecurity specialists, even if they don't to journalists.)

2. Administration officials told tales out of school and now the higher-ups are pissed and denying the story. That just means it's Monday. But note this in the piece:

That's a bit difficult to invent whole cloth. A timeframe is stipulated, as is the breadth of the prospective operation: "across Russian networks that are intended..." etc.

So I read this as the U.S. will compromise Russian systems in such a way to alert the Russians that the Americans are in there. "Yoo-hoo! We see you and we know you see us seeing you. Here's a taste of what we're capable of. Now don't fuck with us again."

AIVD (Dutch intelligence) were literally watching the SVR at their terminals as they rooted around DNC servers. Wouldn't have been very hard to alert them to the fact: washingtonpost.com/news/worldview…

And then I suppose there's always a third possibility, albeit more remote: that nothing (or nothing major) will happen but the administration wanted to sound very tough and menacing to... readers of the New York Times, which includes Russian intelligence, MoD and FM officials.

As @RidT notes, the text of the original piece was changed to lower the temperature, and so I'm more inclined to think the NYT just described it all wrong:

https://twitter.com/RidT/status/1369044642344415235