Over the past four months, American intelligence agencies and aides to US President Barack Obama assembled a menu of options to respond to alleged Russia’s hacking during the election, ranging from exposing country's high officials financial ties, to manipulating the computer code that hackers have used in designing their cyberweapons, New York Times writes.
But while Obama vowed on Friday to “send a clear message to Russia”, some of the options were rejected as ineffective, others as too risky. If the choices had been better, one of the aides involved in the debate noted recently, the president would have acted by now.
In addition to the idea of exposing certain financial ties, there are also proposals to cut off some officials from their hidden bank accounts in Europe and Asia. There is an option to use sanctions under a year-old executive order to ban international travel for senior officials in the G.R.U.
The National Security Agency and its military cousin, the United States Cyber Command, which is responsible for computer-network warfare, have worked up other ideas, officials said, though some have been rejected by the Pentagon.
All of this has led Mr. Obama to ask how the confrontation might escalate, and whether the United States in the end may have more to lose than Russia. In the end, he doesn’t have great options, New York Times concludes.
