Russians in Silicon Valley can't shake off shadow of computer hacking

San Francisco

PAVEL Cherkashin, a Russian investor based in San Francisco, thought he had the perfect name for a Catholic church that he is spending US$11.5 million converting into a tech palace. It would be called Hack Temple.

But that was before the nearly daily deluge of news about Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election by hacking computers and using Facebook and Twitter to spread inflammatory messages and sow division.