Secretary of State John Kerry promised that the United States would retaliate against Russian President Vladimir Putin's attempts to meddle in the American presidential election.

"We released this information to put the people doing it on a notice that they're not, quote, 'getting away with it' for free, as well as to put states on notice that we're serious when we say they need to take every measure possible to guarantee the integrity of our elections," Kerry said Monday at The Internet Association's Virtuous Cycle Conference. "And we will and can respond in ways that we choose to at the time of our choice."

That threat comes days after the Obama administration accused Russia of perpetrating a series of politically-charged hacks, including targeting the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The accusation stopped short of formally accusing the Russians of breaching a pair of state voter registration data bases, although U.S. officials have blamed Russia in private and Kerry seemed to imply they were behind those attacks as well.

"What makes the Russian thing so different is that I don't think any of us engaged previously in democratic exercise where we actually tried to change the votes somehow by co-opting the counting process," Kerry said.

Kerry also acknowledged that the United States has tried to "affect outcomes" of foreign elections, but he also argued for a distinction between American information-sharing and direct hacks.

"But that said, this ain't the first time countries, ours included, have tried to affect outcomes of governments or – in one part of the world or another," he continued. "I mean, go back to Iran in 1953 when Mosaddegh was run out by the CIA and Kermit Roosevelt and – we were engaged in changing government, or Diem in Vietnam when we – so there's a history of involvement. And some people argue to me as secretary of state when I visit their countries that legitimate national institutions of ours like the National Democratic Institute or the International Republican Institute are engaged in that kind of activity."

Kerry defended U.S. institutions and praised the Internet as a powerful tool for spurring "political change" by allowing people to "know exactly what everybody else in the world has" at the same time. He faulted governments for taking "ominous" steps to prevent that flow of information.

"[P]eople are in fact trying to close down the legitimate exchange of ideas, which is not what the Russians were engaged in, but we had engaged in the legitimate exchange of ideas and they label it 'interference' in their campaign, which is the difference," he said. "And that's one of the reasons why we wanted to make clear people understood that distinction, because we don't do those old things that used to happen. That is not a government role and it's been, I think, for some period of time not something that we're engaged in."

That statement might reinforce Russian attempts to accuse the United States of hypocrisy.

"This is some sort of nonsense," Putin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said in response to the accusation, per the Washington Post. "Every day, Putin's site gets attacked by tens of thousands of hackers. Many of these attacks can be traced to U.S. territory. It's not as though we accuse the White House or Langley of doing it each time it happens."

Kerry asked the tech experts to help the U.S. government, explaining to them that some of the security measures opposed by Silicon Valley are necessary to prevent foreign cyber attacks and terror threats. "I think we're going to have to figure out what that balance is going to be in a world where we see Russians allowing hackers and instructing some people to try to interfere with our democracy," he said. "We've got to figure out how we manage this arms race, folks."