The journalists who wrote up stories about Powell’s email know very little about the data they are perusing, or the motives driving those who leaked it. It could be a little digital activist who believes in transparency and made public everything they stole. Or it could be a person or foreign government who wanted to shape a political outcome. We know that a story about Clinton’s poor health is in this dump. We don’t know if emails about Clinton’s vigor were selectively edited out of it before release. In fact, it is perfectly possible for a hacker to use the information in the data they did steal as a model for mocking up false information they want to circulate in their leak. All we have is some light speculation that a group of Russian hackers may be responsible.
The effect is that by digitally hacking the data of corporations, celebrities, or politicians, the leakers perform a “social-hack” of journalism itself. Public relations agencies are paid top dollar in their sometimes humiliating quest to get news outlets to write stories about their clients. But a group of successful hackers can change the front page of all the major news websites in the world within a few hours just by leaking enough of the right sort of data. Journalists barely have time to check what they are reporting, and victims of the leak may have a difficult time authenticating the contents of it, too.
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