It’s easy to mock the Democrats’ hysteria over all this, which seems mostly like an inability to accept that they lost an election they thought was in the bag. Instead, they blame a password-phishing scam that John Podesta fell for like somebody’s technologically-challenged grandmother. (Another IowaHawk tweet: “Breaking: State Dept expels 20 Nigerian diplomats after John Podesta fails to receive $1 million wire transfer from nephew of General Okezi.”) And, partly to cover for Hillary and to delegitimize Trump, much of the press has talked about “election hacking” in a way that suggests — entirely falsely — that the Russians were changing votes instead of (maybe) being the ones who copied embarrassing emails from John Podesta and gave them to Wikileaks. (I say “maybe” because some people, like Ars Technica’s security editor Dan Goodin, don’t think that the Obama Administration has made the case that the Russians were behind it.)
But there’s more to the story, and some of it is worth more than mockery.
Whoever stole John Podesta’s emails (and if I were a betting man, I’d bet it was the Russians) was able to do so because of basic failures in email security. Those failures have been a hallmark of this administration — we’ve had several really major hacks by foreign intelligence services including one characterized by experts as a cyber Pearl Harbor and yet none created the hysteria that Podesta’s emails have. Hillary’s private, illegal email server was almost certainly compromised by foreign intelligence services, and if so, had she been elected president she may have been open to blackmail and manipulation.
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