Email & Social Media Monitoring

CNN and the Wall Street Journal, among others, report the hack of personal email addresses and Twitter accounts, of high-ranking government officials like CIA’s John Brennan and Homeland’s Jeh Johnson.  This is not rocket science hacking, of course, no matter who is doing it, but the pile of public officials having their email and personal correspondence read by other countries is getting bigger every day.  Hillary Clinton said she wasn’t the only one doing it, and that should have been a cause for concern.

The investigative fallout from Clinton’s email has been interesting because so many people were doing government business on those personal accounts, both in this administration and in previous ones.  Our government needs to stop that right now, and do an impact analysis on the potential loss of information by doing business on private email.  “Everybody does it” is not a good excuse, because not everybody does.  Most have common sense.  We don’t need more policy, but we might need more security education for our executives.  It seems to have fallen by the wayside.   Operational Security seems to have gone with it.

That is quite a bit different than having a Twitter account or a private email address.  I may just want to keep up with the kids emails, Facebook postings, and Twitters.  Lots of press people and bloggers are going to make a big deal out of these kinds of leaders having accounts on social media, when it probably is not such a big deal. It just depends on how that information is being used. 

The downside of it is a foreign intelligence service can discover who our leaders communicate with and monitor them.  It makes a web of associations and that web is of interest because it leaks information.  We used to find that hairdressers knew when our operational deployments were taking place because wives gathered there to discuss being alone for a few weeks or getting together for a shopping trip.   We had security education classes for spouses after that.  The cooperation we got from relatives was better than we hoped for.  It is harder to do with influence peddlers who attach themselves to so many government officials. 

Our political leaders have a lot of friends.  Map those friends and you find that some of them are influential with several leaders.  Influence those few and there is a better chance of influencing the leaders without ever getting close to the target.  Businesses understand it when they hire relatives of public officials, or people with prior government experience.  Their influence spreads like a web.  Their influence - and job longevity -  do not last very long, once those associations end.  

Doing business on private email and social media makes that influence easier to get, and improves the quality of intelligence any one country can get from us.  That is a direct benefit that allows them to determine how we might respond to a given situation.  This is Information War as it is practiced today.  Watching what the kids do on Twitter and Facebook is not going to have that same kind of impact.