DNI Talks Campaign Hacks

I have to admit I like this Director of National Intelligence because he has never been one to shy away from the truth as he sees it.  That is refreshing in Washington D.C. Because it is so unusual.

This time, he has struck out on something that has come up before, the hacking of Presidential candidates during an election.  Only this time China was not mentioned directly, when the previous times it came up, China was behind it.  ABC is speculating, perhaps wishfully thinking, that Anonymous will take up cyber weapons against Donald Trump [http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-chief-presidential-campaigns-cyber-targets/story?id=39200335 ].  I can't imagine anyone in Anonymous wanting to do that kind of thing, but I can imagine the press wanting to encourage it if they can.  They are starting to run out of legitimate stories to run about the candidates and hope for more.  Wouldn't a little inside information, stolen in the name of Anonymous, be nice to have?  It doesn't have to be any of the known hacker groups;  it just has to be a name they can attach to it, similar to the stories run when British newspaper people were hacking answering machines.  This is the kind of unethical journalism that the press discounts but has to deal with among its peers.

Intelligence services, which is probably more to the point of what a person like the DNI would be talking about, do not often feed information to the press about what they find out.  If they did, Hillary Clinton would have more trouble than a person could ever handle.  They take the information and use it to plot out what kinds of policies the candidate will have given the people writing her speeches, advising, or supporting them.  They don't give it to the press, although the Russians did similar things to the staff of Ronald Reagan when they tried to prevent him from running for office.  They didn't succeed, in case we have forgotten.

Maybe the staffs need a little advise that the Secret Service has already given them - don't say anything in email that you don't want on the front page of the New York Times or the St Louis Post Dispatch, because somebody is reading your email right now.  That doesn't mean you have to become paranoid or stop using email.  You just have to be realistic about the prospects of it remaining a secret.