We have the curiosity of a hacker being identified as an agent of the Russian government, releasing email to Wikileaks. What is odd about this is the lack of any kind of evidence that the Russians were involved. I know this is confusing to people who do not live in the United States, and probably murky even to those who do. Is it really credible to blame the Russian government for this hack? Can anyone say it was the Russian government and not some hacker-for-profit guy who was making money at this? The short answer is "no" to both of those.
As Donna Brazile, now the soon to be Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) pointed out this morning, there will be more of these to follow so the damage control will be extensive. This whole thing is just starting. There are already claims that part of the demonstrations at the Trump rallies were engineered by the DNC. I thought the Russians were behind those, and was obviously wrong.
The narrative out of the DNC is that Russia is favoring Trump, the Republican nominee, over Clinton. Clinton, the Democrat, was favored by the DNC over her rival Bernie Sanders. That was part of the whole mess that caused the resignation of the current DNC Chair because the Committees are not supposed to favor one candidate over another. She denied doing that, but got caught by the stolen email.
As I said, this is about narrative, not facts. Nobody has attributed the hack of the DNC too anyone, but intelligence services are not easy to pin down. All of them use proxies, so that even if we were to find out who gave the document stash to Wikileaks, it might be harder to figure out who was really behind it. We used to say, "If you are really good, you won't get caught." Intelligence services are really good and they don't tell anyone, even if they are caught. So, we really cannot blame the Russian government until there is some attribution, probably behind closed doors. That will take a month or two, so getting out a narrative right now is safe. It took almost that long for Congress to hear that China took the database of OPM.
The DNC narrative is easier to believe if we say it was the Russian government with lots of resources behind it, rather than say a person who hacks for a living did it and the DNC had lousy security. Donors don't like to hear the latter. The narrative fits the concern about the privacy and security of donor lists and internal communications some of them have with the top levels of the Democratic Party. It would be better for an intelligence service to have it than a hacker for profit. The hacker would sell it to somebody who paid for it. The intelligence service would keep quiet about having it, and they probably wouldn't give it to Wikileaks which would negate a number of reasons for stealing it to begin with.
There is money in hacking - as anyone who has ever seen the text messages of Hollywood stars can testify. Stealing email is not new but it is getting easier to do, so more people do it. It was behind the Sony hack which caused no end of problems for the studio and many other news people who used it for hacking voicemail. The narrative that says this was a professional hack for profit fits better here than the one being touted by the DNC.
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