The DNC Hack Is Watergate, but Worse
The email dump isn’t a high-minded act of transparency. It’s a foreign power attempting to swing an election for its favored candidate.
Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
A foreign government has hacked a political party’s computers—and possibly an election. It has stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure. And though nobody died—and there was no economic toll exacted—the Russians were aiming for a tender spot, a central node of our democracy.
It was hard to see the perniciousness of this attack at first, especially given how news media initially covered the story. The Russians, after all, didn’t knock out a power grid. And when the stolen information arrived, it was dressed in the ideology of WikiLeaks, which presents its exploits as possessing a kind of journalistic bravery the traditional media lacks.
But this document dump wasn’t a high-minded act of transparency. To state the obvious, only one political party has been exposed. (Selectively exposed: Many emails were culled from the abridged dump.) And it’s not really even the inner workings of the Democrats that have been revealed; the documents don’t suggest new layers of corruption or detail any new conspiracies. They’re something closer to the embarrassing emails that fly across every office in America—griping, the testing of stupid ideas, the banal musings that take place in private correspondence. The emails don’t get us much beyond a fact every sentient political observer could already see: Officials at the DNC, hired to work hand in glove with a seemingly inevitable nominee, were actively making life easier for Hillary Clinton. It didn’t take these leaks to understand that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a hack and that the DNC should be far more neutral in presidential primaries.
What’s galling about the WikiLeaks dump is the way in which the organization has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks. Leaks are an important tool of journalism and accountability. When an insider uncovers malfeasance, he brings information to the public in order to stop the wrongdoing. That’s not what happened here. The better analogy for these hacks is Watergate. To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party. The hackers installed the cyber-version of the bugging equipment that Nixon’s goons used—sitting on the DNC computers for a year, eavesdropping on everything, collecting as many scraps as possible. This is trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy. It falls into that classic genre, the dirty trick. Yet that term feels too innocent to describe the offense. Nixon’s dirty tricksters didn’t mindlessly expose the private data of low-level staff.
We should be appalled at the public broadcast of this minutiae. It will have a chilling effect—campaign staffers will now assume they no longer have the space to communicate honestly. This honest communication—even if it’s often trivial or dumb—is important for the process of arriving at sound strategy and sound ideas. (To be sure, the DNC shouldn’t need privacy to know that attacking a man for his faith is just plain gross.) Open conversation, conducted with the expectation of privacy, is the necessary precondition for the formation of collective wisdom and consensus. If we eviscerate the possibility of privacy in politics, we increase the likelihood of poor decision-making.
It is possible to argue that Russia is just behaving as great powers often do. States try to manipulate opinion beyond their borders. Barack Obama recently attempted to sway the British public to reject Brexit; we don’t just broadcast the Voice of America to expose the world to jazz. Russia does this, too. It has a website and television network, Russia Today. We might not care for Russia Today and its propagandistic coverage, but it operates in the open. It uses reporting and opinion to sway hearts and minds. The interconnected nature of the world means that it would be malpractice for states not to make the best case for its policies to enemy and ally alike. The United States is better when it understands the world and argues with it.
Still, we have a clear set of rules designed to limit foreign interference in our elections, to protect our sovereignty. We should be open to rational arguments from abroad but terrified about states playing a larger role than that. This is why we don’t let foreign entities make campaign contributions. We don’t allow noncitizens to vote. Consider our reaction, if an American political leader had pulled this stunt: He would be prosecuted, and drummed from political life. These are unacceptable tactics for an American; they can hardly be more tolerable when executed by a foreign power that wishes us ill.
The DNC dump may not have revealed a conspiracy that could end a candidacy, but it succeeded in casting a pall of anxiety over this election. We know that the Russians have a further stash of documents from the DNC and another set of document purloined from the Clinton Foundation. In other words, Vladimir Putin is now treating American democracy with the same respect he accords his own. The best retaliation isn’t a military one, or to respond in kind. It’s to defeat his pet candidate and to force him to watch the inauguration of the woman he so abhors.
Read more about Donald Trump’s connections to the Kremlin, and about his campaign manager’s work for Putin’s allies.
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This comment has been deleted
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LOL the red baiting is only going to increase to give the americans an external enemy instead of focusing on self improvement, so neoliberal
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Neoliberal is economic. Basically, free trade and reduced regulations.
There's nothing about external enemies. Perhaps you were looking for a different buzzword?
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A foreign government is trying to influence our elections? I am so shocked... Aren't you? I guess Putin decided it was cheaper hacking the DNC email server than buying either Hillary or the Donald off outright. Sound like a smart decision...
BTW, how much does it cost to buy off Hillary? How much does an Orange Hitler cost?
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It shocks me that so many are shrugging it off with a, "Whatevs" simply because they happen to like the result so far.
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I like how every new putinbot who shows up opens with "Is there any evidence that it was Russia which hacked the server?"
I guess it's the first point on the card.
You know that scene in Monty Python where the secretary drowns in a sea of Chinese caricatures...?
Can anyone explain how a different Democratic primary debate schedule would have led to a Sanders nomination?
The Democrats held one a month in the last three months in 2015, and then two a month in 2016. The January debates both came within two weeks of the Iowa caucus (held Feb 2). One was on a Sunday and aired on NBC, the other was on a Monday and aired on CNN.
They held debates on every day of the week, except Friday, and aired them on broadcast TV, cable TV, and YouTube.
As far as I can tell, the argument is that millions of voters would have watched the debates, but couldn't because of something having to do with the schedule. And if they watched the debates, they would have voted for Bernie Sanders. But any clips they'd see on the news, online, or passed around by social media wouldn't have been enough to sway them, they needed the full debate. But they couldn't watch them even though they wanted to. Is that right?
If not, please correct me. And if so, please explain how.
@¿Huh? @Procrastinating Dissertator
My mother in law DVRed them and watched late at night. That's just one example, but it led me to be confused when anyone argued that people who wanted to watch were prevented from doing so by the schedule.
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@Procrastinating Dissertator @¿Huh? I find it easier to watch things that I have to record because I'm otherwise occupied than the things that are on when I'm free.
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It's not like I go to the Pravda comment section and start typing under "Soda Popinski" or something.
Y'all need to get your sh-- together before you troll here. This isn't Salon.
I'm well aware--case officer "Joe from Clarksville" has been a fixture here for a long time, but we haven't had this kind of invasion of amateurs before
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Lot of new screennames here. I find it hard to believe Slate is important enough for Russia to try to manipulate the comments but maybe they are bored over there.
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We all know a guy that Googles their own name regularly.
Putin is that guy.
Donald may be also.
@Bias of NY @Tullamore Phoenix
Actually I don't know that guy and I don't want to.
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You're high! What exactly has HRC done to Vlad. Let him invade the Ukraine, annex Crimea, remove the missile defense shield from Europe, and reduce our military effectiveness. You're buying the fact that Russia is the one responsible, but that's a little self serving for HRC. I mean I'm supposed to believe it was the Russian's because she says so. I might have been born at night but it wasn't last night. Don't be an idiot.
@Greg D This is what the private company that investigated the breach concluded.......last month:
https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/
This isn't even the first data release from that hack.
Hillary let Russia invade the Ukraine, annex Crimea??
Our Military effectiveness has not been reduced one iota.
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So we're trying the shift the focus away from the fact that the DNC willingly favored Clinton over Sanders, despite what the citizens said they wanted with their votes. Yes, it's bad the Russia did this, but look what they exposed. Our democracy is a sham.
@0.193539526186 By May the DNC absolutely should have favored Clinton over Sanders because she was already the presumptive nominee. What reason was there to behave otherwise?
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Remember Newt Gingrich and the taped phone call? The issue quickly became the illegal taping of the call, not the content of the call arguably showing Newt conspiring to go back on his promise to the ethics committee whose meeting he had just left.
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-war-on-jim-mcdermott/Content?oid=34045
(story has pro-McDermott bias)
So, the site that was so uncertain before the emails that the DNC was trying to railroad in Hillary at all costs is now 100% certain that the Russian government hacked and released the emails, despite the fact that the best evidence they have is that one group of hackers apparently took the day off on Russian holidays?
I have no words.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/07/dnc-hack-wikileaks-russia/492878/
Or you could read the articles and review all the evidence.
That would be hard though!
@Aschen! @Zhi I did read the articles.
Did Russia do it? I'd say Russians were probably trying to hack the DNC because Russian hackers are pretty much always trying to hack all the things. I'd be surprised if the Chinese and Israel and Iran weren't also in on it. Saying they were actual government hackers working directly at the behest of Putin, though, is quite the leap.
@Aschen! @Zhi They admitted there were multiple groups attempting it, one of which were, they think maybe, Russian government hackers.
Jumping from there to "This is all a huge plot by RUSSIA to elect TRUMP!" is, well, setting off my skeptic-O-meter with great enthusiasm.
Contrasted, again, to them pooh-poohing suggestions that the DNC was actively working against the Bernie campaign. Which, it appears from the emails, they were.
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Does anybody really believe this Russia BS? I know it's the first thing that came to their heads, but, come on...
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@0.398380858849 It's not the first thing that came to my head. But then I read articles and reports. You should try it too.
@0.398380858849 At least it is plausible. Lately they have been really lazy with the daily lies.
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