Trump Campaign Hacked by Suspected Foreign Cyberattackers.
A series of headlines this week drew attention to the hacking of Donald Trump campaign documents by foreign players, with strong hints that the hackers were from Iran, an avowed U.S. enemy.
Spokesmen for the Kamala Harris campaign said they were already on the lookout for similar cyber sleuths, but had either withstood or had not encountered serious hacks — the White House condemned any attempt at foreign interference in American elections.
As the story has played out, there have been some modest, if distracting lessons to note both for the campaigns, for cyber defenders and for voters.
The FBI is investigating, naturally. But what we know so far is that the hackers were able to persuade someone to answer an errant email to let them into campaign servers, where hackers predictably found a research dossier the campaign had assembled on Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, (R-Ohio), assessing his potential vulnerabilities.
That information then was shared with at least two general news sites, which say they will not report on the illegally obtained documents.
Of course, we have already seen first-hand the vulnerabilities of JD Vance, so further reporting on what was reported to be a compendium of publicly available documents is less than newsworthy at this point.
Indeed, the news question raised by all this was more along the lines of why the Trump campaign didn’t know and prepare for Vance’s “weird” positions on “childless cat ladies” and shifting both voting power and tax credits that Republicans oppose to promote families. Naturally, some of what Trump researchers might have found as positives for Vance have not played well in the actual campaign.
Maybe the Trump campaign does have valuable internal information worth a hack, but so far, access to its documents is far less likely to prove politically damaging than the daily streams of unfounded lies and inventions from the candidate himself, or the constant insistence on insults and offensive attacks on his opponent.
Foreign Interference
Of course, the bigger issues here revolve around the idea that we don’t want foreign influence in our campaigns. We want wholly owned American nonsense to start and stop in our election borders — though we’re open to promoting candidacies of perceived alliance in other countries’ elections.
Apparently, the difference is that we think it nasty if other countries, this time Iran, which denies involvement, don’t own up to their desires. Just why Iranian interests might find the promised toughness from a Harris victory over the vowed belligerence from a Trump win is anything but clear.
Maybe the goal here is just to sow discord and spiraling lack of trust in elections and governments in the United States altogether. In that regard, we’re doing a pretty complete job of it by ourselves.
Cybersecurity is a real response to real threats against business and government, and it deserves some respect for how well it functions. The irregular interruptions we have seen resulting from computer hacks show just how annoying and interfering hacking can be for everything from transportation to utilities, to banking or the operation of a hospital. Studies by the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering have found that more than 2,200 cyberattacks occur each day.
In the political world, we’re still seeing ripples from the 2016 hacks by WikiLeaks, which just days before that year’s Democratic National Convention published nearly 20,000 emails from the DNC servers. Those hacks, believed at first to be linked to Russians, ended up as campaign fodder for Trump to use to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and only recently has Julian Assange, formerly head of Wikileaks, made a deal for a guilty plea on federal charges.
For Trump, use of the illicitly obtained documents is a new cause for hypocrisy. When it was WikiLeaks information and appeared to favor himself politically, it was fine to for him to trumpet any results and for the news media to spread the word from inside Democratic headquarters. Now that his campaign has been targeted, Trump wants all news reporters to shun the use of any products of hacking.
When the Mueller Report found that Russian operatives were active around infiltrating the Trump campaign in 2016, the goal seemed to be to get hands on private polling information and anything that might besmirch Clinton. At least that goal was understandable.
We’re not getting enough understandable stuff from the Trump campaign now to distinguish governing goals from fantasies about crowds, helicopter crashes, and just when Kamala Harris knew she was a Black woman. Hacking can be serious, of course, but protecting outdated public news reports about Vance hardly seems worth protecting.
