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>>18474868 So this came up in a search for "aspen digital hack and dump working group"
>https://archive.ph/bSk8a
10.07.2020 02:02 PM
The Right Way to Cover Hacks and Leaks Before the Election
The media knows it screwed up in 2016 with John Podesta. Here’s how it should do better in the final weeks of the 2020 race.
John Podesta speaking to reporters
The media continues to struggle to contextualize the release of stolen documents, without doing the bidding of the thief.​Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
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It seems clear, with four years of hindsight, that the American news media owes John Podesta an apology. The political media did almost everything wrong in covering the theft-and-leak of his private emails amid the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign, four years ago today—and yet it’s not at all clear that if confronted by an operation similar to what Russian intelligence executed in targeting the Democratic National Committee via Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, that we’d get it any more right now.
In fact, so-called “hack-and-leaks” remain one of the most difficult stories to confront appropriately. As we enter the final weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, when each day seems primed for an October surprise, it’s worth thinking deeply about what makes these incidents so pernicious—and how we as a news media and a society might respond more maturely and rationally than in 2016.
From dozens of conversations this year with numerous reporters, editors, researchers, and executives—as well as a tabletop exercise I ran at the Aspen Institute this summer along with Vivian Schiller, the former CEO of National Public Radio, who now directs Aspen’s media and technology program—it’s clear there’s a shared unease about how the news media handled the 2016 Russian attack on the DNC and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. The unease stems not from any partisan preference for or against Hillary Clinton; it has to do with the sense that the US media allowed itself to be the delivery mechanism for a Russian attack on our democracy.
The basic details of the Podesta leak have come into focus thanks to the work of US intelligence and Robert Mueller’s investigation as special counsel: On October 7, 2016, just hours after US intelligence first warned publicly of Russia’s unfolding attack on the presidential election and just 30 minutes after the damaging Access Hollywood tape was released, Wikileaks began publishing thousands of emails stolen earlier that year by Russia intelligence from Podesta’s personal email account.
Ever since the dust settled in November following Trump’s surprise victory, there’s been an uncomfortable sense that the media’s tendency toward horse-race coverage aided and abetted a surprise attack by America’s foremost foreign adversary. The Podesta theft and subsequent leak destabilized the campaign and muddled the line between two controversies—confusing many voters between the leak of the Podesta emails and the questions around Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email at the State Department.
A “hack and leak” is among the most likely attacks the US might face in the closing weeks of the presidential race, and it is also one of the hardest to respond to adequately and effectively. The path forward requires understanding both the lessons of previous attacks and why Donald Trump’s words and actions have made the current landscape particularly vulnerable.
How We Got to Now
The first major hack-and-leak was met with more amusement than alarm. To this day, North Korea’s 2014 attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment remains misunderstood—a bizarre incident by a bizarre regime, more embarrassing than harmful, protesting a mediocre stoner movie with Seth Rogen and James Franco.
Yet it was actually a deeply destructive landmark attack, as it turns out, for reasons we didn’t realize at the time. Beyond the actual financial and physical damage, the Sony hack burned itself into America’s mind because the hackers hit the softest part of the company’s IT system—emails—and weaponized that information through the use of social media. North Korea got the mainstream media to pick up on those leaks and do the hackers’ bidding, causing reputational and financial damage to the company as Sony’s innermost secrets were spread across the internet for all to read. A stolen spreadsheet of a company’s executive salaries proved irresistible to reporters, who published it quickly; ditto for reporting on executives’ candid comments on colleagues, actors, directors, and other Hollywood luminaries. Particularly in the sped-up news cycles of the digital age, the media had decided that the “newsworthiness” of purloined internal secrets outweighed any ethical dilemmas raised by how that material was obtained. In Sony’s case, there was no sense or allegation of wrongdoing—just hot gossip.
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>The Right Way to Cover Hacks and Leaks Before the Election
Unfortunately, that part of Sony’s legacy—so obvious now in hindsight—didn’t sink in with the government and the private sector. America learned the wrong lesson and focused on deterring destructive attackers and hardening network IT systems. Russia, meanwhile, watched the Sony hack and learned the power of stolen information to influence public opinion and undermine confidence in an organization. Russia also saw how American society had been quick to blame and isolate the victim—Sony—rather than unite against the perpetrator of the hack. Russia saw that media organizations—some reputable, some not—would rush to cover such leaks, amplifying the thefts with little self-reflection.
In the years since, we’ve seen similar operations targeting public figures from French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron to Paul Manafort’s daughter, all carried out by foreign adversaries who see such thefts as advancing their own strategic agendas. Yet the media continues to struggle to contextualize the release of stolen documents, without doing the bidding of the thief.
Hack-and-leaks are a particularly difficult and challenging threat to address precisely because they exploit the seams of democracy, as well as long-held norms and instincts of the news media and news organizations themselves. We’ve seen reporting stray from the newsworthy to the salacious, like the Amazon order history of Sony executive Amy Pascal, or the silly, like John Podesta’s risotto recipe. But stolen, leaked documents often contain legitimate news and insights into key decisions or relationships—news which editors and reporters rightfully feel they can’t ignore, regardless of the source.
Even the nearly unthinkable idea of a complete US media boycott and blackout on leak revelations would prove unlikely to stop such revelations from penetrating the US political landscape. Less reliable fringe or partisan websites can publish material that forces more mainstream and reliable organizations to confront stories they’d normally argue don’t rise to their standards. As we’ve seen from QAnon’s Pizzagate to the president’s own Twitter feed to the rumored-and-never-spotted giant antifa bus during the protests in recent weeks, news organizations often now have to wrestle with fringe provocateurs and conspiratorial ideas in a way that they didn’t have to before.
Couple that with the press corps’ normal bias toward competitive scoops, speed, and horse-race-style coverage and you had a recipe for trouble. Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who was at the center of much of the 2016 mess as it unfolded, had a stark warning as part of his recent book tour. “The press hasn’t solved any of this,” he told me. “If the [Russian intelligence service] GRU dumped the Biden campaign’s binder of opposition research on Kamala Harris right now, every news organization and publishing house would race to publish it. I think if you reset the players and the facts of 2016, I’m willing to bet it plays out exactly the same way.”
The biggest challenge, though, is that we rarely know the origins and motivations behind such leaks in real time. Intelligence agencies and news organizations are left to speculate about the provenance of the documents and the motives and desired outcomes from the attack, leaving a critical void as to the goals of the perpetrators. We now know how concerted, extensive, and coordinated the Kremlin’s attack on the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign truly was, but none of that detail came out until years after the fact.
Put another way, as one tech platform executive told me, the challenge of an “information influence operation” is that at the start only the adversary knows it’s an operation—a coordinated series of actions that has been thought out and planned in advance. A game of chess has begun, but it might take several moves for the news media or a campaign to notice. By then it may be too late.
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