Leaks, Hacks, and Liberals So now WikiLeaks is bad. by Gabriel Schoenfeld
http://www.weeklystandard.com/leaks-hacks-and-liberals/article/2003568?ct=t%28Donald+Trump%29
The facts are by now widely known, if still not nailed down with precision. On Friday, July 22, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, a massive trove of emails purloined from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by hackers was posted on WikiLeaks, the online bulletin board for leaked information founded by the Australian anarchist Julian Assange. Strong evidence rapidly emerged showing that the hackers were connected to or under the control of Russian intelligence. As the press picked through the mildly juicy revelations, the favoritism of the supposedly neutral DNC toward Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders was put before the world to see.
The result has been a continuing maelstrom. Supporters of Sanders, already agitated for having to swallow the bitter pill of defeat, were inflamed. Backers of Hillary, embarrassed and chagrined, decried the apparent Russian interference in party affairs. It did not take long for the head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to be unceremoniously purged from her position and for the newly cleansed DNC to issue an apology to Sanders and everyone else it had wronged.
There the story has paused, but it is hardly over. There are grounds to believe that the Clinton Foundation was also hacked and quite possibly Hillary’s vulnerable private server at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., which housed her official emails during her tenure as secretary of state, including the 33,000 or so that she and her lawyers wiped from the memory because they were deemed “personal.”
The worry, of course, is that Russian intelligence has all of these, and that many more damaging disclosures of Clinton shenanigans are yet to come. Donald Trump, startling the world, has called upon the Russian government, if it did hack Hillary’s emails, to release them, with the obvious aim of injuring Hillary’s campaign and boosting his own. If that is indeed what happens, and WikiLeaks blasts new revelations onto the net on the eve of the elections in an October surprise, it could well propel Trump into the White House. That is exactly what Assange, who publicly favors Trump over Clinton, and who claims to have more of her secrets in his quiver, is threatening. The prospect has liberals wringing their hands.
A case in point is Franklin Foer, the former top editor at the New Republic and now a contributing editor at Slate. To Foer, the DNC email scandal is the sum of all his fears. “A foreign government,” he writes, “has hacked a political party’s computers . . . stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure.” It is “trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy.”
One cannot disagree. But how does this particular data breach, one is left wondering, differ from the leaks that Foer and other liberals routinely celebrate as the stock in trade of American investigative journalism?
Foer has a ready answer: What is especially “galling about the WikiLeaks dump,” he explains, is that it “has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks.” Hacks, to Foer, are bad, conducted by bad people for bad purposes. The Russian hack, he writes, is the equivalent of 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.”
Leaks, on the other hand, Foer explains, have nothing in common with hacks. On the contrary, they “are an important tool of journalism and accountability.” They are the means by which an insider who uncovers malfeasance “brings information to the public in order to stop the wrongdoing. That’s not what happened here.”
Let’s grant that a hack—a way of obtaining information—and a leak—a means of disseminating information—are very different things. But, still, does the particular distinction Foer draws between the two make sense? Suppose, for example, that Russian intelligence, instead of feeding its trove of hacked secrets to WikiLeaks, had chosen to pass them along to an American investigative reporter, who then wrote about a selection of them in, say, the pages of the New Yorker or the New York Times. Would Foer have any grounds for objection?
Certainly, the material under discussion is highly newsworthy, although Foer, straining to stuff the pieces of his argument into a box in which they do not fit, is at pains to suggest it is not newsworthy at all. The DNC documents disclose a lot of “minutiae,” he writes, and reveal no “new layers of corruption or detail any new conspiracies.” Rather, it is “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.”
“Minutiae”? “Stupid ideas”? “Banal musings”? Balderdash. There is nary an American journalist who would not have leaped at the chance to uncover and publish the fact that top officials at the DNC were conspiring to exploit Bernie Sanders’s religious faith or alleged lack thereof. As one such DNC official indelicately put it in one of the disclosed emails, Sanders has
skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.
The DNC email trove contains many other piquant details, including, for example, that a Democratic donor seeking to host a fundraiser for the party had been convicted of an insurance fraud that entailed attaching electrodes to the ear and rectum of horses and turning on the power to electrocute the valuable animals. If stories about such escapades had been presented exclusively to the New Republicwhen Foer was editing it, I would take any odds that he would not be dismissing them for rehearsing “minutiae” but instead speculating about whether his magazine might have a shot at winning a Pulitzer Prize.
Foer complains that the DNC hack will have a “chilling effect” on deliberations inside our political parties. Campaign staffers will now have to “assume they no longer have the space to communicate honestly.” Yet it is precisely “this honest communication—even if it’s often trivial or dumb,” he continues, that “is important for the process of arriving at sound strategy and sound ideas,” and “if we eviscerate the possibility of privacy in politics, we increase the likelihood of poor decision-making.”
Truer words were never spoken. But if leaks from inside a political party have a dampening effect on deliberation, that is also true of leaks from inside the national security machinery, the very kind of leaks Foer hails as essential to keeping our democracy humming smoothly. Fear of leaks forces officials to keep key decisions close to the vest and away from experts down in the bureaucracy who understand critical issues better than anyone else. The effects of the resulting “poor decision-making” can be far more momentous than anything connected to DNC or RNC messaging and fundraising. Yet twisting himself into a pretzel, Foer seems to favor maximum possible secrecy for the trivial issues and maximum possible transparency for matters of the utmost gravity.
The real crux of Foer’s anxiety is that secrets unearthed by a hostile intelligence agency are being employed to manipulate an American election with the goal of installing an ignorant, intemperate demagogue in the White House. I fully share that anxiety. But I can personally guarantee that if the shoe were on the other foot, and a Seymour Hersh or a James Risen had learned from Russian hackers of efforts by the CIA to manipulate a foreign election, something the CIA has done with some frequency in the past, Foer and fellow liberal journalists would be heaping praise on their reporting as “a high-minded act of transparency”—his characterization of supposedly good leaks as opposed to dastardly hacks.
Democrats and liberals are entirely in the right to be exercised about Russian intervention in our election and the danger it presents. As a Republican #NeverTrumper who intends to vote for Hillary Clinton in November, I am exercised as well. But a modicum of consistency in the treatment of secrecy and leaks and hacks would be a welcome thing. The alternative, of twisting oneself into a living pretzel, as Franklin Foer has done, is not an attractive posture.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is a former senior adviser to the 2012 Mitt Romney for president campaign and the author of Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law.
Democrats and liberals are entirely in the right to be exercised about Russian intervention in our election and the danger it presents. As a Republican #NeverTrumper who intends to vote for Hillary Clinton in November, I am exercised as well. But a modicum of consistency in the treatment of secrecy and leaks and hacks would be a welcome thing. The alternative, of twisting oneself into a living pretzel, as Franklin Foer has done, is not an attractive posture.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is a former senior adviser to the 2012 Mitt Romney for president campaign and the author of Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law.
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