【Taste of Future Sister-in-law】

With its hacked emails,Taste of Future Sister-in-law Russian server pings and daily drip of Podesta email leaks, the current presidential election has effectively turned the promise of technology as an agent of political progress into a nightmare.

Eight years ago, we marveled at a young Illinois senator’s canny use of social media to mobilize an electorate and make his opponent and even the current Democratic presidential candidate look like Luddites.

Pundits lathered praise on the Barack Obama campaign back then, marveling at all his team accomplished. The late David Carr explained what Obama did in a post for the New York Times:

Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote.

Social media and technology were a force for good in the political process. Almost a decade later, they’re weapons of war.

How did we get here?

Twitter accounts that were once used to dismiss FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) are now where it foments. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton use their Twitter accounts as persistent pulpits from which they can spew invective and name-calling (to be fair, they also occasionally tweet facts and happy campaign highlights). The legions who sit on either side of each candidate usually join in to create a cacophony of useless noise.

This made for a rousing, if often frustrating, presidential election and primary season, where separating the quality social media wheat from the preposterous chaff became almost impossible.

It’s not unusual to see a flurry of activity from each camp at the tail-end of a presidential campaign. Both candidates seek a last-minute advantage, a point or two poll rise in a swing state. While in previous presidential elections 24-hour-a-day campaigning was usually at the core of this, most of the action in recent weeks has been in cyberspace.

On Tuesday, Slatepublished a blockbuster story that appears to indicate possible collusion between Russian bankers and Donald Trump. As evidence, a collection of unnamed experts who appear to have access to relevant DNS logs discovered unusual internet traffic between an aging, little-used server at Trump’s Manhattan headquarters and Alfa Bank in Russia. Trump has made a variety of conflicting (and confusing) statements about Russia and Premier Vladimir Putin throughout the campaign, which is one of the reasons some take these accusations seriously. Trump, though, has since denied the report and a number of cybersecurity experts, including one who was cited in the report, have since debunked it. Others expressed alarm that anyone would share information from typically secret DNS logs.

Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton might have considered making hay of these accusations if it weren’t for the fact that she is dealing with her own multi-pronged cyber conflagration.

First there are the WikiLeaks Podesta emails. The longtime Clinton aid and current campaign chairman, and the IT department that supported him, fell for a pretty simple social engineering (spear phising) attack. He gave up his email username and password and subsequently revealed the entire contents of his emails to hackers who turned them over to WikiLeaks. Whether or not everything in those emails is true, the damage is already being done. Democratic operative Donna Brazile was shown the door by CNN, where she served as a contributing commentator, after the emails apparently revealed that she shared debate questions with the Clinton camp in advance of one of the debates.

The orphan

Neither Clinton nor Trump has spent much time talking about cybersecurity during the campaign or the three debates, but technology – of a sort – has been a persistent focus. No, not in all the ways it can transform lives and elevate societies, but in what Clinton did with 33,000 emails.

Clinton has effectively parried Trump’s jabs on this topic and even weathered some of the WikiLeaks email leaks, but then FBI Director James Comey dropped another email surprise before the election. His department was reopening the closed investigation into Clinton emails based on another trove of digital correspondence discovered on Anthony Weiner’s computer. Weiner is the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aid.

All this last-minute hacking, leaking and digital activity is having an impact. Prior to the email leaks and just after the debates, Clinton was leading in national polls -- now a recent ABC national poll has Trump up by a point (although other polls have Clinton ahead).

The brunt of it

One should feel sorry for the subject, rocked again by yet another surprise revelation. I’m talking, of course, about email. No digital platform has suffered more damage in this election cycle than email. This once valuable communication platform is now laid bare as a kind of ultra-tacky super glue that gets everywhere and is impossible to wash off. Politicians and government officials seem unaware that email is the worst form of private, secure communication. A deleted email on your server is likely still stuck to the inbox of its recipient or one or more servers. Good-old-fashioned voice phone calls may soon become the favored, secure communication platform again.

Similarly, Trump’s possible Russian server connection is a reminder that no communication on the internet is ever truly private. Obviously, you can encrypt the contents of communications, but it’s much harder to hide the fact that this server talked to that server or this computer and its IP address contacted a server halfway around the world.

We had a chance

Eight years ago, still basking in the glow of our first social media-infused election, some were sounding the alarm.

A group called the Internet Security Alliance published a white paper titled The Cyber Security Social Contract: Policy Recommendations for the Obama Administration and 11th Congress. It celebrated the 2008 election results, but warned, “The recent election was clearly a mandate for change. Nowhere is change more critically needed than in our nations approach to cyber security.”

The group, which is headed by technology, policy and national security leaders from Carnegie Mellon, Verizon, Ratheon and Nortel, among others, predicted the involvement of countries like Russia and China in hacking operations.

“Cyber security is no longer the domain of high school hackers, but is populated by organized criminals, unfriendly nation states and terrorists. The problems we face are far more severe than compromised personal data. Our physical security is threatened by vulnerabilities in our electronic information systems.”

The group urged the Obama administration to see cybersecurity as more than just an IT issue.

Some experts worry that, even today, most of us still don't recognize the threat. When asked about the current election-related hacking news, Steve Morgan, founder and CEO at Cybersecurity Ventures, sent me this note in an email:

While cybersecurity -- specifically the Clinton email server -- is at the center of the presidential election now, there is still very little media coverage on the bigger picture cyberwar going on between nations and more broadly hackers vs. the world. Hopefully it won't take a 9 or 10 on the cyber Richter scale for people to start paying more attention.

Know your enemy

Now, as Obama’s second term ends and Trump and Clinton make their final campaign pushes, it’s clear none of them heeded these warnings, certainly not John Podesta and Clinton, who used a personal server for government emails; or the Democratic Party, which suffered a possible Russian-sponsored hack; and not Trump or his IT managers, whose servers may be talking to Russian servers simply because of some spam that’s bouncing back and forth across the ether.

It's not clear Trump and Clinton are ready to address why this is all happening. At least not yet. It’s like asking a Naval artillery operator to trouble shoot his cannons in the middle of a war. His job is to load, aim and shoot, not analyze why the canon fires or even assess the damage it does on the other side. Technology is now a weapon in an election season cyberwar. One can only hope that when all the dust clears the newly elected president can turn his or her attention to cyber-attacks certain to keep coming from outside.