What the Hack!

The total preoccupation of the liberal media and left-wing operatives is a distraction from the sorely needed introspection into what went wrong with the Democrat messaging in their presidential election loss.

The narrative is that Russia predetermined the outcome of a U.S. election by conspiring with Donald Trump to steal it away from the presumptive nominee Hilary Clinton.

For the record, there is no evidence that any voting machines were compromised to alter votes. There is no evidence that any Government agency was compromised to alter the election.

What is known is that the Democratic National Committee, which is a private enterprise, was hacked due to lax security in the email account of John Podesta (he used a variant of “password”, i.e. p@assw0rd as his sign-on) who fell for a phishing scam to change his email password.

This is nothing unusual in that millions of Americans get this type of email on a regular basis in their inbox. They usually are aware of the signs of a phishing scam and delete these emails. Those naive enough not to see through the ruse fall victim to identity theft or having their computer taken hostage for ransom or as a tool for further phishing.

The travesty in all of this is that the DNC security was lacking. A similar attempt to hack the RNC was unsuccessful due to better security.

The information that was released to the public via Wikileaks was not composed by Russia but constituted actual emails among the DNC party elite. The damage was self-inflicted and the outrage is misplaced. Liberals complain that the release swung the election in favor of Donald Trump but that is difficult to defend as the liberal media refused to dwell on the disturbing content of the emails and insulated a vast majority of the voting public from a damaging review and analysis of their impact.

Now, the Obama Administration has “sanctioned’ Russia by expelling diplomats. Where was the outrage and sanction of Chinese hackers who pulled off the largest theft of data ever when 21 million personal records of current and former government employees was accomplished in a breach of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which is the equivalent of the Human Resources department of the federal government? In two cases (in one case over 1 million fingerprint records were pilfered, in the second over 21 million SSNs and other personal data were compromised) our Government cyber-security was found wanting.  Other successful hacking attempts of Government databases should also have been cause for considerable concern and possible action and/or sanctions. In 2015 the IRS was hacked and 104,000 tax returns were compromised. In 2009, the Veterans Administration lost a hard drive with personal information on 70 million veterans. In another snafu, the lost information on an additional 25 million veterans and had to pay a substantial settlement.

There are many other examples of our Government being hacked, which is a significant issue (here, here, here, and here).  There are even more incidents of private organizations being hacked but for which the Obama Administration feels no compelling need to intervene in and make a public issue of the integrity of our democracy (here).

According to ITRC statistics here are the numbers:

The reality is there are many hacking attempts annually throughout the US and many targeted at the US Government.  If the Obama Administration were truly concerned about the integrity of our institutions and citizens, they would be much more aggressive with actual breaches of government data than private breaches of individual’s emails.

The entire situation around the election was due to lax care of information.  Whether John Podesta or in the case of Hillary Clinton’s email server, these are self-inflicted and we should not lose site of the fact that these individuals were reckless and careless with information.