Distinctly Vulnerable

I want to recommend Jack Goldsmith’s excellent post at Lawfare, “Uncomfortable Questions”. Whether you’re vehemently anti-Trump, ardently pro-Trump, or something in between, it should make you squirm a bit. Here’s just one of its core insights: our extremely free press renders the United States distinctly vulnerable to phishing attacks of the sort that cracked the Democratic National Committee:

In this light, consider the standard phishing attacks described in Mueller’s indictment, which resulted in the theft and release of Democratic Party information that, in the unregulated U.S. speech environment, went viral and had an enormous impact that still reverberates. (President Obama once described the operation as “not particularly sophisticated.”) There has been a lot of talk and a bit of action about hardening voting systems, cleaning up fake accounts on social media, and cracking down more on propaganda efforts on social media of the type Mueller outlined in his February indictment. But when I read Friday’s indictment I thought: We have done nothing as a nation to redress the tactic of phishing, and once information is stolen and released, there is no possibility of regulating its use in the American free speech environment. Expect much more phishing and related tactics in November and in the 2020 presidential campaign.

To it I’ll add my own observation: if you think that obscurity makes you invulnerable, you probably shouldn’t have your own email server.