The Media Must Prepare for Another Hack-and-Leak

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Lawfare
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"The Media Must Prepare for Another Hack-and-Leak," the latest from Janine Zacharia and Andrew Grotto:

The Media Must Prepare for Another Hack-and-Leak
What would it take to make America more resilient against propaganda campaigns?
lawfareblog.com
9:18 AM · Oct 21, 2020

https://www.lawfareblog.com/media-must-prepare-another-hack-and-leak

The New York Post’s publication of a story about alleged emails belonging to Hunter Biden, supplied to the tabloid by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, has all the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation. Yet if the Post’s story is part of a propaganda campaign by Russia or other actors bent on corrupting American democracy, it is a very clumsy one: The original story was so specious that reporters refused to put their names on it, and even Fox News may have passed on it.

The Post story serves as a kind of warmup for the media, which may face a more newsworthy hack-and-leak scenario soon. Russian intelligence agents from the unit that successfully hacked and leaked the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC’s) emails in 2016 are again trying to break into email accounts of political parties and consultants, Microsoft said last month. In late September, Facebook announced that it had dismantled a propaganda campaign with connections to the same Russian actors. Meanwhile, Google says China and Iran are trying to access email accounts of campaign staffers working for both President Trump’s and Joe Biden’s campaigns via phishing attempts.

With all these indications that another hack-and-leak operation is likely, what would it take to make America more resilient against propaganda campaigns?

In an ideal world, candidates and other public figures—especially the main would-be beneficiaries, Trump and his supporters—would step up and denounce such operations, turning the adversary’s attempt to undermine democracy into a bipartisan affirmation of the integrity of civic discourse. And the Trump administration would marshal a whole-of-government effort to punish and deter Russia and other foreign governments from meddling. These actions would reduce the benefits and increase the costs of hack-and-leak operations.

*snip*