Clinton campaign using Snowden-approved app to foil Putin's hackers
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/how-the-clinton-campaign-is-foiling-the-kremlin
On May 17, as dusk was setting over Brooklyn, around a dozen employees from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and a consultant who worked with the Democratic National Committee, walked through the cavernous halls of the campaign’s office headquarters, which tower over Cadman Plaza’s expansive fields and the elegant federal buildings surrounding them. Through the halls, they wandered past endless posters adorned with blue “H”s bisected by red arrows and posters that proclaimed, “I’m with her.” Eventually, they settled upon an empty conference room. As the Democratic staffers took their seats, they were joined by Marc Elias, the general counsel for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and given a grave warning: from that point forward, they should avoid using one single word in their e-mails.
That word, according to someone with intimate knowledge of the meeting, was one with which they were increasingly familiar: “Trump.”
...
According to reports, the D.N.C. was notified as far back as April that the organization’s servers had been compromised. Consultants from the private security firm CrowdStrike were brought in at the time, but it wasn’t until June that the hackers were kicked out of the server. In the intervening weeks, staffers were told, according to a person who works with the committee, that if anyone was going to communicate about Donald Trump over e-mail or text message, especially if those missives were even remotely contentious or disparaging, it was imperative that they do so using an application called Signal. In July, the trove of e-mails was posted to the Wikileaks Web site. (One of the most damning e-mails found in the D.N.C. archives, which focused on Sanders’s religious beliefs, was sent on May 5, several days after the intrusion was allegedly discovered, and two weeks before staffers were told to use Signal.)
Signal, staffers in the meeting were told, was “Snowden-approved.” A week after the meeting at the campaign headquarters, according to two people who have worked with the D.N.C. and the Clinton campaign, an e-mail was sent out instructing staffers where to download the app and how to use it. Shortly thereafter, the news broke that the D.N.C had been hacked. (Elias did not respond to e-mails and voicemails. A spokesman for the D.N.C. declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.)
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/how-the-clinton-campaign-is-foiling-the-kremlin
I lost track of the number of levels of irony here.
= new reply since forum marked as read
