One of the best lines of the U.S. presidential race so far comes from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. “It’s sad to think right now,” he joked in the first round of Republican presidential debates, “but probably the Russian and Chinese governments know more about Hillary Clinton’s email server than do the members of the United States Congress.”
A cheeky zinger with a serious point: It would be alarming if, as U.S. intelligence veterans worry, Chinese, Russian and other hackers were able to steal U.S. secrets through Mrs. Clinton’s private email server.
Yet the cybertheft would also be perversely appropriate. Because for all their differences, Mrs. Clinton’s email schemes and the Chinese and Russian cyber campaigns share a certain symmetry: They all rely on the fact that in cyberspace, it’s easier to misbehave and, if caught, easier to brazen it out.
To most people, the digital world is an esoteric abstraction. So we generally have a hard time recognizing the severity of misdeeds committed in cyberspace. Consider the upstanding citizens who would never shoplift yet download pirated music and movies. Among other effects, such permissiveness gives an asymmetric advantage to anyone who wants to exploit it, from individuals like Mrs. Clinton to the hacker armies of China and Russia.
Tech lingo often makes things worse. Yes, Mrs. Clinton used a private server to handle her emails as secretary of state. But that description is anodyne compared with the less technical reality: Before assuming one of the most sensitive jobs in government, she devised a unique personal system to hide tens of thousands of public documents. Later, facing a congressional investigation, she deleted whatever she wanted, in effect tossing stolen goods into a backyard bonfire.
The destruction of evidence recalls the 18-and-a-half minutes of conversation excised from Richard Nixon’s Oval Office recordings, but the Clinton camp wants voters to think her email affair is much more complicated, and far less outrageous, than Nixon’s tape-tampering. Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri recently deflected questions by saying: “Now everybody’s an expert on wiping servers. I don’t know how all that works.” In other words: Nothing to see here but tech mumbo-jumbo.
As for misbehavior on a macro scale, China’s efforts thrive on technical opacity and a kind of overwhelming force that seems to inure Americans to abuses. The 2013 Blair-Huntsman commission found that China’s anti-U.S. industrial espionage had amounted to “the greatest wealth transfer in history.” The Obama administration assumes that Chinese hackers this year purloined the medical records of some 80 million Americans insured by Anthem—one in four people nationwide. Previous targets in America of what U.S. officials say were Chinese hackers have included gas pipelines, the electric grid and nuclear labs.
Russian hackers—thought to be less numerous but more sophisticated than their Chinese counterparts—have targeted U.S. corporate giants and America’s European allies. A 2007 assault paralyzed Estonia’s government ministries, parliament, banks and media. Estonia is an ex-Soviet state entitled to protection as a member of NATO. A European official asked then, “If a member state’s communications center is attacked with a missile, you call it an act of war. So what do you call it if the same installation is disabled with a cyberattack?” NATO still doesn’t have an answer.
China and Russia wouldn’t likely carry out such assaults if they required attacking convoys of Brink’s trucks, or deploying agents into hospital archives with Minox spy cameras, or blasting through infrastructure cables on foreign soil. But digital-era theft, invasion of privacy and sabotage are quicker, murkier transgressions. Even when Beijing and Moscow are identified as perpetrators, many victims seem to respond with little more than a shrug.
Hillary Clinton must be hoping that most Americans will ultimately shrug about her email abuses, too. At the moment, though, it appears from her sliding poll numbers that many Americans have started to see through the digital haze and draw analogies to old-fashion wrongdoing.
In all these cases, small and large, the jury is still out. Meanwhile U.S. intelligence officials will continue diverting scarce time and attention to the task of trying to figure out what advantages China, Russia and other adversaries may have gained if there was a convergence of their hacking campaigns and Mrs. Clinton’s email shenanigans.
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