The Plot to Hack America

However, this hack was unprecedented. The exposure of all of the internal discussions on the processes, procedures, strategy, beliefs, and thoughts of every staffer at the DNC from Debbie Wasserman Schultz down to the concerned citizen who calls and leaves a voice mail, was staggering. Any innocent comment could be turned into a political flamethrower. All discussions could be framed as conspiracies. The question at hand for the DNC became not who conducted the hack, but what would they do with the information.

Watergate 1.0

In 1972, President Richard Nixon, through his proxies in the White House called “The Plumbers” and in coordination with the Committee to Reelect the President (aka CREEP), sent five men into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the offices at the luxurious Watergate hotel in Washington DC. The burglars had orders to install wiretaps, break into safes, and copy files to find out exactly what opposition research the Democrats had on Nixon in the months before the election. Although he won the presidential election, by August of 1973, the political scandal of covering up the crime led to Nixon being the first President to resign in disgrace.

The 2016 DNC hack conducted forty-four years later—almost to the day—was the exact same operation. However, this time there would be no security guard to detect the intrusion, and the burglars would not be caught wearing latex gloves and planting microphones. They would copy the information in a matter of seconds, their digital fingerprints would emerge long after the break-in, and discovery would occur well after the damage had been done to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

There were a myriad of suspects on the political stage from Trump supporters to Black Hat members of Anonymous, the shadowy hacker collective that sought to expose hidden secrets though public sun lighting. Though the DNC is a political machine that managed the Democratic Party and the campaigns of its members to office, it also operates as the framework to express the political aspirations of a huge proportion of the American electorate.

When President Barack Obama won re-election to the Presidency in 2012, he won over 65 million votes representing 51.1 percent of American voters. The management team for that electoral success was the DNC. They not only represent the candidates, but once the candidates are selected the DNC is the principle agency for the grooming, funding, and support to meet the goals of the party. Now, all of their internal secrets were stolen.

The general understanding at the time was that the DNC could contain the damage resulting from the hack, and the DNC claimed that nothing had been pilfered.¹

The general inner workings were relatively tame so long as they were not in the public domain. In June 2016, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz stated that,

The security of our system is critical to our operation and to the confidence of the campaigns and state parties we work with… When we discovered the intrusion, we treated this like the serious incident it is and reached out to CrowdStrike immediately. Our team moved as quickly as possible to kick out the intruders and secure our network.²

After the April hack had been discovered, the analytical study of what was stolen was compiled. Crowdstrike and DNC officials figured out very quickly that the attack was broad and that the hackers had access for as long as ninety or more days where they entered and exited the servers and reviewed and took what they pleased. However, there was an early indicator of the intent of the intrusion.