The (alleged) Russian hack of the DNC should be one of the biggest stories of the year. Why isn’t it?; Washington Post, 7/26/16

Paul Waldman, Washington Post; The (alleged) Russian hack of the DNC should be one of the biggest stories of the year. Why isn’t it? :

"...[T]here’s something utterly bizarre about the kind of coverage this story is getting. Evidence currently suggests that the Russian government may have attempted to sway the results of the U.S. presidential election. I put that in italics, because it ought to be in screaming 72-point headlines on every front page in America. And yet, it’s being treated like just one more odd story in a wacky election year, not much more important than the latest fundraising numbers or which ethnic group Donald Trump has insulted most recently...

That being said, this hack represents something profoundly different from what we’ve seen before. We’ve known that foreign intelligence services from countries like China and Russia have in the past attempted to infiltrate not only government networks but those of other political organizations and actors, like the parties. What distinguishes this attack is that it wasn’t just for the purposes of surveillance. They weren’t trying to figure out what Americans are up to, they were trying to intervene to change the results of our election. Goldsmith suggests some even more frightening possibilities:

What if the hackers interspersed fake but even more damning or inflammatory emails that were hard to disprove? What if hackers break in to computers to steal or destroy voter registration information? What if they disrupted computer-based voting or election returns in important states during the presidential election? The legitimacy of a presidential election might be called into question, with catastrophic consequences. The DNC hack is just the first wave of possible threats to electoral integrity in the United States—by foreign intelligence services, and others.

For all we know, the DNC hack was a trial run for something much more ambitious."