QUESTION ASKED: Are We In a New Era of Espionage?

The release of the surreptitiously gathered information, either to tip an election in one direction or just to sow disorder, is novel—especially in the context of American elections. During the 2008 and 2012 cycles, political campaigns came under cyberattack, but if anything was stolen, it was never shared with the public.

Despite the unique nature of this intervention, the 2016 cyberattacks square with Russian intelligence techniques reaching as far back as the Cold War. It’s an evolution of the Soviet Union’s “active measures,” a tactic favored by the KGB that involved covertly spreading politically damaging fictions in order to seed discord in an enemy. Houghton pointed to an example: Operation INFEKTION, a Soviet misinformation campaign in the 1980s that claimed the U.S. Army had created the AIDS virus at a research facility in Maryland. The Soviet Union pushed the story particularly hard in Africa, where AIDS epidemics had broken out in several countries, and where the Kremlin was wrestling with the U.S. for influence.

“What we’re seeing, essentially, is a long-running, old, traditional struggle, perhaps being conducted in new ways with new technology,” said John Hughes-Wilson, a former British intelligence officer and the author of The Secret State, a history of espionage. “Do you not think the CIA is working hard—I bloody well hope they are, actually—to try and do stuff in Russia? I mean, why do you guys pay your taxpayer dollars?”

There’s very little that can be done to save hubristic politicians and their enablers from themselves. And there’s plenty of evidence now that the DNC emails weren’t hacked by Russians, but leaked by Democrats.

We can and should however hack-proof our elections by requiring photo ID, paper ballots, and ink-stained fingers.