Russian and American governments went back and forth at each other with accusations flying all over about the recent documents which had been stolen from the hack of the Democratic National Committee and the email account of Hillary Clinton’s email campaign.
Other people have argued that the emails for former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton are fair game for hacking because they were not supposed to be held on a private server at the time she was serving the government. If they had not been on a private server and been on the provided government server as they should be, they could have been subjected to freedom of information requests and would have been made available to the general public easily.
This notion might be true and all but it also does not change the fact that the private server also holds her private emails which means that the correspondence of such public figures is being hacked by hackers who are apparently acting on the directions of a foreign government. These private emails are then being easily loaded onto the Internet for everyone who wants to peruse and the victims do nit get a say or a chance to give context to the leaked information.
For American voters, the leaks have clearly left them with a dilemma, as noted by Rob Guidry, the CEO of social media analytics company Sc2 and the former special adviser to the US Central Command. He said that hackers wanted to see the information that was being hacked, but they did seem a little bit worried with how the information was gotten.
He also noted one strange thing which was that many of the media outlets which are covering the elections have now decided to look at WikiLeaks and its files to get any information they would have easily gotten through a Freedom of Information request in previous years.
Richard Stiennon, author of There Will Be Cyberwar and chief strategy officer of Blancco Technology Group, a Georgia based security firm said that the hack of the Democratic congressional campaigns and the leak of stolen emails was ham fisted in a way, but this was just the escalation of the Russian disinformation campaign.
He also said that Americans could potentially disagree with the final results of the election if it continued like this. Mistrust could be born if the election was close in the end. Even after the elections, the hacking will not stop.
Therefore the issue is the US is going to fight back, but how. The White House secretary, Josh Earnest, said that the hacks were not going to go unanswered when he said in regard to a response they were going to ensure that the US response was going to be proportional.
When the US eventually fights back, some fallout is surely to be expected on the Internet and users have to watch out, especially if the battle will drag on as a tit for tat battle.
