Ultimate Extortion

One political type made an accurate point about all the Hillary emails, of which there have been thousands, that being none from Bernie or Donald have appeared.  He asked why we haven’t seen any from Trump?  Could be the Trump group has better security?  Absolute security is easy and almost free, if you want to use it.  It is a certainty that Hillary was careless about security.  The reason is simple.  Neither she nor her team fully understood how easy hacking can be. 

One thing I've learned is many of those at premier levels do not respond well to new things.  To plead ignorance or amateur status, they expose themselves to themselves and to others.  Old hands have trouble with new events and new concepts. So, they hide it or ignore what's happening.  Another reason exists, perhaps about Trump but certainly about others.  

We generalize beyond Donald as he is unlikely to win the election.  Why can it not be so that multiple, maybe hundreds, of important politicians have been hacked of an assortment of electronic records? First, if one uses gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or any of the other services, whatever they transmit still exists on corporate servers - to which dozens, probably hundreds, have access.   These people, with Hillary as the prototype, become incredibly vulnerable to manipulation ans exposure. Even those using .gov and state government services, as we’ve seen, are also vulnerable (IRS, Office of Personnel Management, NSC, U.S. Department of Justice, Arizona and Illinois voting records  and more).  It is common knowledge, but rarely reported here, that other governments have been widely hacked.  Hacking of colleges for data and corporations of both data and corporate designs are rampant (LinkedIn, Target, Niemann-Marcus, Yahoo, UC Berkeley, Med-Star Health, and dozens more).

Even Mary, Queen of Scots, message, who actually used secret codes, was hacked in a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth, and then she was hacked (1586) in a more permanent way.

Here’s the big point.  The dump of Hillary's emails may just be the proof of concept, the willingness by bad actors to release and destroy unless ...  When applied to hundreds of political and other important people, this could amount to the ultimate international extortion at a level beyond anything seen before in human history.  Moreover, we may never know, while we lose everything due to extorted inaction.

Recommendation. Serious regulations need to be enacted for email and electronic protection for all public figures and records. Secure methods exist.  Really smart people use them.  Why can’t the US government?