Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was informed this week that Chinese hackers may have gained access to phones used by the former president and his running mate JD Vance.
According to The New York Times, Chinese hackers are believed to have gained access to data from phones used by the Republican candidates. However, investigators are still trying to determine what data was stolen or examined by the hackers following the telecom system breach.
I mean, Russia and Iran have broken into campaign sites. I suppose China isn’t going to want to miss out on the fun.
I commented earlier that I think that perhaps the government should provide IT services to secure presidential political campaigns. That isn’t a full counter to espionage; poking around in someone’s stuff before they have actually kicked off a campaign might well itself be interesting. But it seems like kind of low-hanging fruit, given that candidates on the campaign trail are clearly being actively, repeatedly, and successfully targeted by foreign intelligence agencies. And those are only the cases that we know about – it’s probably a safe bet that penetrations have occurred that we haven’t been able to pick up on.
And I’m skeptical that political campaigns have the resources and expertise to secure themselves against national intelligence agencies.
I think that this is probably a general issue for democracies. Governments will typically have counterintelligence agencies and policy in place to protect incumbent leaders against espionage. They may or may not be successful, but at least they put the best tools they have on the job. But…in democracies, power can change, candidates are not protected in the same way, and targeting candidates may be a potent way for a foreign intelligence agency to either swing elections or obtain information and leverage useful for down the line, when a candidate has become a new leader.
that only if you trust the incumbent team to play fair
Yeah, that’s true – that’s a risk. You’d have to structure the system in such a way to minimize that. But…you gotta also remember that the existing government also has access to a lot of things like wiretapping capabilities and such; this isn’t our first rodeo with potential for an incumbent to try to abuse government powers.
I can think of legal and oversight structures that can help mitigate risk of an incumbent trying to abuse the US government being responsible for providing that sort of service…but it’s hard to do much about state-level foreign intelligence services otherwise.