Written with Christopher E. Whyte of George Mason University
What would it mean if a country couldn’t keep any secrets?
The question may not be as outlandish as it seems. The hacks of the National Security Agency and the Democratic National Committee represent only the most recent signposts in our evolution toward a post-secrecy society. The ability of governments, companies, and individuals to keep information secret has been evaporating in lock step with the evolution of digital technologies. For individuals, of course, this development raises serious questions about government surveillance and people’s right to privacy. But more broadly, the inability for governments to keep secrets foreshadows a potential sea change in international politics.
To be sure, the U.S. government still maintains many secrets, but today it seems accurate to describe them as “fragile secrets.” The NSA hack is not the first breach of American computer networks, of course, but the nature of the hack reveals just how illusory is our ability to keep secrets. The Snowden affair made clear that the best defense isn’t proof against insider threats. The Shadow Brokers hack – against the NSA’s own top hacker group – has now shown that the best defense isn’t proof against outsider threats either. Even if the Shadow Brokers hack is a fabrication and the information was taken from the NSA in other ways – a traditional human intelligence operation, for instance, where a man with a USB drive managed to download some files – it seems clear that we’re in an era of informational vulnerability.
And what is true for the federal government is even more clearly true for private organizations like the Democratic National Committee. The theft and release of the DNC’s email traffic – likely carried out by Russian government hackers – illustrates that it’s not just official government information at risk. Past years have made it clear that civil society organizations – both venerable (political parties, interest groups, etc.) and questionable (the Church of Scientology, for instance, was the target of a range of disruptive attacks in 2008-‘09) – are as often the targets of digital intrusion as are government institutions.
At this point, it seems fair to think that there is no government or politically-relevant information that couldn’t, at some point, find its way into the hands of a hacker. From there, it is just a short hop into the public domain.