The United States’ intelligence community has been in a frenzy the last few weeks as it reacts to the massive hack of the Democratic National Convention. The FBI and other intelligence agencies have indicated that Russia was most likely behind the 20,000 emails leaked on the eve of the DNC – emails which cast serious doubt on whether or not the Democratic Party was playing fair with Bernie Sanders, and which forced the chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz,to resign. The conclusion so far is that the threat of a foreign power interfering in the election is real. Hillary Clinton echoed this fear, saying that she “wants everyone – Democrat, Republican, and Independent – to understand the real threat that this represents.”
Except the threat isn’t Russia. Russia may very well be trying to disrupt the election process with the hack, but that only works when there’s something juicy to work with. It’s not as if these emails were fabricated. Had Russia not released the emails, the underlying corruption would still be there. The institutional bias for Clinton would still be there. The careless disregard for voters would still be there. The only difference would be that these details would have remained secret. Instead of voters being outraged, they’d be ignorant. Is it really best to advocate for ignorance? Is it best for people to be voting with their conscience if that conscience is based on a lie? This is basically an Edward Snowden moment, and by far the bigger problem is not that Russia made the filth public, but that the filth exists. The corruption in our political machinery is real and that’s what’s at issue.
It’s careless to categorize the freedom of information as a greater threat than corruption and to say that sweeping all these problems under the rug would have been preferable. All that does is keep the vultures in power. It preserves a hollow democratic system that can be easily manipulated for the preservation of itself. Any political strategy that relies on withholding knowledge and propagating ignorance is a strategy incompatible with Democracy, and the public is quickly getting fed up with those tactics.
If Clinton really wants to eliminate the threat, she can start by fixing her own party. Although the media was quick to denounce Trump as treasonous when he suggested Russia should hack some more of the Democrat’s emails, more transparency isn’t a bad thing. The only real threat that Information can present is when it’s selective, and in this case it was selective in Trump’s favor. Maybe those 20,000 emails paint a false picture of actual events, but if that’s the case, why not release everything? Better yet, every citizen should be demanding more transparency in the political process. If political parties want to keep getting financed for their primaries or get a government detail to protect their candidates, they can pay up by releasing all of their emails. They can pay up by being accountable to this country’s democratic principles.
In short, it’s not Putin’s fault that we suddenly lack confidence in the political process. It’s imbecilic to worry about a foreign power corrupting our election when already we’ve done it ourselves.