Hide it better

From Concern Over Colin Powell’s Hacked Emails Becomes a Fear of Being Next by Michael D. Shear and Nicholas Fandos.

A panicked network anchor went home and deleted his entire personal Gmail account. A Democratic senator began rethinking the virtues of a flip phone. And a former national security official gave silent thanks that he is now living on the West Coast.

The digital queasiness has settled heavily on the nation’s capital and its secretive political combatants this week as yet another victim, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, fell prey to the embarrassment of seeing his personal musings distributed on the internet and highlighted in news reports.

“There but for the grace of God go all of us,” said Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council spokesman for President Obama who now works in San Francisco. He said thinking about his own email exchanges in Washington made him cringe, even now.

I have long speculated that there was a possibility that the internet, and its absence of security, might have the unintended consequence of making people more ethical. In religion, the existence of an omnipotent being who can see your every action and thought, serves, at least to some small degree, as a moderator of personal behaviors and thinking. If all your bad thoughts are on display, then you have an incentive to constrain bad thoughts.

My speculation was that nothing is secure on the internet and therefore people would eventually realize that everything they say and do is ultimately visible. In that environment, perhaps secular people might begin to constrain bad thoughts and actions.

The article by Fandos and Shear would seem to indicate that my optimism is misplaced.

Washington may be behind other big cities in learning that lesson. Bankers on Wall Street have favored very brief emails since their conversations were splashed across front pages because of lawsuits filed after the financial crisis. In 2010, Goldman Sachs executives used the acronym “LDL,” for “let’s discuss live,” when a conversation turned at all sensitive.

Hank Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs chief executive, refuses to use email. Ben S. Bernanke, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, once set up an email account under the pseudonym Edward Quince in the hopes of greater privacy.

Similar precautions have been common in Silicon Valley since a 2009 Chinese state cyberattack on servers at Google and other tech companies. In Hollywood, a breach at Sony Pictures in 2014 spilled out gossipy secrets and persuaded film crews, actors and executives alike to adopt security measures they once considered paranoid. Studios have turned to a new class of companies with names like WatchDox that wrap screenplays with encryption, passwords and monitoring systems that can track who has access to confidential files.

People are realizing that indeed the internet is insecure. Rather than moderate their behavior and communications, they are simply trying to find more secure ways to behave as they did before. So much for naive moral optimism.