ALSO SEE: FBI Investigates Hacking of Democratic Party Organization

The Rush to Blame Russia for the DNC Email Hack Is Premature

By Trevor Timm, Guardian UK

26 July 16

There is some circumstantial evidence that the hack may have originated in Russia, but there are many questions that haven’t been resolved

ince WikiLeaks published the DNC’s hacked emails on Sunday, there has been a flurry of accusations – including from the Hillary Clinton campaign – that Russian president Vladimir Putin orchestrated both the hack and the leak, in an attempt to help Donald Trump win the presidency.

First, it would certainly be disturbing if Russia is trying to affect our democratic process, but maybe we should wait until we see actual evidence before deciding, as some have, that Putin ordered hackers to help swing the US election on the eve of the Democratic convention?

It’s amazing how quickly the media are willing to forgo any skepticism and jump to conspiracy-tinged conclusions where Putin is involved. He has been linked to everything from Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, Greece and Spain. People treat him like an omnipotent mastermind who secretly and effortlessly controls world events. Here’s an idea: maybe we should stop giving him so much credit?

Yes, there is some circumstantial evidence that the hack may have originated in Russia, but there are also many questions that haven’t been resolved. As Adam Johnson detailed, when you look closely, the evidence is shoddy and often contradictory. Even in the New York Times article that spent dozens of paragraphs speculating about Russian involvement concluded at the bottom: “It may take months, or years, to figure out the motives of those who stole the emails, and more important, whether they were being commanded by Russian authorities, and specifically by Putin.”

The bulk of the “evidence” has come from the statements of cybersecurity firms FireEye and Crowdstrike, both of which have lucrative contracts with the US government. As FireEye’s CEO once made clear, his company has a financial stake in nation-state hacking tensions.

If the allegations involving Russia are true, there are plenty more logical motivations besides evil genius-level electioneering, and the media should probably stop feigning shock that a country would stoop to this level. As Edward Snowden pointed out on Twitter with an accompanying NSA document, “Our government specifically authorized the hacking of political parties.” The US has also considered hacking and then releasing sensitive and embarrassing information in China in retaliation for cybersecurity attacks, as the New York Times reported last year.

This is not to say people should not be angry or upset if Russia is trying to influence American politics, but if the US wants to place blame at the feet of the Russians, they should do so transparently and in public, without leaving it to anonymous officials and cybersecurity firms to make claims without providing hard evidence. The US started down this course during the Sony hack last year, and in this case, transparency might be the best deterrent in the future – which, by the way, is something both Snowden and the Snowden-hating national security blog Lawfare argued on Monday.

Beyond the geopolitical implications, this whole affair also brings up another issue that has been greatly debated over the past year: end-to-end encryption. Possibly the most ironic of all the emails consisted of a DNC official calling a BuzzFeed article “the dumbest thing I’ve ever read”. The article suggested both parties’ national committees had no idea what they were doing when it came to cybersecurity.

If politics led to logical conclusions, the disastrous hack of the DNC might encourage the party to take a much stronger stance embracing end-to-end encryption, which is a cybersecurity tool as much as a privacy enhancer. For example, if the DNC were communicating over WhatsApp – which is fully end-to-end encrypted so that anyone who breached WhatsApp’s servers would not have access to the content of the messages – they would have made it much harder for the hackers. In fact, Congressman Ted Lieu castigated his colleagues earlier this year for not using end-to-end encryption when communicating with staffers – for precisely the reason that it left them open to observation by foreign spies.

But we don’t live in a logical world, so we can probably look forward to politicians continuing to stoke cybersecurity fears and escalating international tensions without doing anything effective about it.

From Anita Hill to Gretchen Carlson, a Myth About Sexual Harassment Victims That Just Won't Die

By Bryce Covert, ThinkProgress

26 July 16

n old line of attack against those who speak out against sexual harassment is surfacing once again in response to allegations against recently ousted Fox News executive Roger Ailes. After former host Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit against Ailes, eliciting similar stories from a number of other women who worked for him, many pundits are publicly questioning why they worked with him and even praised him at the same time that he was harassing them.

While it may seem contradictory, there are plenty of reasons for victims of harassment to stay silent and keep trying to build their careers. Doing so can still go hand in hand with enduring abuse.

When initially asked about the lawsuit, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said he thought the allegations were “unfounded.” He went further on Meet the Press this Sunday, casting doubt on some of the women because they worked with Ailes and said positive things about him.

“I can tell you that some of the women that are complaining, I know how much he’s helped them. And even recently. And when they write books that are fairly recently released, and they say wonderful things about him. And now all of a sudden they’re saying these horrible things about him,” he said.

Trump’s not the first to make this defense. Ailes himself has made it. Besides the public lawsuit from Carlson, Ailes has reportedly been accused of harassing Fox host Megyn Kelly, who told an internal investigation into Ailes’s behavior of her experiences early in her career. In response, Ailes’s lawyer told the New York Times, “Roger Ailes has never sexually harassed Megyn Kelly. In fact, he has spent much of the last decade promoting and helping her to achieve the stardom she earned, for which she has repeatedly and publicly thanked him.”

Ailes hinted at a similar self defense in his farewell letter to Fox after he was ousted. “I take particular pride in the role that I have played advancing the careers of the many women I have promoted to executive and on-air positions,” he said. “Many of these talented journalists have deservedly become household names known for their intelligence and strength, whether reporting the news, fair and balanced, and offering exciting opinions on our opinion programs.”

Even the media has fallen into this line of thinking. In a sit-down interview with Carlson, New York Times reporters John Koblin and Jim Rutenberg wrote of “a series of handwritten notes that Ms. Carlson sent Mr. Ailes late last year” in which “she told him that she would love to stay at Fox and asked for additional opportunities at the network.” They asked her “why she was seeking better assignments if she felt she was a victim of harassment.”

Carlson had this to say in response: “I think it’s hard when you’ve been a victim — you keep thinking things are going to get better.”

Carlson is right: many victims end up dealing with their abuse and harassment by simply trying to push through to better opportunities, especially when faced with few good options.

Many women find themselves subject to harassment from men who hold positions of power and can be an indispensable boon to their careers — or a giant roadblock if they are crossed. According to many women’s stories of their treatment from Roger Ailes, that was a role he exploited often. Most women say he propositioned them or said inappropriate comments in business meetings about how he could help further their careers. Ailes bragged to one woman about all the others he had gotten sexual favors from in exchange for helping them advance. He told another as she struggled to get out of an unwanted embrace, “Well, you know no girls get a job here unless they’re cooperative.”

That’s a common tactic harassers use. “It’s Sexual Harassment 101,” said Jennifer Reisch, legal director at Equal Rights Advocates. “You can say, ‘Do this or I’ll fire you,’ or you can say, ‘Do this and I’ll promote you.'”

Some victims may try to come forward right away; at least one woman who says she was harassed by Ailes did. A woman using the pseudonym Susan says when she was 16 she went to audition for a part on The Mike Douglas Show, where Ailes was a producer, late in the evening, when he brought her into his office, locked the door, took his genitals out of his pants, and told her to “kiss them.” Some years later she wrote up her experience and sent it around to the media, but she couldn’t get anyone to publish or cover it.

And that’s not an uncommon reaction to a woman who says she’s been harassed. Many of them are met with disbelief and inaction — so the incentive to come forward is that much weaker. “People have to make choices about how they navigate that situation,” Reisch said. “We don’t give women a whole lot of safe choices to make.”

Coming forward can have enormous negative consequences for an accuser. She may not only face public character attacks, but also risk losing her job and the career opportunities she may have been working toward.

Carlson claims her contract wasn't renewed because she rebuffed Ailes's advances. Rudi Bakhtiar, a former Fox News on-air employee, told the New York Times that she was propositioned by a different Fox employee and was fired when she rejected him. Other women who have come forward say they were blacklisted: one woman told New York Magazine that after she turned Ailes down, a meeting she had set up to sign a major contract was canceled, and she was later told it was because Ailes had put out the word that she shouldn't be hired.

"If the person who is harassing you is someone who is really important not just in your company but in your industry, you have to worry not only will this make it impossible for me to continue to work here, but...what kind of black mark am I putting by my name by speaking up," said Emily Martin, vice president for workplace justice at the National Women's Law Center.

So there is a great deal of risk and often little gain for taking action. Instead, many victims try to put up with the harassment and avoid their abuser as best as they can. In a major report on workplace harassment, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that only a very small sliver of victims say anything about it or take formal steps against abuse. Instead, the most common response is to keep the job and stay quiet. "The vast majority of women who are experiencing sexual harassment are very likely working with the people who are harassing them," said Reisch.

It's no big leap, then, to imagine that victims will still try to further their careers by accepting opportunities from their harassers and by publicly thanking them when those opportunities arise. "There is a very good reason for saying nice things about your boss in public," Martin pointed out. "Lots of us have had bosses that in private we talk about differently than when we talk in public. That's not a unique experience."

"Even if you have experienced harassment, you may still think that you really need to protect your own job and protect your own interests," she added. "Often doing that will mean saying nice things about the person who has power over your job and over your professional future."

The country has long wrestled with these issues. This same line of questioning came up a quarter century ago during one of the most important, breakthrough discussions of sexual harassment: the Anita Hill hearings. In 1991, when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was nominated to the bench, Hill went public with allegations that Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

In the hearings over Hill's allegations, the senators who questioned her seemed baffled as to why she stayed silent and kept a working relationship with Thomas.

“If what you say this man said to you occurred...why in God’s name would you ever speak to a man like that the rest of your life?" former Senator Alan Simpson asked. He called the fact that she stayed in touch with him after he was no longer her boss "most puzzling and contradictory."

In response, Hill explained why a victim might behave in such a way. "I was afraid of retaliation, I was afraid of damage to my professional life," she said. "One of the things I have come to understand about harassment, this response, this kind of response is not atypical."

Twenty-five years later, it's still true that this reaction is typical. And yet this line of reasoning in defense of those who stand accused of harassment -- that if a woman continues a positive professional relationship with her harasser then she must be lying about her experience -- continues to emerge.

"We put these double standards out there for how women are supposed to speak up and tell their stories," Reisch pointed out, "and yet when they do, everything they've decided to do and every reaction is questioned."