John Podesta fell for a phishing scam. Let's not start another Cold War over that.

John Podesta in New York on Nov. 8, 2016. (Photo: Peter Foley, epa)

If there’s any single statement that Barack Obama probably wishes he could undo, it was his mockery of Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debates. Referring to Romney’s characterization of Russia as America’s greatest geopolitical foe, Obama said the 1980s are now calling, and they want their foreign policy back.

Now of course, Democrats are up in arms about the Russians, sounding like madcap John Birchers from the 1960s. As Twitter wag IowaHawk noted, they didn’t get upset when Russia invaded Crimea, they didn’t throw down when Russia shot down a civilian airliner over Ukraine, but stealing John Podesta’s password via a phishing scam is apparently grounds for restarting the Cold War. Well, only one of these crimes constitutes a threat to Democrats’ political power.

It’s easy to mock the Democrats’ hysteria over all this, which seems mostly like an inability to accept that they lost an election they thought was in the bag. Instead, they blame a password-phishing scam that John Podesta fell for like somebody’s technologically-challenged grandmother. (Another IowaHawk tweet: “Breaking: State Dept expels 20 Nigerian diplomats after John Podesta fails to receive $1 million wire transfer from nephew of General Okezi.”) And, partly to cover for Hillary and to delegitimize Trump, much of the press has talked about “election hacking” in a way that suggests — entirely falsely — that the Russians were changing votes instead of (maybe) being the ones who copied embarrassing emails from John Podesta and gave them to Wikileaks. (I say “maybe” because some people, like Ars Technica’s security editor Dan Goodin, don’t think that the Obama Administration has made the case that the Russians were behind it.)

But there’s more to the story, and some of it is worth more than mockery.

Whoever stole John Podesta’s emails (and if I were a betting man, I’d bet it was the Russians) was able to do so because of basic failures in email security. Those failures have been a hallmark of this administration — we’ve had several really major hacks by foreign intelligence services including one characterized by experts as a cyber Pearl Harbor and yet none created the hysteria that Podesta’s emails have. Hillary’s private, illegal email server was almost certainly compromised by foreign intelligence services, and if so, had she been elected president she may have been open to blackmail and manipulation.

So let’s look ahead: In the next administration, we need to pay a lot more attention to cyber security. People love to be online — Obama famously refused to give up his Blackberry when he took office, even though experts thought it insecure, even with modifications. But anything that’s online is vulnerable to hacking. In Neal Stephenson’s futuristic novel The Diamond Age, all the really important people do everything, from correspondence to reading the news, on paper, in part because it’s more secure. That future may soon be our present, at least if we want to be safe from spies.

We also need to pay more attention to civil society, which all the post-election denial and hysteria aren’t helping with. Of course Russia tries to manipulate our politics, just as the United States has historically manipulated the politics of other countries, most notably Europe after World War II, when we secretly funded moderate-left parties in order to prevent electoral victories by communists. (Some say we should be doing something similar now to stop Putin-allied parties from winning in Europe.)

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

But politics are easier to manipulate when people are divided and distrustful. And leaked documents are more strategically valuable when the leakers get to decide when they come out. A society in which — as even Anthony Bourdain has noted — “privileged liberals” show “utter contempt” for the working class is a society with divisions that are easy to exploit. And if journalists had been doing their job, instead of going 100% in the tank for Hillary, the news captured in the Podesta emails would have been reported by someone else long before, instead of being released at the last minute.

But, as Michael Tracey notes, lefty media outfits like Mother Jones have a business incentive to stoke the hysteria, and many journalists are hysterical themselves: “They are unwell. A lot of them have literally been driven crazy by Trump. Constant, daily, unremitting hysteria will do that to a person eventually, and social media (namely Twitter) only amplifies the effect.”

Indeed it does. For a nation to flourish, it needs a political class possessed of self-discipline, and one that values the long-term interests of the nation. We don’t have one of those. So hang on. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2hL36bo