Garrett Graff

The mounting human death toll and unfolding financial calamity of the current pandemic is one thing. But the ripple effects will last for years—and given the country’s bumbled handling of the virus itself, it seems an open question whether we’re in a strong position to respond and confront what comes after it. The US's ongoing, disastrous response to the pandemic—by almost any measure one of the worst in the developed world—is sending a clear message to other countries that the U.S.

Since the 2016 election attack by Russia, public attention has focused on cyberattacks. The risk is getting only worse: The more wired everyday society becomes, the more reliant it is on interlocking technology systems that were never designed with security in mind. The increasing complexity and interconnectedness of the various networks that power everyday life increases the chances of what Jason Matheny calls a “digital flubber” incident—the possibility of an autonomous system working as intended, yet spiraling and cascading with unintended and unforeseen consequences. 

By some accounts, about 40 percent of the world’s population relies on Huawei equipment.

Hillary Clinton comes across in the FBI interviews as a disengaged tech user who sees the communication tools as little more than a means to an end. She has, according to multiple aides, never even learned how to use a desktop computer. Clinton regularly pumped those around her for help with her devices—even those, as her long-time aide Philippe Reines joked to the FBI, whose job had “zero percent” of their responsibilities focused on IT. Reines, whose name is redacted in the FBI files but whose identity is easily discernible, “likened it to your parents asking for technical help with their phone or computer.” Except that what Clinton turned to others for help with wasn’t an Amazon purchase or reading CNN.com: She needed help managing a massive trove of communications about the inner workings of the nation’s diplomacy and national security.

Over the course of five years, those emails lived first in her Chappaqua, New York, basement, then later in a data center in New Jersey, then they were FedExed across the country and possibly copied onto a thumb drive before being printed out, sorted and handed back to the State Department in 12 bankers’ boxes. The boxes soon found themselves at the center of an FBI investigation and led ultimately to the biggest controversy to shadow Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. But it all started with the strange home server.

This is its story.

[Commentary] Federal government lawyers are struggling to grasp the increasingly technical cases that come before them. Both federal prosecutors and the attorneys who represent executive agencies in court are bungling lawsuits across the country because they don’t understand what they’re talking about. Too few lawyers have the skill set or the specialized knowledge to make sense of code, networks and the people who use them, and too few law schools are telling them what they need to know.

[Garrett Graff is a former editor of Politico Magazine]

[Commentary] The government’s lawyers are struggling to grasp the increasingly technical cases that come before them. Both federal prosecutors and the attorneys who represent executive agencies in court are bungling lawsuits across the country because they don’t understand what they’re talking about. Too few lawyers have the skill set or the specialized knowledge to make sense of code, networks and the people who use them, and too few law schools are telling them what they need to know. “It would be enormously helpful to have a deeper bench of lawyers with technical backgrounds,” says Susan Hennessey, a Brookings Institution fellow and former National Security Agency lawyer. This situation is stymieing criminal investigations, upending innocents’ lives and making it harder to set legal boundaries around mass-surveillance programs. The result is that, when it comes to technology, justice is increasingly out of reach.

Today, cyber, data and privacy questions lie at the core of numerous corporate and government cases, and there aren’t anywhere near enough practicing lawyers who can adequately understand the complex issues involved, let alone who can sufficiently explain them in court or advise investigators on how to build a successful case. “This is a problem that pervades all of the national security apparatus,” says Alvaro Bedoya, who previously worked as the chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law, and now leads Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology. “You don’t have a pipeline of lawyers right now who can read code.”

[Garrett Graff is the former editor of Politico Magazine, and is a leading authority on national security, technology, and politics]