Democratic officials were urged to begin encrypting their communications in the weeks before thousands of internal party emails were published online by WikiLeaks, Vanity Fair reported Friday.
Although roughly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails were ultimately published by the antisecrecy website on the eve of the party’s convention in Philadelphia last month, the impact may have been much more significant had staffers not already been told to start exercising additional security measures due to fears of a potential leak.
The warnings reportedly began with a May 17 meeting in which Marc Elias, the general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, reportedly made two recommendations in particular to Democratic officials, according to Vanity Fair: install an encrypted messaging application for their smartphones called Signal, and stop using the word “Trump” while communicating with one another.
Attendees at the meeting were told that Signal has been touted by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and were encouraged to use the app especially if they planned on saying anything “remotely contentious or disparaging” about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Vanity Fair reported citing sources familiar with the meeting.
While directing Democrats to avoid making disparaging comments about the GOP opponent in the face of a potential data breach likely warranted little further instruction, an email sent to DNC staffers around one week later reportedly provided a guide on how to install Signal, an app for both iOS and Android devices that uses end-to-end encryption to secure phone calls and text messages sent between any two people. – READ MORE
