Now that Donald Trump has personally invited Russia to hack into American democracy, let's be clear about just exactly what it's like to live in Russia under the rule of Vladimir Putin. Here’s a glimpse from NPR earlier this week:
Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University and an expert on Russian intelligence whose work often brings him to Moscow, says one of the triumphs of the Putin regime is that everyone thinks they're being spied on, all the time.
"The FSB can't listen to every phone conversation, but everyone assumes that they are," he says. "The FSB can't read every email, but everyone writes emails as if they thought they were. Everyone has a little Putin in their head. Everyone is basically running a little censor. Just in case."
This is exactly the type of paranoia Trump is inviting into our democracy. As Franklin Foer argued, the DNC dump last week didn't reveal state secrets so much as the embarrassing trifles of everyday communication between colleagues.
We should be appalled at the public broadcast of this minutiae. It will have a chilling effect—campaign staffers will now assume they no longer have the space to communicate honestly. This honest communication—even if it’s often trivial or dumb—is important for the process of arriving at sound strategy and sound ideas. (To be sure, the DNC shouldn’t need privacy to know that attacking a man for his faith is just plain gross.) Open conversation, conducted with the expectation of privacy, is the necessary precondition for the formation of collective wisdom and consensus. If we eviscerate the possibility of privacy in politics, we increase the likelihood of poor decision-making.
So when Trump entreats Putin to hack away, what he's really stoking in America is that constant feeling that someone is looking over your shoulder, monitoring your every communication—that some frivolous ill-conceived missive might suddenly be open for mass consumption. Welcome to Trump’s America, courtesy of Russia.