My biggest objection during the time we helped remove Qaddafi was not a condemnation of regime change, but "what's the precedent?" Unless you're the Supreme Court in 2000 writing a "one-time-use-only" clause into your work, or even if, there's the constant concern in both foreign and domestic policy that a new clever "remedy" will be copied and extended in ways we find unreasonable but ways the bastardizers think wholly fair. Thus part of the history of how Republicans have mimicked and abused Democratic strategy in the Senate or amazingly refused to take any action on a Supreme Court nominee based on a fairly meaningless comment by Biden lots of years ago.

The use of hacked information is not new, and in the case of the Arab Spring, the Wikileaks trove seemed to bring some pretty useful and not too damaging information that ushered in some transparency in a world known for backroom dealings and hypocritical activities. Details of how the US treated prisoners at Abu Ghraib along with the misdeeds of US contractors signaled a watershed moment - not as profound a response as hoped, but still, some light on what was being hushed up as "national security" when in fact it was simply government overreach and abuse. Snowden squared the circle with his releases a couple years later, throwing the spotlight on government surveillance, intentional shell games to avoid compliance with Congressional and court mandates, and a whole different scale to snooping than some had believed before (though others like EmptyWheel had long believed we were just seeing the tip of the iceberg from hints as far back as September 2001 and earlier).

But these weren't really "hacks" - they were more inside jobs, whistle blowers, arguably people who did this for good reason whether they left themselves open to 'face the music" or not, and despite a crazy journalist publishing the password on one collection (saying he thought it'd expired - duh), it was mostly treated responsibly, including vetting of information and data through traditional respected news publishers, and careful elimination of personal data.

But "ClimateGate" was different. This was a hack intended to expose the subterfuge of climate scientists, and true to intent, any word or phrase from numerous documents were used to somehow expose "nefarious" intent on those in the relatively slow and plodding field of climate science, to make that case that they were all colluding to pass off a bill of goods they didn't actually believe in. The "meaning of is is" semantics crews would be proud. But surely with all the press, there must have been some actual scandal, some smoking gun? Eh, not really.

After the emails were released, every investigative report — from the National Science Foundation Inspector General, NOAA’s Inspector General, Penn State University, University of East Anglica, and the UK Parliament — reached the same conclusion: nothing in the emails in any way altered the overwhelming scientific evidence that the world is warming due to increased levels of pollution.

But that's only one part of the story. Timing is everything. And as they say, a lie can travel the world while the truth is still putting its sneakers on. Given a dump at the right time, there'd be no way to properly contest the information, and the field would be tilted towards the infiltrators. And that's what they did.

The hacked emails were mysteriously dumped in 2009 on a server in Russia at an optimally timed moment as President Obama and world leaders were preparing to head to Copenhagen forge a new global climate agreement. The scientific community was instantly judged guilty in kangaroo courts led by Fox News and other media outlets who chased the story before investigating the facts. Fox News’ Sean Hannity helped lead the charge, declaring:

HANNITY (2009): “it is safe to say that ClimateGate has revealed that global warming and that movement is run by hacks and frauds.”

During the Bush years, the government scandalously used 3rd party contractors to hack and disable independent reporting sites like Glenn Greenwalds - well, a scandal if the news media had really picked up on it, but it's largely forgotten, unlike the slow dredging through Benghazi-inspired (I hate to say "related") emails. Greenwald to his credit admits Wikileaks' standards on data cleaning have gone downhill badly the last 3-4 years, though there's some question whether the psychiatrist office break-in of Daniel Ellsberg was that intrinsically different from convenient hacks at the DNC.

The problem is we're stuck wondering who we've signed on with. Is it Assange trying to get revenge for US government attacks and purported sealed indictments? Or Putin still upset over Crimea and sanctions? Or something to do with Syria & ISIS?

Similar to the ClimateGate incident, there seems to be partial acceptance that "nothing in the emails in any way altered the overwhelming ... evidence" - in this case, that the DNC didn't much care for Sanders (and vice-versa obviously) late in May when things were mostly over, and that there wasn't a lot of smoke to the smoking gun, aside from an earlier never-used request for Sanders' "Jewish" affiliation that missed the point that they wanted a non-practicing Jewish atheist to toss to the lions in hyper-religious America, not a Jewish believer.

But never mind - there was enough for those who wanted to be offended and shocked, and thus the convention eve fights began, timed apparently by Assange himself to damage Hillary and led to the already foregone removal of Debbie Wasserman Shulz - a targeted attack that might often meet with disapproval. But in this case, the now standards-less enemy of one's enemy becomes a friend, or simply an unacknowledged accomplice. Mook's suggestion that Russians were behind this was met by ridicule as some kind of paranoia, while post-convention this assertion has gained a good amount of credence as a growing problem, one where voting machines themselves might be exposed.

Ignoring Trump's bombastic bring-it-on call for Hillary's hacked emails, it does seem we're in a dangerous zone where Russia or Anonymous or Koreans or the famed HBGary/Palantir hackers-for-hire can alter the mood and actual outcomes of the election, and we've already taken a step towards acceptance, especially if the results fall our way. Sadly in 2000 we found out that that doesn't always happen (and later congressional tech support gave Republicans access to Democrats' files, at least in the Senate - nice to know what the opposition's doing. It makes me wonder whether someone specifically crearted the database glitch that gave Sanders access to Hillary's files - and not the DNC itself, but an outside actor.)

The Roman Gods were always up for a bit of mischief, and it seems we're in for a bit in our politics as well. Remarking something wicked this way comes, I suspect our security framework will be another battlefield where we fight out "politics by other means" - hanging chads, disenfranchised voters, leaked info, smear campaigns, and a variety of other techniques. The Dirty Tricks department seems to have revived itself - which direction will this take?