Welcome to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense and Foreign Affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans.

I'm the Editor-in-chief of Warren The Rocks.

In this episode we address the unprecedented Russian-directed information operations campaign targeting

the U.S. presidential election and indeed the fundamental legitimacy of the American

system of government.

From email hacks to electronic voting machines, major vulnerabilities have been exposed and could

change the way we approach national campaigns forever, not just in the United States

but in other democracies as well.

Think I'm overstating it? See what you think by the end of this episode.

If you follow the news, you've surely heard a lot about the series of leaks from the email accounts of the Democratic National

Committee in a series of former senior leaders and politicos.

I sat down with Shane Harris of the Daily Beast and the Rational Security Podcast in DuPont Circle

and asked him to catch us up.

Well, the first word that we got that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked came in a Washington Post article actually last summer

where it was presented in pretty startling detail actually that the DNC had had this incursion

information have been stolen.

Interestingly at the time it was reported that the hackers had stolen the opposition

research file on Donald Trump.

But we didn't really hear about a Russian attribution until a bit later.

And as it became clearer to me was when I was talking to people in law enforcement,

people in the intelligence community.

...