He wasn’t surprised when the Democratic National Committee called. “They were an obvious target,” Clarke told me later. But he was amazed when his team discovered how wide-open the committee’s systems were. As it stood, the DNC—despite its Watergate history, despite the well-publicized Chinese and Russian intrusions into the Obama campaign computers in 2008 and 2012—was securing its data with the kind of minimal techniques that you might expect to find at a chain of dry cleaners.
