It was this leaking that made Russia’s DNC hack different. As General Mike Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director, said, stealing your opponent’s emails was simply “honorable international espionage.” Everybody did that, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the French, the Germans, and other Western nations. “It’s accepted international practice. If I could have broken into Russian servers, I would have done it,” he said. What made this hack different was what happened afterward, Hayden suggested—the fact that Russia “weaponized this data” and “shoved it into U.S. space.”
