Powell’s hacked emails scare some in Washington off the grid

WASHINGTON >> A panicked network anchor went home and deleted his entire personal Gmail account. A Democratic senator began rethinking the virtues of a flip phone. And a former national security official gave silent thanks that he is now living on the West Coast.

The digital queasiness has settled heavily on the nation’s capital and its secretive political combatants this week as yet another victim, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, fell prey to the embarrassment of seeing his personal musings distributed on the internet and highlighted in news reports.

“There but for the grace of God go all of us,” said Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council spokesman for President Barack Obama who now works in San Francisco. He said thinking about his own email exchanges in Washington made him cringe, even now.

“Sometimes we’re snarky, sometimes we are rude,” Vietor said, recalling a few such moments during his time at the White House. “The volume of hacking is a moment we all have to do a little soul searching.”

The Powell hack, which may have been conducted by a group with ties to the Russian government, echoed the awkwardness of previous leaks of emails from Democratic National Committee officials and the CIA director, John O. Brennan. The messages exposed this week revealed that Powell considered Donald Trump a “national disgrace,” Hillary Clinton “greedy” and former Vice President Dick Cheney an “idiot.”

The latest hack could well spur a new rash of email deletions across the country as millions of people scan their sent mail for anything compromising, humiliating or career-destroying. It adds to the sense that everyone is vulnerable.

The soul searching is happening with a special urgency in Washington, where email accounts burst with strategies, delicate political proposals, gossipy whispers and banal details of girlfriends, husbands, bank accounts and shopping lists.

A television news anchor said that producers and staff members at her network had jokingly agreed at a morning news meeting to issue blanket apologies to one another if their emails were ever made public.

She said Powell’s emails had revealed him, a normally stoic public official, to be just as gossipy as everyone else, and added that the gossip, not classified information, was what people feared becoming public.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat, said the news of Powell’s hacked emails had him thinking that New York Sen. Charles Schumer’s never-ending use of an old-fashioned flip phone “makes more sense than ever.”

“I think more and more people are realizing that there isn’t a thing you can say in an email that isn’t likely to be hackable or discoverable at some later point,” Durbin said, lamenting his own complacency.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., shrugged off the news. “I haven’t worried about an email being hacked since I’ve never sent one,” Graham said. “I’m, like, ahead of my time.”

But for another network anchor in Washington, who declined to be named for fear of becoming an even more prominent hacking target, the Powell disclosures led to a long night Wednesday that involved saving a few personal emails and then deleting his entire account. Everyone, he said, has sent emails they would not want released, including innocent messages that could be misinterpreted.

Washington may be behind other big cities in learning that lesson. Bankers on Wall Street have favored very brief emails since their conversations were splashed across front pages because of lawsuits filed after the financial crisis. In 2010, Goldman Sachs executives used the acronym “LDL,” for “let’s discuss live,” when a conversation turned at all sensitive.

Hank Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs chief executive, refuses to use email. Ben S. Bernanke, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, once set up an email account under the pseudonym Edward Quince in the hopes of greater privacy.

Similar precautions have been common in Silicon Valley since a 2009 Chinese state cyberattack on servers at Google and other tech companies. In Hollywood, a breach at Sony Pictures in 2014 spilled out gossipy secrets and persuaded film crews, actors and executives alike to adopt security measures they once considered paranoid. Studios have turned to a new class of companies with names like WatchDox that wrap screenplays with encryption, passwords and monitoring systems that can track who has access to confidential files.

“It has, without question, affected what I say in writing,” said Jordan Roberts, a writer and director whose credits include the coming comedic drama “Burn Your Maps.” The Sony hack gave him “a personal pause button that hopefully spares me future potential embarrassment for the sake of a quick and pithy and frequently unfounded, and almost always unnecessary, insult,” he said.

Joe Quenqua, who runs the entertainment practice at the DKC public relations firm, said by email that everyone thinks twice before shooting off an email. “Might it make for some more banal email exchanges? A bit less gossipy?” he wrote. “Sure, but it’s so simple: Better safe than sorry.”

Richard Gelfond, the chief executive of IMAX, said: “I used to be a little more tolerant of what others say in email. That ended.”

In some countries outside the United States, there has long been a more cautious approach to electronic communications. In Pakistan, politicians often agree to speak to reporters in person only after removing phone batteries or covering the microphones with a pillow. Many in the Middle East have migrated to more secure services like Telegraph or Signal.

Many Americans have learned the hard way. Aaron E. Carroll, a pediatrician and research professor at Indiana University, discovered the dangers after writing a newspaper article defending artificial sweeteners that prompted health groups to demand his university emails. The groups hoped to prove links between Carroll and companies that make sugary drinks and snacks.

“It totally devastated me,” Carroll said on Thursday. “I was freaking out, not because I did anything wrong — all of a sudden, I was panicked about what have I said that was inappropriate or that could be taken out of context.”

Carroll, who said he had no connection to any food companies, engaged in a “scorched earth” policy in the weeks after his emails were handed over to the health groups. He deleted just about everything off his university email account and now clears out the account regularly.

“I’m a little more careful now. I’ll just walk down the hall instead of sending a long email,” he said, though he added that he still sent personal and work messages on the same account for convenience. “It has not changed my daily habits of email as much as you might think.”

That was also a sentiment on Capitol Hill, where some treated the prospect of a Powell-like hack lightly.

Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri said he was already a “late adopter” when it came to email because he never thought it was secure. He said he had been careful not to rely heavily on email when he was in charge of wrangling votes for Republicans in Congress.

“I think that a lot of people are now finding out why that should have been the case for lots of other people,” Blunt said.

Durbin, asked if he was worried enough to scour through his sent mail, sighed and shook his head.

“Oh, no,” he said. “The Russians will have to read it.”