I don’t know or care if this is true, but it does confirm my suspicion that it’ll be damn near impossible for someone to get elected 20 years from now.
Every yahoo and google email and IM lives FOREVER. Suppose a person flirting via IM in college decides to run for President 30 years later... someone at those sites can EASILY dig through the archives and “leak” the contents.
If this turns out to be true, I’d bet anything it was an inside job at Yahoo.
Yes and no. The more ubiquitous electronic communication and hacking into those same forms of communication become, the greater the plausible deniability. If a hacker can break into the system, the same hacker can, theoretically, plant false data into the same system. Plus, the alleged “undying” nature of internet data will, imho, prove to be as fleeting as the initial reports about the indestructibility and immortal nature of CDs, which begin to lose data in as little as ten years, and which are more prone to skipping and scratches than LPs were.
Finally, the best way to be secure is to put things out in plain view, then obscure the real data with millions of bits of false data or “disinformation” (e.g., the “open source” approach to intelligence). It’s much easier to do than try and find a failsafe system, which is impossible, and no one can ever know what is real and what is false.