Donald Trump spoke in Colorado on Friday, and made more startling comments regarding email. However, instead of asking Russia to hack his political opponents, he talked about how he would prevent cyber-intrusion: stop using computers.
He said:
I like the old days, especially for the military, on things like that. You wanna attack or you wanna do something? It’s called courier. It’s called, let’s put it in a thing…in an envelope and let’s hand it to the general. Let’s not send it over the wires where everybody’s probably reading it, right? And no matter how good, no matter how good they say it is, it’s not. I mean, people can hack it I guess. It’s terrible. I know and if you talk about military and you talk about secrets, you talk about politics.
The rambling, word-salad nature of the statement aside, it marks a remarkable shift from all modern politics and yet another regressive position held by Trump. And also one that makes no practical sense. “I’m just not a believer in email,” Trump also said last week at a separate event.
Trump also has said that he doesn’t even tweet himself. He told CNN earlier this year that he “shouts out” what he wants to tweet and “young ladies” on his staff transcribe it and hit ‘send.’
Cyber-security is a problem, and many have said that future wars will be fought via electronic means. Trump’s position, that we should just abandon the technology, is an impossible view and no solution at all.
To his point about a thing “called courier,” is that while it is true that no one can hack into paper, it would be very difficult to send those couriers to where the information needs to go. It takes time, and if the hypothetical enemy is using electronic communications, the war will be over before it’s fought. It would be like the Union Army of the mid-19th century going to war against the Transformers.
