Idle Worlds: “You know how it happens. You try to secure one Congressional campaign, and then another, and pretty soon you can’t stop. You’ll fly across the country just to brief a Green Party candidate in a district the Republicans carried by 60 points. You want more, more, always looking for that next fix.This is the situation I found myself in from late 2017 to 2018, when I was part of an effort that delivered a basic, hour-long campaign security training to 41 Democratic Congressional campaigns. It was exciting! I traveled the country like Johnny Yubikey, distributing little blue security tokens from a sack. The campaigns ranged from beyond-long-shot candidates running from their den, all the way up to some nationally prominent figures. I took a selfie with Bernie! I wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post! I don’t believe I accomplished much, but I made so many friends along the way! And I learned a lot about the idiosyncratic world of Congressional campaigns; knowledge that I want to now hand over to you, the next person willing to take a swing at this piñata of futility.

This article is specificaly about campaign security, or how to keep candidates and their staff and families safe from people trying to break into social media, read their email, or wire their campaign war chest to Nauru. There are a lot of even more hopeless problems, like election security, but as you will see there is plenty to lose hope about just in this corner of the problem space…”