Can an American citizen or business whose emails were hacked by a foreign government successfully sue the foreign government for damages?
All of a sudden, it’s a bipartisan issue.
The Democratic National Committee garnered headlines earlier this year when it sued Russia in federal court in New York, alleging that Russia had stolen emails from John Podesta, who was the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
And Elliott Broidy, who was deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, is suing Qatar in federal court in California, alleging that Qatar launched a sophisticated cyber-attack on his company’s email accounts and leaked the information it obtained to the press. President Trump had publicly acknowledged and praised Broidy at an event at which Trump also spoke of a U.S.-Qatar “dispute” over Qatar’s funding terrorism.
The legal complaints by both the DNC and Broidy claim that they should be allowed to go forward under existing exceptions to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a 1976 law that generally grants foreign states immunity from American courts.
It is hard to defend the proposition that some foreign country, or its agents, should be able to able to hack into the email of a prominent American and make the information public without paying some sort of severe price. It’s not that different from getting away with state-sponsored terrorism, writes Ira Stoll.
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