Robby Mook (@RobbyMook), Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign Manager and a Belfer Center Senior Fellow, sits down withwith Aroop Mukharji (@aroopmukharji) to talk about lessons from the 2016 campaign, the Defending Digital Democracy Project, and dark chocolate.

A practical training video for campaign staff and volunteers from all political parties, "Five Things" was produced by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs' bipartisan Defending Digital Democracy Project to help campaigns understand the importance of cybersecurity and learn what they can do about it.

Election security has come under scrutiny over the last year -- and deservedly so. The 2016 election opened our eyes to how new technologies we rushed to purchase after the butterfly ballots and hanging chads of the 2000 election created new vulnerabilities hard to imagine at the time.

When the stolen information was exploited to generate news coverage or concoct “fake news” – such as that Democratic operatives were running a sex ring out of a pizza parlour – we learned some hard lessons in why privacy really matters. I worry the current rhetoric around encryption is ignoring that lesson.

To mark their states' candidate-filing deadlines, Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic Secretary of State of Kentucky, and Mac Warner, the Republican Secretary of State of West Virginia, are distributing the "Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook" to candidates in their states seeking to be on the ballot in 2018.

In July, the Belfer Center launched a new, bipartisan initiative called the Defending Digital Democracy Project  (D3P). Led by Belfer Center Co-Director Eric Rosenbach, along with the former campaign managers for Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, the project aims to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.