Baloney. She was the second most powerful person in the US government. If she couldn't get them to provide modern secure communications, she had the ear of the one who could.
If it was as you say, and truly that systemic a problem, then indeed heads should politically roll - starting from the top, which means her.
Handling national secrets on a cheap generic PC in one's bathroom because a subordinate huge-budget agency won't cooperate is a sign of gross incompetence on many levels. If jail time is what it's going to take to motivate people to get this systemic problem solved, them so be it. The standards are obvious, and ominously violated to a dangerous degree.
If I remember correctly, they didn't want to allow Obama to use a Blackberry either back then, but he was a big fan of Blackberries and said he couldn't use the much uglier and brick-like alternatives. So I think they eventually compromised for the president. But I don't think they were just going to do it for everyone else, at least not at the time.
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2234082/what-obama-won-t...
She shouldn't have set up her own server. And the NSA should have been more sensitive to how important mobile email is to a modern diplomat.
As someone reporting directly to the CEO, I bet it's not so hard... And "but it was really hard" isn't exactly a solid excuse for... anything?
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/mar/...
Politifact rates this idea mostly false.
Powell maintained his own email but without the server in his house, Rice claims she avoided all email, so we have exactly 0 secretaries of state who've handled email 'the right way' in 220-some-odd years of this fine country.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2016/02/05/Colin-Powell-Condo...
As someone who believes strongly in revitalizing self-hosting, I find focusing on Hillary's use of a personal mail server (and not on the fact that it was not an official e-mail account, full stop) to be unfairly marginalizing personal mail servers or personal servers in general. There's nothing wrong about running your own mail server. The problem is running your own mail server to give yourself a personal e-mail account to use in your job as Secretary of State. But the key part is using a personal e-mail account for your job that involves dealing with highly sensitive and classified materials—an action that would get most government employees fired if not imprisoned.
feel free to name specific legal statues that were violated as well as which are misdemeanors or felonies.
http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/no-hillary-did-not-commit-a-...
using this statue to prosecute would not only violate the spirit and intent of the law but also be very unlikely, given precedent, to result in any conviction. Hence a competent prosecutor would likely not seek to prosecute based on this law, nor should they, as it would be a waste of taxpayer money not to mention the ill effect it would have on our electoral process (sudden unnecessary prosecution against particular candidates unlikely to lead anywhere).
I doubt she will be prosecuted but this has sunk her campaign. It's over.
Far from it
We have to face reality. Trump destroyed the Republican establishment. Hillary will not be an issue for him.
Applying that to Hillary's case is a bit of a stretch. It's not like she was downloading all the confidential stuff at the White House and emailing it to herself. And anyone emailing to clintonemail.com would presumably guess that was going to the Clinton's email server.
This wasn't just poor IT security, this was willful ignorance of the consequences of state secrets being in the open. It is incredibly likely she was targeted by foreign intelligence. And perhaps Russia found it useful that no one was talking about their impending invasion of Ukraine or Iran learned how desperate the administration was to cut a deal? There were a thousand ways this could have undercut US foreign policy, which has recently been disastrous (Like when Hillary hung up the phone on her Russian counterpart in 2012 when Russia was trying to negotiate a peaceful conclusion in Syria - according to the Wikileaks embassy cables).
To be clear, this was unclassified email. Classified email is on a separate network.
Certainly having access to the Secretary of State's unclassified emails could yield valuable intelligence insights but these are not emails that are going to contain "secrets" per se.
We won't know for sure until the FBI investigation is complete, but it is looking like this wasn't an accident but a cavalier attitude towards handling sensitive intelligence.
But given how no one seems to care how she handled Syria, Iraq, and N. Africa, it's obvious it doesn't much matter how she handled secret information.
The fact that other people sent information to her Opennet email address that contained information derived from classified documents is not necessarily damning for Clinton. If someone from DoD or any of the intelligence agencies pulled information from a classified document and sent it to a public email address, that spillage would be on the sender.
If Clinton realized that classified info came into her inbox then she would be responsible for getting that information off an unclassified machine. But if someone pasted an excerpt from a classified source into an unclassified email, the recipient of that email may not know that it was in fact classified information. Certain types of information should ring alarm bells for the recipient, but the classification of other types of information are not always going to be apparent if the information is not marked (secret, top secret, sbu, etc).
To date there doesn't seem to be anyone claiming there was intentional spillage on Clinton's part, or that she personally took classified information and put it on an unclassified system. There may yet be more revealed but right now it doesn't look like she did anything meriting prosecution.
Doesn't seem to square with:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3075347/government-it/s...
The NSA refused to give Clinton a device similar to the one used by Obama: a modified BlackBerry 8830 World Edition with additional cryptography installed. And while Clinton's predecessor Condaleeza Rice had obtained waivers for herself and her staff to use BlackBerry devices, Clinton's staff was told that "use [of the BlackBerry] expanded to an unmanageable number of users from a security perspective, so those waivers were phased out and BlackBerry use was not allowed in her Suite,"[1]
This being Clinton there are probably conspiracy theories (the NSA is out to get her!) but I suspect they simply didn't want to have to deal with it, and had the ability to say no. So they did.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/nsa-re...
if you don't provide a secure way to get shit done, motivated individuals will figure out how to get shit done, security be damned. happens every time. that's what happened here.
That infrastructure simply isn't scaleable.
[Edit: See this HN comment for sources. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11306380]
Unfortunately, the alternatives to her aren't that great either. I'm hedging my bets until November, hoping some sort of miracle happens. Hoping this election invokes the 12th amendment and goes to the house. I feel none of the current candidates would be eligible and we'd get a fresh start.
She didn't want the one they offered her, which was an older-style Windows Mobile phone. As the emails frequently note, she is not a "computer person", she knew how to work one kind of device for accessing email and refused to use anything different. They offered her a secure computer with a dedicated outside line even inside State, but her handlers thought she wouldn't even be able to deal with the concept of accessing her email on a PC rather than a Blackberry. I am not bashing Clinton here, I am just reading back the stuff from the emails that was on JudicialWatch.
What's "depressing" to me is that I have had to handle classified material in the past and there's zero doubt what would happen to me if I handled this shit like her and her staff did, but there's going to be zero material consequences for her. I kind of feel like there's two sets of law books, ones for peons like me, and ones for special people like her.
I have a very hard time believing that the 3rd (possibly 2nd) highest person in the US government couldn't get their IT requests fulfilled.
Careful with the phrasing - it has been said others have used "private e-mail" but that is, to me, not the same as setting up a server and using it exclusively.
Do you know anybody with their own home email server?
And I think the OIG report expressly said that Clinton was the only one to have done so.
OTOH, one could argue that a third party non-government, non-sanctioned, email system that the official does not control is potentially worse in many ways than a personal email server, as in the latter case the official at least in principal had control of retention and access and other aspects of the behavior of the system.
> It's all very depressing.
Not at all.
Because of this fiasco, every clown with political aspirations will be using an approved and encrypted system instead of rolling their own garbage.
The same argument surely applies to targeted surveillance...
but after all, it _is_ a conspiracy theory because there would be at least two parties involved conspiring to blackmail. sheep also don't get what the term actually means.
"The first query was dismissed by Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, claiming that the requirement to use two devices for official and personal e-mail “didn’t make a lot of sense.” Staffers raised concerns again the next January, but were told by a director that Clinton had received approval for her private server, even though she never requested it. Furthermore, the same official “instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary’s personal e-mail system again.”
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/now-know-hillary-lied-multiple...
Our choices this cycle are extremely poor, but I'll take her finger on the button any day of the week over the real estate oompa loompa.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/now-know-hillary-lied-multiple...
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/hillary-clinton-was-liber...
She might be more Hawkish then Trump although considering the fact that Trump is making all his nonsense up as he goes along its really hard to tell. He tacks isolationist since everyone is tired of war and then he tacks we will destroy our enemies since everyone hates ISIS.
The Saudis might not be good allies but they are our allies. Considering Trump has talked about retreating from our nicer allies like South Korea and Japan in terms of everyone for themselves I wouldn't be surprised if they prefer her. It's not like they are donating money to her campaign.
Wall Street is afraid Trump will do something crazy and destroy the economy.
How Hillary is blamed for that and not Bernie is unbelievable.
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/26/11116412/bernie-sanders-mass-in...
> Seems
Hates equality: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/hillary-clinton-doma_us_562e7...
Lies on top of lies: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/now-know-hillary-lied-multiple...
Hard to believe she is a Democrat.
It's not if you don't think about it. And given how it's not personal, that can be done.
That would have made it more difficult for the NSA to spy on her. I know this sounds cynical, but really, do you think the NSA doesn't spy on our government officials?
Re nefarious motivations. The server and its location weren't just used for diplomatic stuff. There are nefarious things going on. She worked hard to block any FOIA requests or supeonas that would enlighten us more. The mark of an honest politician or nonprofit. ;)
Supposedly she got the server set up because the NSA refused to give a politician who travels frequently a secure smartphone. She (I personally believe) was likely ignorant of many of the security requirements of such a server (even one set up for unclassified e-mail), as was whoever set it up. And no-one on her staff either knew enough or was willing enough to say anything. She is also supposedly not the first Secretary of State to have an arrangement of this nature.
This feels like the very definition of systematic failure and clearly needs to change. But the conversation is almost exclusively based around a) her having nefarious motivations, because she is Hillary Clinton, or b) this all being a Republican plot to derail the Democratic candidate for President.
It's all very depressing.