Is every conversation in a rest room recorded and available?

If you don't trust people creating cryptography standards you cannot really leave gaps, can you?

Most officials communicate in ways that circumvent FOIA.

Adding to this FOIA doesn't guarantee useful answers. Having gone through the process whilst in the military I found a few loopholes. They can give a bloated answer with boxes and boxes of useless mostly unrelated information. They did this to me. They can also decline to answer and just say it's classified. They can also just decline to answer through stalling tactics. It served my purpose and that was to stall them from collecting DNA.

Hillary Clinton's email server is a famous example of attempting to avoid FOIA requests.

From what I hear, it's also an example of how ineptly run the State Dept's IT systems were.

Complex tasks like "set up a new computer" had months of lead time.

That wouldn't explain the intentional destruction of the blackberry phones and the deletion of thousands of emails.

I'd say the haphazard destruction of Blackberries and iPads with hammers is pretty explicit evidence of how bad State Dept IT policy and execution was.

Maybe I've worked in large corporations too much, but my first question when I see policy violations is not "How is this person conspiring?" but rather "What made following the official policy difficult? And how can we fix that?"

Also, the State Dept seems like exactly the sort of place policy violations become culturally routine: non-technical experts, doing work that is arguably "more important", with IT seen as a cost rather than profit center.

Perfect storm for policy-in-name-only.

She must've been unaware of her legal requirements under FOIA, that her husband signed into law, when she ordered the people's emails destroyed.

Or, she didn't even think about records retention or device security, in the same way that most politicians/executives don't, assuming it was handled by someone.

And it was in fact not, because there was no functioning policy enforcement at State.

> there was no functioning policy enforcement at State

I agree, the laws were not enforced in this case.

I would have gone with Petraeus' gmail account. The one that got the Chinese to hack Google.