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Clinton Regrets, But Defends, Use of Family Email Server
dcblogs writes: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that, in hindsight, her decision to use a private email server to conduct official business was not the best one. But she is defending it and said the system was secure. Clinton, at news conference in New York, said the email server that she used had been set up for former President Bill Clinton. The system had "numerous safeguards" and is on home property protected by the U.S. Secret Service, she said. "There were no security breaches," said Clinton. "I think the use of that server, which started with my husband, proved to be effective and secure," she said. It still remains unclear about just how appropriate Clinton's system was. As a general rule, government IT policies don't give federal employees the option of using their own email accounts to exclusively conduct government business.
it will begin the death-rattle of the Democratic party. Progressives see through her like a dirty window.
What surprises me is that (while the concerns about discovery, transparency, and national archive access are relevant and important, and not clearly satisfied by this arrangement) there hasn't been more discussion of the security and handling-of-classified-materials aspect.
I get the impression that the Secretary of State likely deals with sensitive materials at work from time to time. I similarly get the impression that, if somebody with access to classified material were discovered to have taken a huge pile of it home and stored it in their garage, they might face some rather unpleasant questions and some...'career limitations' in the future.
Even if she is being 100% forthright with the National Archives, and absolutely everything there is on the up and up; in what sense didn't she have a big pile of classified documents just stored at home under who-knows-what security protocols implemented by god-knows-who? Are you actually allowed to do that? Do only little contractors get squished? What's the deal?
Setting asside the legality of not using government-run email for government business (which is a clear violation of the records act), I have one comment:
Ordinarily, there is no way one could argue that a server sitting in somebody's home was more secure than one sitting in a data center owned and managed by a Federal agency. Then the IRS thing happened, showing an incompetency in their IT department that is deserving of much public ridicule and a proverbial "you'll never work in this field again." After that, an AOL or MSN account might be preferable.
30 years in IT, more than 15 of those running ISPs, and I've never seen anything like that level of incompetence from a professional IT organization.
It will be interesting to see if somebody has the balls to issue a warrant for the physical server itself. I doubt it, as this is mostly an excuse for the Repubs to act outraged and make a lot of noise without actually accomplishing anything of value, and the Dems to act like victims and make a lot of noise without actually accomplishing anything of value.
When it's all over, there will be new rules to follow and new hurdles for us plebes to jump over because clearly we need to regulate email or something equally stupid, and as always, the political class will except itself from it's own laws and rules.
Bureaucrats and politicians are nothing if not predictable.
"I don't think software should necessarily be free
General Petraus just plead guilty to talking documents home and giving his biographer access to it.
Hillary seems to have taken everything home and given her entire political team/IT/family access to it.
If the Clintons are known for anything, it is their ability to craft a message and stay on message. Remember, "It's the economy, stupid!"? The entire group is known for being able to quickly respond with a wall of on-message response to any crisis.
Yet in this case we had radio silence for a week, followed by this evasive and strange defense.
She repeated this a couple of times. It surprises me that none of the nerds here have picked up on this. She didn't want to have to carry two phones, so she used her personal email account. Nobody at her press conference thought to raise their hand and say "Uhm, excuse me..... but, you can have more than one email account on your phone."
We have Bill Clinton's people claiming that he's only sent two emails in his life just a couple of days ago, then she goes out and claims that the email server was set up for him, and she had to delete more than half of the email on the server because it was personal, stuff between her and her husband. Yikes. This is not the Clinton machine we are used to.
In the 90's the message was tight, and if facts were uncovered that contradicted the message then the whole team changed messages at the same time. They need to step up their game....
This sort of thing isn't unprecedented, the Bush White House had a policy of issuing important staffers two Blackberries, one that had a whitehouse.gov email and one that had a gop.org email, and using both systems indifferently for communication.
I sorta don't care in either place, at least from an ethics perspective, since all emails ever seem to do is trigger dopey years-long investigations and pseudo-controversies about the parsing of language and people going off half-cocked. Case in point: Benghazi.
On the other hand, I'd rather not people like this be president of the United States. I think Lindsey Graham has the right idea, if you're an official person, NEVER USE EMAIL. Write official documents carefully, or just call someone.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
A moral dilemma is when you're trying to figure out whether to kill one person to save three, not when you are trying to figure out where to store your email. That's an IT decision. Just because the right thing to do is clear to you in the abstract doesn't mean it would even be clear to you in practice. How would you feel about carrying two phones? How would you feel about having your private email on a government server? When you read science fiction, does the character with the smart phone carry two of them so that she can have access to her secure stuff and her regular stuff? Hell no.
So yeah, of course we can armchair quarterback it, but let's not pretend it's not political.
Ms. Clinton can use her private server for anything personal anytime she wants.
Well, I don't quite agree, because at that level it's hard to segregate the personal from the professional -- indeed that's what the concern is here, that there might have been some illicit connection between her personal life (the Clinton foundation) and her work as Secretary of State.
But to be fair, since Secretary Kerry is apparently the first Secretary of State with an official email account, the same questions can be raised about Condaleeza Rice; I'll give Powell and Albright a pass because both being born in 1937 they belong to a generation where senior administrators had all their correspondence handled by "a girl".
This suggests an unquestionably fair and non-partisan solution to this controversy. Both Clinton AND Rice should turn over ALL their electronic correspondence for the years they were in office to the State Department for preservation. Any correspondence which they deem personal and private would remained permanently sealed unless there was court order opening them or until they themselves choose to open them. There would be no fishing expeditions through their private correspondence without the equivalent of a warrant.
This would not only be perfectly non-partisan, it would maintain the same or greater degree of discoverability as if they'd used official email accounts, as they both should have.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It is illegal to have classified information on a private e-mail server. The notion that she never sent or received classified information in six years is laughable.
Maybe the part about "I deleted all the unimportant emails. Trust me" part?
I can't wait to hear what happens when forensics gets to their machines and hopefully finds tons and tons of illegal activity.
No person should ever be allowed to do this, especially someone who doesn't understand the impact of doing this from a technology perspective and only from a political one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... , though in that case the email was hosted by the Republican National Committee.
I'm generally a Clinton supporter, and I'm really unhappy with the email thing. But it is the same as has been done before and will be done again.
Not to worry though, I'm sure that we'll have EVEN MORE investigations into this than we had into Benghazi, with the exact same results.
Destruction or attempting to hide federal records (which all SoS emails are) has always been illegal (since the 50's or so). The more recent law changes were more to clarify how records were to be archived (set a max 20 day limit on external records being transferred to your agencies official archiving system for example).
Her use of a private email account is also not illegal although it violated a State policy in place before she took office, but even when using private email all records are required to be turned over for archiving.
So she's not in violation of the 20 day law, since it was passed after her time in office, but she is in violation of the original law requiring all records be archived. Her only defense was that it took her team 2 years to finalize their archiving plan and they were just about to start when they happened to get subpoenaed. So far she has not shown any archiving plan was ever in place.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!