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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.
Politician does something that's not illegal during her tenure, details at 11.
The sad irony here is that the Clinton presidency was the first where they had to set up a real email presence, and they hired some really smart people to do it. They did a great job. But that was a long time ago, and things have moved on. So they're getting criticized for using SSL 2.0 for transport security, which is a valid criticism now, but is still better security than most people have. And of course it's not like security on government servers is better. So this is kind of obviously a deliberate attempt to create a fuss over something that really isn't as significant as it's being pumped up to be.
On the plus side, maybe more people will start using strong TLS transport security for their email...
"It still remains unclear about just how appropriate Clinton's system was."
The most ridiculous part of the summary. Except for the whole "convenience" pseudo-argument. At best this excuse suggests that Clinton is willing to prioritize personal convenience over transparency and accountability, which is probably not a great look for someone who is expected to announce a presidential campaign in the near future.
Ms. Clinton can use her private server for anything personal anytime she wants. Her government business, especially cabinet level correspondence, must originate from a state.gov address. During my work for the DoD email messages had to be digitally signed with a government issued smart card (CAC) to provide authenticity. It's a tenant of best practices. I can't imagine the State Department not adhering to the same standard of security when doing the people's business.
Too much focus on the server. Using a home server or a contract server makes no difference from a legal/ethical standpoint. You don't conduct federal business on a private email account. That seems to clearly have been violated If you do, then that private account should be subject to access from the appropriate authorities.
Secure from the privy eyes of accountability.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
Seems to me the reasons for her decision to use a private server for government business are pretty simple. It means that she (and her staff) get to decide which documents should be forked over in response to FOIA requests.
In a just world this server would now at an independent expert for thorough inspection.
Same thing for congressional oversight. Case in point: Benghazi.
Also, it keeps all of her correspondence out of the official protocols. She wants to delete some stuff? No problem. That would be more complicated if she had used her government-issued means of communication.
I seem to remember from earlier incidents (like the hack of Sarah Palin's personal mail) that this is *not legal*. For good reasons.
Finally, it is basically a given that some of her correspondence contains sensitive, if not outright secret, information. If someone like Thomas Drake gets threatened with ridiculous punishment for having *un*classified information on his home PC, surely this here should land Mrs Clinton in a whole lot of trouble. But, well, who am I kidding, right?
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
Section 3 (d), Avoid conducting official Department business from your personal e-mail accounts.
So she was aware of these problems in 2011 and did everything she told other people not to do anyway?
http://www.foxnews.com/politic...
we are going to hear about this ad nauseum for months, as if she personally commanded the jihadis there
i'm not really a fan of clinton, but the bias against her is obviously overblown
if clinton had done this:
http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
we would hear about she had committed sedition, treason, and was a traitor, for the next 2 years, daily
and it IS sedition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
but this letter will be forgotten in a week
because it's not hillary clinton who did it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
it will begin the death-rattle of the Democratic party. Progressives see through her like a dirty window.
Did you just put the blame on your husband?
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
You people are being taken for a ride by a lying skank.
Per other threads, said email server failed Qualys SSL scans, but has been 'updated' recently. Do we have a lazy admin at the healm? I'm not sure how that's Clintons fault, unless they're the ones who watch said admin like a hawk. (Yea, right...)
Was she breaking rules of law with regard to the State Dept.? From what I've read, no. Was it preferred she use State Dept. resources? Yes. But it wasn't required. Perhaps those rules should change, Republican leadership!
As far as her position, and the emails? To me it seems a matter of convenience. If most of her communications in life, before/during/after State Dept, were used through her personal server, stands to reason she would maintain that behavior. That said, I'm more concenred with the discipline of the position. As long as she knew what information could and couldn't travel through her personal server, and 'Classified' or other didn't go through improper channels, I don't see reason for the broohaha.
If it's a matter of necessary steps having to be taken for archival purposes, required by law? There are far more cumbersome parts of the US Government with which I take issue with, long before this.
Does it go to transparency? Are we seeing 'EVERYTHING' she communicated? Odds are, yes. These people aren't your average Washington idiots. The Clintons got to where they are because they're smart. They wouldn't 'screw up' by not handing over a few emails that 'someone' out there new existed, but didn't get released.
And last, but not least.... If someone, is looking for dirt on her, odds are, they won't find it in an email stash through her personal server. I can guarantee, if there's stuff the public shouldn't know with regard to what she's communicated, the public isn't going to know.*
*Notwithstanding whistleblowers, leaked documents from hacks, and Executive Order releases.
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....
You are talking about an email server, whilst Topgear is not being shown on Sunday. Get a grip people.
I'm not even going to blame her for this issue. She's not an IT person. That's not her job. I'm going to blame all the IT people that worked with her that never said anything, or raised any kind of fuss over the problem.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Clinton, at news conference in New York, said the email server that she used had been set up for former President Bill Clinton.
Complete BS. Bill Clinton is on the record as having sent two emails his entire life:
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/...
Quite a bit of work setting up an email system for someone who doesn't use it.
Clinton printed over 50,000 pages of e-mails, which were then shipped to the State Department. It would have been less work for her to send those e-mails electronically. What was her purpose in doing that extra work?
Printed texts take more time to search, and they do not contain all the internal meta-data. Perhaps too she just wanted to show her middle finger to the people who asked for her e-mails.
This is honorable behavior?
But she is defending it and said the system was secure.
Isn't it good that she knows more about web security than the computer consultants who rated it
No, the Faux news claims that emails have been destroyed, but there's no evidence of that.
Likewise its not illegal for her to run her own email server, she's not required to use the USA Government one to permit easier archiving of email, it just makes it easier for them.
"Because she self hosted her own email there is no such third party and we have to "trust" that she didn't delete government emails."
No, NSA has all her and your emails, as does the third party since email is a two way thing, and the law doesn't require any such proof. Really it's just the endless droning whine that is Fox News and Republidroids.
Does anyone here have an email server that is NOT backed up?
Does she have backups for her server?
1) No - she is a clueless ditz and the people working for her should not be allowed to touch a computer again.
2)Yes - she is hiding those and the backups should be turned over to the archives immediately.
3)She did but they got destroyed - HARD CORE FELONY of destroying data!
Pick 1.
Laws are for the little people, not them.
They believe, and act, as though they are above the law. Lying, perjury, obstruction of justice.
There's no dilemma if you feel that laws simply don't apply to you...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
that "law" bs is for regular people
"Rules are for other people. Nothing happened. Why is the vast Right Wing Conspiracy so worked up over this?"
-Styopa
All career polititians do this, not just the Klintons. It's also interesting to note that Bill has only sent TWO emails in his whole life. TWO EMAILS! Lindsey Graham, not a one! They should take a poll of congress (to start) and see how many emails they have all sent. I bet you at least 50% "don't do email". These are the people who represent us? Riiiight!
They all disgust me how they feel the law does not apply to them.
So we have the smartest woman in the world who can't handle two Phones or E-mail accounts with a husband who is a pig spending his pleasure time with under age prostitutes being portrayed as the poster child for strong women and leadership? does that make any sense to anybody? Imagine lefties if Sarah Palin said that about e-mail?
There are not that many internet savy Republicans, Most Republicans barely can manage remembering how to log into windows without help, so this is not a legitimate way to garner public criticism of Hillary. There are not that many internet savy republicans, and it is obvious here that there are a few that are turing around and reposting trying to make it look like EVERYONE is a Republican, who HATES the Clintons and the WORLD is against them.. It is obvious to the rest of use who have IQ's above 120, that There are a few of you out there reposting like mad trying to make it look like you have social proof when in fact you are a few Republican morons who just figured out how to type and hit send. WE ARE NOT FOOLED.
Tell me how supposedly one of the most important jobs in the country can be run by a person who's communications are separated from her official office?
When in WDC, she can't refer to incoming email from staff who are just around the corner or down the hall? Someone calls from London and says "look at the email I just sent." and Hillary has to say what? Maybe "I'll look at it tomorrow when I get home." What the hell is that for a high level functioning government cabinet position?
So she must have had official emails for HIllary being sent addressed to some lower person in the Secretary's office (probably clippy.)
This sounds to me like the perfect way to raise funds for a personal project from governments around the world, and eventually destroy the hard drive.
If I say I regret using it the people will forgive me.
Lies, lies, and more lies.
FBI uses Gmail for plenty of their official business still as many of them don't have email addresses given to them by the Bureau. I thought it was strange at first some years ago when we started working with them but when you started seeing that all agents were using it there isn't much you can do but go along.
90 posts and counting, without a "How is this news for nerds" bitch.
My first job after college was as a computer programmer for a branch of the US military that I don't like to name. I'm glad I did the job at the time and just as glad that I left for private industry 20+ years ago. The reality of government service is that big shots do whatever they want whether it makes sense or not and whether it's legal or not because the people under them who realize "Hey. That's NOT allowed!" don't have the authority to make them do what they are supposed to do and the people above them who do have the authority have bigger fish to fry. So nobody tells them "John Doe isn't following the rules on email" or whatever. Plus, people in the military and government are amazingly vindictive and if you complain about a superior doing something wrong/illegal, the person who is likely to pay for it is you, not them. So I totally understand how Hillary came up with this stupid idea to use her own email server and everybody below her was too scared to complain about it and Obama had bigger issues like Ben Laden to worry about than what server Hillary was using for email.
When I worked for the US military, we had a general who ran our base and he single handedly kept an ancient Vax system alive for his email. I had a job that got me into contact at times with fairly senior civilian managers and they used to complain about how they loved a new Unix based email system that the base had setup but the general refused to use it. He insisted on using an old Vax that at the time couldn't easily be integrated into the newer system for some kind of technical problem that had to be overcome, so the top military and civilian managers had to have an email account on the Vax just to see if the general sent them email, but everything they sent amongst themselves that didn't need to go to him went through the new system. The general finally had to retire and once he left, his successor didn't care anything about the old Vax email system, so it finally got shut down. So I've personally seen it where some big shot in the government just does whatever the heck they want to when it comes to email. I've wondered how much it cost in manpower and other costs to keep one old email system alive because one general refused to use anything else.
Joe Biden is a square shooter. Joe Biden for 2016!
Hillary should offer up her private emails as soon as the Republicans in Congress release all of their private emails. Because how can we know that those "private" Republican emails don't contain official content?
Currently, every public servant must decide which email system to use at the time each email is sent. Is it official or private? Do we trust a Secretary of State to make that distinction? If so, Hillary is in the clear. If not, then all personal emails of all public servants must be made public. What difference does it make (TM) if the division between private and official is made at the time the email is sent or later?
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Many businesses discourage or forbid employees to use personal email systems for company business. The reason of security is there yes. But there are other good business and legal reasons to discourage this practice. Any company IT department caught up in a lawsuit requiring full disclosure can attest to the nightmare it is even with only the company email system. To add to that an external system is just plain nuts.
Remember when the Bush white house lost millions of official emails and the media barely mentioned it? Fox news even went as far as saying the emails were recovered but never went into detail on how this was confirmed. Of course the email scandal did not affect Bush's ability to win reelection or tarnish his presidency in the eyes of the political right.
Keep in mind the democrats went "ballistic" and tried to make an issue out of how the Bush administration thumbed its nose at document recording requirements. They had a point but they lost the moral high ground when Clinton is caught not even using official email.
Of course what the political pundits on the right won't admit to is that official diplomatic cables are used not emails to send confidential information. Also as far as we know, none of Clinton's email actually went missing. Not to mention, no candidate regardless of party would ever get caught using official email to document something scandalous. Sure some local politician or even a freshmen congressman may occasionally get caught, but seasoned professionals like the Clintons, Bushs, Boehners, or Mcconnells won't. They could send their more controversial emails outside of official channels and still consider themselves within the current rules.
The actual lesson we should take away from this political ping pong match is that both sides will try to create any controversy to gain a political edge or more importantly distract us from more pressing issues. Like how the US Senate is trying to usurp executive powers by bypassing the president on matters of foreign policy. Notice how the email controversy was dialed up to counter the criticism? What else is being done while the public is distracted?
I know what you mean, Hillary. I didn't want to carry two devices either. I actually managed to get THREE email accounts on a SINGLE phone, but, whoah! It sure weighed a lot. I could hardly carry it around with me. That's why I deleted 30,000 emails too. They were just making my accounts too heavy!
She was Secretary of State for years. She resigned the job years ago. If this issue is really that important, why did nobody speak up after her first couple of months? I'm not saying let her off the hook, but the controversy seems timed for political reasons.
This woman is so crooked that when she dies, they'll have to screw her into the ground to bury her. It would be interesting to see this thread's moral outrage if a republican SOS decided to spin up an email server in his/her house for public and private use. Obama and his administration is a crime in progress and HC should be prosecuted for this unprecedented act.
You do realize that President Bush (#43) had his own share of email shit-storms don't you? In fact this might have lead to Hillary's decisions, flawed as they were, (I don't know). Citations follow...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/watch-an-old-home-movie-from-2000-where-hillary-clinton-said#.re86K3GRo
When she became Secretary of State, she had to use e-mail. Hence, she got her own private server (at home where it was under protection of the 4th Amendment).
The right place to air her rationalizations is in a court of law, not in the media. This is a clear criminal offense. The public rationalizations are a essentially an admission of guilt, guilt of a clear and direct violation of federal recordkeeping laws that are intended to protect the country and the people from political abuse. Prosecute her and the many other politicians that do this, that's where they should be explaining themselves, not in the media.
I'm astonished by how many people are crying about the notion that she could have deleted emails without records; if you're adamant that politicians are corrupt enough to do that, then why do you assume they couldn't make unwanted emails permanently disappear from the .gov accounts they're supposed to be using? Catching Mrs. Clinton with her hand in the cookie jar doesn't change the nature of secrecy and mistrust which underlie politics as a whole. Politicians aren't going to suddenly stop communicating things they don't want on record, they're just going to try harder to keep those things buried. None of this addresses or helps to solve the much more apparent problem of poor security standards.
Under Clinton, 2 of her employees died. Emails were requested IMMEDIATLY afterwards, and months of emails after that incident were not part of what she turned over. In any possible reasonable sense, she is hiding something, you are a shill if you disagree.
Besides that, her Clinton foundation pulled in millions from foreign governments and we don't know if she was promising State Department favors in return. It is a blatant case of looking like bribes from foreign governments. Emails might clear that up, but we don't have that ability.
So yes, we do demand transparency when your employees are killed on the job or you are taking in millions of "donations" while on the job. Every utterance or action, maybe not, but in these cases, yes.
So in other words you are wrong and probably a shill.
She doesn't regret using personal email. She regrets getting CAUGHT using personal email.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Yeah! I'm sure a server from the mid 90s is VERY secure! I hope they applied all their updates!
Except that here everything was commingled and there was no third party to verify official emails were saved.
FOIA doesn't apply to congress, nor are or were any members of congress required to use official email.
Clinton had the power, and used the power, to delete any emails from this account she felt like. But that's okay, because she only deleted "personal" emails.
Hillary should offer up her private emails as soon as the Republicans in Congress release all of their private emails.
If you have credible evidence that any of them did government business on such systems, I would agree.
This is not some petty-assed partisan issue, so please stop worshipping.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
"It's OK for high-profile Democrats to break the law because Republicans are evil and can't be allowed to win elections."
Grandiose delusions, nothing else needs to be stated. Stop attempting to cover for the people you falsely believe to be on your team.
As the New York Times reported, chemical weapons were indeed found in Iraq.
But you just keep shilling...
Ok, I'm not big on all the hubub around these emails either -- but we need to be the change we want to see in the world. If Democrats like Hillary want our political discourse to be better then they need to set the standard, not act like children and point the finger back across the aisle. If all we're going to do is wait and see which party will do the right thing first, then they will NEVER do the right thing. We, as a governed populace, should be looking for a government that does the right thing even when it means admitting they had previously done the wrong thing.
They are stored with the Rose Law Firm Records...
Or did Vince Foster have them? ... I don't recall...
There is nothing to be seen here, Move along.
What difference does it make?
Blah!
But it DOES apply to the executive branch, and by extension the State Department..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Like all politicians, the regret *may* be heartfelt and really, really emotional (also: all ousted executives actually quit because they want to "spend more time with their families"), but the proper expansion is always "regrets she got caught."
Also: "family email server" makes it sound like "family car" -- oh, it just happaned to be around, and Pat doesnt' have a fur coat. She has a good, Republican (No! Democratic!) fur coat / Ford F-150 / email server. Nah -- this was not an "aw, shoot, I'll just wear any old thing" decision, with a "Oh, you mean you guys want copies, *too*?!" innocent shrug and sufficient deflection. It was the same kind of record-hiding move that people righteously castigated the Bush administration for -- that's being revived as an issue, which is appropriate, but mostly as a "that other kid did it too!" excuse, which isn't.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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.
Every blurb I see about this story, she defends her decision to use a private email server on the basis that it was "secure." Regardless of the veracity of those claims, the security of the system is not the point. She conducted official government business on an email server under her control. When subpoenaed, she produced all emails she deemed to be responsive to that request and all other "non-business" emails had been deleted and says, "trust me, this is everything."
Security is obviously a concern, but the reason that these rules regarding emails exist is for oversight. Government email servers aren't under the control of the politicians using them, and that mitigates the risk of spoliation of evidence. With that in mind, defending her decision on the basis of security is non sequitur. The ridiculousness of her defense becomes more apparent through hyperbole: Yes, I ate babies, but safeguards were in place to make sure those babies were free of bloodborne pathogens.
Clinton said she never sent classified emails from her server. However, she never said that she didn't receive classified emails on her server. As anyone in the government industry knows, when you get classified emails on an unclass system you have to "sterilize" your servers.
Did she do that? Probably not.
I guess that's why she was such a crappy SecState - everyone's intelligence services were reading her emails.
I'm not going to vote for her. Are you??
Forget her, and look for somebody else. If you do vote for her, then don't complain. You only look like a damn fool.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
At least the General's crime of sharing stuff with a woman he was sleeping with doesn't apply here . . . we think . . .
Did she get the Secret Service or someone in the government to help her secure it? Then why didn't anyone say anything?
Didn't she get government help to secure it? Then how can it be secure when her IP address will literally be on every email, the most attractive hacking target in the world?
It's not without merit, but it's definitely some petty-assed partisan issue. It's coming from the Republican party in 2015. They don't do anything else anymore. They have an entire 24 hour news network devoted to petty-assed partisan issues.
Can't they just ask the NSA for them?
Tell your boss that the corporate email system is inconvenient, so you set up a private server at your house.
Have all of your contacts send all of your emails to your private account.
If your company wants backups to comply with any laws, tell them you will provide them, but only if you think they are relevant.
See how long you keep your job.
Use gmail :-P
Don't be like Sarah Palin using Yahoo mail.
Kidding aside
Actually I have my own email server, I use intermail on Linux Slackware server I have colocated
Are you touched in the head? Seriously? Bush did it, so let's not worry. Wrong is wrong, Bush got away with it, fine. Let's not let another person get away with. Particularly, the person who called the Bush administration corrupt and full of cronyism over their email scandal (she did this in 2007 btw).
I love that title: "Family Email Server"
Like it is some weird variant of MS SBS "for families".
You know, the email server that doesn't let bad things come through...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
It wouldn't be too hard to construct at least a 'partial' audit trail by looking at those who DID recieve emails from her on the state department servers. Then compare this list to the list that she sent and see if they have anything in common. Obviosly you couldn't get things she sent to others, but at least you could verify that she has sent all the things she claims she has.
tenet: a principle or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy.
tenant: a person who occupies land or property rented from a landlord.
Doesn't even matter - she's demonstrated that either:
a. Her technical adviser was too stupid to tell her that she could get two (or more) email addresses worth of mail on a single device.
b. She thinks that she can sway independent voters with a pack of lies that I'd be embarrassed to hear come out of a ten year old's mouth.
Either way, I'm of the opinion that she would have been better off ignoring it. Her dyed in the wool followers would continue to support her and the maybe-third-party voters wouldn't have had to listen to the dumb.
Typical politician. The fact of the matter is that it was a violation of the Federal Records Act. Clinton, by federal law, was required to use a State department email address for all official business. She not only didn't use the state department email - she didn't even have one set up. Since it is policy to do so she must have expressly ordered it NOT to be set up.
Next point - how do we know which emails were deleted and which were not? Remember - Hillary controls the server. Had it been on a government server there would have been records and such. Do we really want to set a precedent where politicians get to decide what records get kept and which ones don't? Remember, Richard Nixon tried this with the Watergate tapes. He didn't want to turn over the tapes themselves, just edited transcripts of the tapes.
Thirdly - other government officials, including Obama, knew she was doing this. She was Secretary of State for 4 years. You can be sure that they traded emails somewhere along the way. Wasn't Obama the one that promised a more transparent government?
Finally - why would someone go to the trouble and expense to set up their own domain and email server? Something to hide perhaps? Now I don't know that she was up to no good but it sure smells fishy. And her track record of slippery half-truths sure don't help.
There is the political PR side of all this, you are correct.
To you and me she looks stupid because we generally understand what E-mail is and how it works and recognize the smoke and mirror trick she's attempting. But to the less technical, her story is plausible enough to be accepted, even by non-rabid supporters, especially given that those who are already in lock step with her will be repeating the lie as often and as loudly as they can. It's how the left has painted the Republicans as racist and having a "war on women" when neither is true. You just keep saying something over and over and people eventually believe it...
I think they initially miscalculated how damaging this story was and initially where going to just wait it out. However, it started getting too long, with even democrats repeating it so they switched tactics and decided to address it with the whole carefully scripted presser in hopes of being able to make it go away.
Time will tell if this was a good idea or not. Personally I think she should have just let it die unanswered, but I'm guessing that it was starting to get too close to her planned formal announcement that she's running for president and they felt it was better to cut their losses, give out the half answer, and move on. (Her typical "What difference does it make now?" move.)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Whether or not the system was secure is but one concern. Whether the system was transparent and accountable to the authority she worked for as Secretary of State on behalf of the American People is at least an equal, if not greater concern.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Just like her husband.
If you are going to refer to all the controversy surrounding ethics with the Clintons, do try and keep in mind that except for fooling around with his secretary, Bill Clinton and Hillary have never been found guilty of any of the charges.
That seems to be a Clinton-esque parsing of the facts. :-) Didn't Bill negotiate a deal with federal prosecutors over his lying to a federal judge under oath and that one of the elements of the deal was surrendering his license to practice law? That's the rich and powerful getting off lightly, not being innocent.
Hillary should offer up her private emails as soon as the Republicans in Congress release all of their private emails.
Its not that simple. Setting up your own server in preparation for your job as Secretary of State effectively makes that a defacto government server, one that you are privately administering rather than having the appropriate government folks administering. That is the heart of this matter, whether or not that server should be considered a government server and come under the physical possession of government.
Currently, every public servant must decide which email system to use at the time each email is sent. Is it official or private? Do we trust a Secretary of State to make that distinction?
There is an enormous distinction between choosing which email account to use and operating a private server for government use. When choosing the email account to use the user can not manipulate history. When operating a private server that user can manipulate history.
Its implied that Hillary and Bill managed their own home mail server. But that seems pretty unlikely. Somehow I can't see Hillary checking for exploits against her MTA and patching. More likely someone did it for them. And having managed large organizational email systems myself for years, I have to wonder who that person is. Does this sysadmin work for the Clinton Foundation? Does he have a shoebox full of backup tapes under the bed? Is he nervously looking over his shoulder right now?
She's saying its secure when we know it was using self signed certs, exposed OWA, and I saw something this morning that said Qualys scanned it and it was riddled with vulnerabilities. She says there were no breaches, but does she have the extensive instrumentation required to detect a breach, especially one perpetrated by government sponsored entities who would absolutely have an interest in the contents of her email?
It's just so frustrating to see the ignorance, and then to read comments from people defending her. You can say the timing is politically motivated. I personally think this is the State Department's fault much moreso than hers...but don't tell me that it was a.) legal, b.) a good idea, c.) secure, d.) in any way, shape or form compliant with even the most basic security frameworks out there.
I wish I could just not see anything else about this issue, but it's like a magnet for my eyes.
This is the same stupid ass statement she made at the press conference. No matter what you saw on TV or read on some interweb rag site, guys in black suits wearing sun glasses doing back flips over laser beams and plopping at the console is actually the least likely scenario for a computer to become compromised.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
We are being asked to believe that Hilary Clinton (or some unspecified persons working for her) separated "personal" from "official" e-mails, sent paper printouts of all the official e-mails to the State Department, and DESTROYED all of the personal e-mails. Why would she do that? Who destroys all their personal e-mails, and why? Isn't it much more likely that the "personal" e-mails were destroyed so that sorting process could not be reviewed, because inconvenient official e-mails somehow got destroyed along with them?
There was no violation of law or policy.
The law only appears to require it be archived on (copied to) a federal system, NOT that it originate on a federal system. If she always sent and/or CC'd to at least one gov't account when doing gov't business, then technically she may be following the law as written.
Now, there was a State Department policy guideline against using a private account/server to send such messages, but it is not a "law", per se. It's roughly comparable to an employee manual saying, "All receptionists must wear a tie".
At least this is how I understand the legal situation based on reading multiple sources. If anybody has a specific law or document that says otherwise, please quote and link it.
Table-ized A.I.
So, when Colon Powell did it it was no big deal, but Hillary does it and it's the end of the world? Also, no notices the irony of saying she should have used the State Department's server so her e-mails could be archived when the State Department admitted that they lost ALL the e-mails from her term due to a server upgrade. So if she had used their server all her e-mails would have been lost. Because she used her own they exist. How about a hearty "thank you" and STFU from all the repubs trying to contrive a controversy so they stand a chance against her in 2016...
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
http://www.jewishworldreview.c...
"Concealing government documents from the government when you work for it is a felony, punishable by up to three years in prison and permanent disqualification from holding public office."
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.
I think that's the point; it's beyond likelihood this was just an oversight. She (or her team) obviously decided it's better to just give the dogs one big bone to chew on than let them launch a congressional investigation into every single email she ever sent. As you say, I'm generally proHillary; not happy about this on an absolute basis; but as a political move, I think it was well played.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
As a former contractor to the State Department I can assure you that emails are not used for classified information. The most "sensitive" information in an email might be someone trying to re-arrange a seating at a State dinner because ambassador X's wife does not like ambassador Y's wife. Emails were treated like unsecured phone lines. In fact there is an entire booklet on communication protocols specifically instructing employees to treat email like a post card. Email and texting are simply adjuncts to unsecured phone calls.
There are plenty of methods for secure transmissions, but none of them are on personal cell phones.
There is not going to be an email thread somewhere with Hillary trying to cover up Benghazi. Republicans know this. It is nothing more than political theater that has and will piss off the moderate swing voters.
"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."
In fact the Department of the Navy enchorages Reservists to use their personal emails and third party "cloud services"
There was a drilling engineer that faced 20 years of Federal prison time for deleting texts and emails that might have been relevant to the oil spill. He was convicted, but his case is pending appeal. I would bet that he is now wishing he had thought to set up a server at home. Hillary is hoping for 4 years- I say let her have them, but maybe not in the place she expects. Besides, we all know that the NSA, the Chinese, the Russians, and probably even the North Koreans have all the copies of Hillary's email that they have been getting off her server for years. Nothing is lost- it is just that the people who have it don't want to admit they have it.
They don't care. They know the useful idiots will vote for them, no matter what.
Look at the apologists on this board.
Never mind she broke the law - "What difference does it make?"
Learn from it. You're a consummate bullshit artist, not someone who knows jack shit about computer systems.
Sure, right. We know that the Clintons knew this was illegal as all hell. She had enforced this rule against others in the past.But liberals own the federal government now so they can't be charged with crimes unless the party itself has issues with the offender. Welcome to Democracy 2.0, your votes don't matter now.
More that it was dismissed as not a big deal back then so why a big deal now?
That's the problem with setting low standards. When you try to hold others to account it comes back to bite.
Personally I think both are examples of a failure and that there should be consequences for both parties, but it's not going to happen that way.
Yes he's comically wrong, but as an aside I used to use email for web browsing back in 1996 when my workplace forbid network access for anything apart from email.
The service was called "ftpmail" but could also be scripted to post into forms on web pages. It was probably still around when Slashdot started so someone bloody minded enough could have used work email to put bullshit up on Slashdot.
Smaller systems are intrinsically more focused, which implies better privacy.
Let's not conflate privacy and security. Thats' not straightforward if we talk about such obscure concepts as group- or team- privacy. Anyway, it's obvious that sysadmins can access email contents, which we may call a privacy breach. When someone who was not appointed by the team or group does so, we call it a security breach. There are recipes to defend from the latter, not from the former.
Of course, one can choose to be "transparent" and operate through a gmail account. I don't recommend it. On the opposite, I recommend every group or team run their own email servers if they can spare the effort to keep them secure. I'd vote Clinton just for doing so if I were American.
Secret from ordinary citizens, of course.
Easily known to any spy agency. So our elite don't worry about their allies, implications are that all of the other intelligence agencies in the world are allies of each other. I can think of more than a few instances that would confirm that.
I think Mrs. Clinton's attitude and declarations show an apalling ignorance bordering to stupidity. I wonder, are there similar (vast) blackouts in her knowledge of driving a car, operating a mobile phone, microwave oven, kitchen robot, lawn mower etc. ?! Beware, Bill and other US or non US citizens !
Mikey