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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.
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...
it will begin the death-rattle of the Democratic party. Progressives see through her like a dirty window.
It specifically is illegal actually.
And the destruction of government records is a felony.
news at 11. ;)
Her email records were sopeniaed by congress in the middle of that bengazi thing and they were never provided because the state department didn't have them despite by law having a right to have them.
If government officials can use private email servers to host government emails then there is no way to know who said what to whom when. The whole point was to have the records with a trusted third party that could be audited.
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.
Given that there are gaps of MONTHS in the records she provided there is no way that she didn't unless she didn't send a government email despite being the head of the state department for months.
How fucking likely is that?
I'm not saying she's going to jail. She's too powerful and her political allies are too powerful. That doesn't mean she isn't as of this moment almost certainly a felon.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
They went to jail for that. Do you still want an equal response?
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.
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?
No it isn't sedition. It was a reminder of how the constitution works and that the president despite his insistance otherwise does not have the authority to nullify laws passed by congress which the sanctions are. Congress and even state governments have long reached out to foreign officials and even negotiated trade agreements without administration participation. Look up the sister cities project if you doubt that
And we will hear about the clinton email specifically because congress has requested copies of it for oversight purposes and there appears to be gapps in what was provided.
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.
Of course we can blame her for this. She's the one that made the decision to use personal email for government and public purposes, hiding her correspondence from government archives, and hidden from freedom of information requests. If not outright illegal, this is morally wrong. When she becomes president will she continue to hide her official correspondence from government archives and the public? Nixon would have loved to have had a system of off-the-record private correspondence instead of those pesky papers that leave trails.
...the IT people that worked with her that never said anything, or raised any kind of fuss over the problem.
That assumes she didn't simply dismiss their concerns with the type of entitled attitude that has come to be a defining mark of both the Left and Right wings of the Demopublican Party.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
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.
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).
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
As far as we know, ONLY Hillary Clinton used her family email server. The rest of her staff used government mail servers. Therefore any correspondents between her and her staff or the president is recorded on an official email server anyway.
I'm not saying that I agree with her using her own personal email server, but I also don't think this "controversy" rises to the level of me really giving a rat's ass about. Actually it rises to the level of "She should have known better... but meh".
What does concern me is that the right decided to use this low grade political material so early that it will be forgotten by the time the election season actually hits full stride. So the more important question is what's going on that requires the gullible media's distraction on something as trivial as email usage by a retired secretary of state?
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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.
So the defense now is "Bush did bad things, too?"
"Hey - Nixon engaged in obstruction of justice, too! We have precedent!"
Let's see how that one goes over.
There is still no evidence that any federal laws were broken.
You must not know about the federal records act of 1950 and the national archives and records regulations of 1995. NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) adopted regulations in 1995 which required the preservation of official e-mails created on non-official accounts. The Archivist interpreted the Federal Records Act to apply to e-mail records and further provided that “[a]gencies with access to external electronic mail systems shall ensure that federal records sent or received on these systems are preserved in the appropriate recordkeeping system . . .” So as early as 1995, all federal agencies were required to preserve official e-mails, including those created or maintained on “external electronic mail systems.”
Later NARA regulations merely clarified this requirement. In 2009, after a Government Accountability Office report indicated that certain agencies had lax e-mail practices, the NARA adopted new regulations that provided that any emails created on private e-mail accounts must be preserved. But that regulation merely restated, in perhaps slightly different language, what the 1995 regulation had already mandated, requiring that “[a]gencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record keeping system.”
Now just saying that the other employees with a .gov email address had the emails archived does not meet the criteria of the law. What if other government employees also used personal email? Then there would be no official government archive of the email. What about her official emails to foreign heads of state? Those were not archived either. What about official emails to non .gov addresses in the US? Just these questions show that she did not follow the laws and regulations that were established before and during her time in office.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414913/yes-what-hillary-did-was-illegal-and-has-been-20-years-shannen-coffin
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
You also realize this was the major factor in law being passed to prevent that. Documentation for the National Archives is law concerning state document retention. While I agree at the time she used the system it may not have been illegal, but a memo released and signed by Obama https://www.whitehouse.gov/the... suggest otherwise, http://www.whitehouse.gov/site...
However we are reminded time and time again no law was broken, what was broken was procedure, if one can not follow a simple procedure set out by their employer their actions are questionable and their motive becomes dubious.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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.
I don't have a problem with that.
The American public has been doing that for how long now, and without knowledge it was going on?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
What she can't avoid is the memo's she sent out to her own staffers that detailed using private email for public business is a no no.
She even forced out an ambassador in 2012 in part for doing what she did:
http://thefederalist.com/2015/...
The inspector general’s report specifically noted that Gration violated State Department policy by using a private, unsanctioned e-mail service for official business. In its executive summary listing its key judgments against the U.S. ambassador to Kenya who served under Hillary Clinton, the inspector general stated that Gration’s decision to willfully violate departmental information security policies highlighted Gration’s “reluctance to accept clear-cut U.S. Government decisions.” The report claimed that this reluctance to obey governmental security policies was the former ambassador’s “greatest weakness.”
So did she wrongfully remove the ambassador, or did she hold him to a standard she knew she was violating herself?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
They're hoping to find a "gotcha" email in her corespondence. Especially one of the ones deleted or not handed over. Then they hope the pressure keeps on and she loses the primary. You forget that primary season is starting soon,and the republicans know they have no good candidates at this time. The Gov. from Wisconsin is their best bet. Dems have Hilary, Elizabeth Warren and people even seem to still like Anthony Weiner.
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.
She has months of gaps in her emails. That's not credible.
There is no way she sent no official emails while head of the state department for months.
As to your ad hominem on Fox news... it doesn't matter who says a thing. If the devil himself stood before you and said 1+1=2... is he lying?
Saying that it is from fox so is wrong is equally stupid. It is ad hominem. Do better.
As to requirements to use the US government servers, yes she is required to use them. She can use private email if she BCCs or CCs all the email to the government account. Otherwise she can't do it.
And even then that is frowned upon.
If on top of that she destroyed government documents then that is a felony.
She has MONTHS of gaps in her emails. Which means she's either filtering mails in sensitive periods of time to carefully redact information she doesn't want to reveal or she actually deleted them.
I suspect it is the first option. The server should have been ceased and gone over by independent computer forensic investigators. Same thing you'd do if you were auditing a corporation that wasn't cooperating with discovery.
She'll almost certainly get away with it. But that is more because she's powerful and has powerful friends rather then because she didn't do anything.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Laws are for the little people, not them.
The Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014 became law on November 26, 2014. Clinton's final day as secretary was February 1, 2013.
The "Law" that everyone keeps claiming that she broke wasn't effective until a year and a half after she left office.
There was absolutely no legal requirement at the time of her tenure to use a government e-mail. Furthermore, she retroactively complied with the records portion of the law by turning over any business related e-mails she had on her home server archive.
Also, previous Secretaries of State, like Colin Powell, used personal email as well. In his case, they didn't even archive it so many of the emails are lost. We'll never have access to his electronic discusssions about, say, the decisions leading for him to give a speech at the United Nations calling for the Invasion of Iraq.
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.
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!
The Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014 became law on November 26, 2014. Clinton's final day as secretary was February 1, 2013.
So? How does that excuse her from existing federal regulations? Section 1236.22 of the 2009 NARA regulation clearly says, "Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system."
... pass along the data to be reviewed? No. She used employees of her family enterprise to print out 55,000 pages of email for them to have to manually wade through (another stalling tactic), and she and only she knows the criteria used to separate those from the 30,000+ messages she says she deleted before hand. Anyone who buys her laughable narrative on this topic is a fool or (more likely, since nobody's that dumb) one of her shills.
She went out of her way to avoid that requirement. She made no provision to have her official emails mirrored over to State's mandated archives. Nor did she lift a finger to do so when she left office. That violates both the letter and the spirit of that crystal clear legal requirement. And when investigators in congress and other FOIA requesters finally understood why her stonewalling was so effective (there WERE no records at State for them to request, because she prevented that from happening!), she did what
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.