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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...
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.
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)
Physical security is still an important aspect of overall security.
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?
She is on record saying she didn't like email because it could be audited. Since that recording she apparently figured out that she could self host.
That is almost certainly why she was doing it.
And added to that, many members of the government are being encouraged to use text messages instead of emails etc because they can't be audited.
There is a concerted effort throughout government to communicate in manners that cannot be audited.
All of which is against the spirit of the law regardless of whether it is against the letter of the law.
Its the fucking IRS issue all over again. They said they didn't have her emails or they were destroyed. Turns out that the IRS emails were actually backed up the whole time and the IT department that had them had received no queries for them at any time. Revealing that the IRS in fact never looked for them.
Its just deceit deceit deceit.
And for those that will reflexively say this is just a republican thing... it isn't. This is fucking bullshit regardless of what party is doing it. Stop being such shills and realize that if you accept this then the republicans are going to start doing it. And then MAYBE you might grasp why this is unacceptable.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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?
Also her claim is she did not want to carry multiple devices. What device was she using that only allows only one email account or just one app to check that one account?
I've had multiple accounts on my phones since my first smart phone. I can switch accounts pretty simply in the same app as well as use other apps specifically for the other accounts with different defaults for each. I don't buy her excuse and seriously question the mental abilities of government official that high up if its too dificult.
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.
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.
Like phone calls, or meeting another official at a bar.
I just don't think emails should be regarded this way, they're far too casual and they don't really reflect the official acts of people in the way that a true "record" does (in the sense that someone in the 1960s would understand the term "government record.") Emails should be afforded the same leniency as phone calls -- maybe we keep them for a little while, but people, even people in government, should have the right to delete them.
Sometimes I wonder if transparency advocates won't be happy until they've stapled a Google Glass onto the head of every government employee recording a 24 hour stream of their every sight and utterance. The problem with this approach is that the only people who actually use government transparency are other politicians, mainly to dig up dirt, and lobbyists -- it makes their job so much easier when they can confirm that a politician remains bought. Beyond a certain point transparency only benefits the loud and wealthy, it makes discretion impossible and it subjugates elected officials to the whim of anyone that runs a PR operation.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
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.
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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.
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!
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.