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Clinton's Private Email Was Blocked By Spam Filters, So State IT Turned Them Off (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Documents recently obtained by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch show that in December 2010, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her staff were having difficulty communicating with State Department officials by e-mail because spam filters were blocking their messages. To fix the problem, State Department IT turned the filters off -- potentially exposing State's employees to phishing attacks and other malicious e-mails. The mail problems prompted Clinton Chief of Staff Huma Abedin to suggest to Clinton (PDF), "We should talk about putting you on State e-mail or releasing your e-mail address to the department so you are not going to spam." Clinton replied, "Let's get [a] separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal [e-mail] being accessible." The mail filter system -- Trend Micro's ScanMail for Exchange 8 -- was apparently causing some messages from Clinton's private server (Clintonemail.com) to not be delivered (PDF). Some were "bounced;" others were accepted by the server but were quarantined and never delivered to the recipient. According to the e-mail thread published yesterday by Judicial Watch, State's IT team turned off both spam and antivirus filters on two "bridgehead" mail relay servers while waiting for a fix from Trend Micro. There was some doubt about whether Trend Micro would address the issue before State performed an upgrade to the latest version of the mail filtering software. A State Department contractor support tech confirmed that two filters needed to be shut off in order to temporarily fix the problem -- a measure that State's IT team took with some trepidation, because the filters had "blocked malicious content in the recent past." It's not clear from the thread that the issue was ever satisfactorily resolved, either with SMEX 8 or SMEX 10.
big boss tells IT to do whatever it takes to make THEM happy, even if it violates policy. Same story everywhere.
VOTE TRUMP 2016 !!
I thought the US government was concerned about Chinese made technology potentially giving up important information to the Chinese government. How is Trend Micro allowed in the State Department?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
of course IT did
I bet she used the same password as on my luggage.
I've met a lot of incompetent IT people, but most email systems are able to whitelist email from a specific server or ip address.
Not that this excuses Clinton for using this personal email system for classified info. She should be in jail.
When I was living overseas in 2011, I had to send an email to the US embassy (which is a division of the State Department). But the email didn't get through because the State Department had an over-agressive spam filter. When I finally got through to them, I told them exactly what was wrong with their filter... But they apparently didn't follow my advice!
You other two options are "damn the rules and do as I say" and "damn you all and do as I say."
I run my own server for my tiny company. I've spent maybe 40 hrs total configuring spam. I have options to whitelist, blacklist, auto greylist, and various other options. It is inexcusable they can't do simple whitelisting by IP.
If it was anyone else. Executives at IT always demand crap like this. Hell, I think there was a /. article not too long ago with a study on it. It's still awful practice, but if you've ever worked in IT with executives you've done this at least once... a year.
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This will solve the problem!
What a conniving bitch.... intentionally breaking the law and intent of the law.
SHE SERVES US.
This is all just her usurping the processes that we put in place to monitor the servants who serve us.
At this point it's literally contempt for the American people's right to read the email of a public official.
She disgusts me.
She did this to skirt FOIA requests. I'm not sure why there aren't any major news agencies with the balls to say it.
No gray matter at all.
This is probably the reason that Clinton was using her own email server: the government email systems sucked because they were run by incompetent people.
Does this "excuse" Clinton? I don't know. But at least she did what she needed to do to get shit done, which is more than what you can say about many people in government.
The officials made a policy decision.
Case and investigation seems closed if this is true.
"State Department officials by e-mail because spam filters were blocking their messages. To fix the problem, State Department IT turned the filters off "
We can quibble about document classification but classification is a result of policy
and the use or non use of a department mail server is also policy.
If those that make policy change it one way or another one place or another and even if that
policy was modified by HC herself the investigation is going to find a dead end at Kafka's
tombstone.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Incredible.
Check out my novel.
I heard that they set Hillary's computer to be the DMZ on the State Department's NAT router because she didn't want to deal with figuring out port forwarding or UPnP.
If it was compromised, I don't see how it isn't possible. A bot would've done it and not even known it belonged to Clinton.
How else was she supposed to get bribes from all of those Third world nations with a normal spam filter?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
State department network was hacked in 2014, Is this the reason why that happened?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/three-months-later-state-department-hasnt-rooted-out-hackers-1424391453
Hillary for prison 2016!
Just indict her already, so we can have Bernie.
Obviously the emails containing top secret information wouldn't be subject to FOIA, and there are about a dozen other exceptions to FOIA, some of them quite broad.
* No, instructing her staff to remove the "Top Secret" marking from the document does NOT make the information no longer top secret. It only means she committed an ADDITIONAL crime.
didn't want any chance of personal e-mail to be accessible because then people would find out about all the illegal shit she is doing.
Classified documents are not allowed to be sent via email, whether that's the State Department's server or anyone else's. State.gov email is not secure, period.
...in the safe room. But I'm waiting until you write your "tell all" book, declaring how Hillary personally ordered his murder because he was her gay lover, her being one of those weird Japanese hentai women with male organs
I'm sure you'll make a million dollars or so scamming all the wanting-to-believe teabaggers, and prompt some GOP congressman to ask very strange questions next time she's up on the Hill.
I cant believe that Americans actually have this woman as a presidential option. If she cant even follow basic security principles, imagine the non-compliance and disregard for laws and rights if she was the president? With the two main candidates being Trump an Hillary, the rest of the world is thinking that the US citizens just failed a simple IQ test.
AFAIK, sending Top Secret classified information in an email is a crime (probably a felony; possibly treason).
I work for a large government agency, and the IT people are mostly incompetent. I have spent significant effort circumventing the email and firewalls to get the work I need done.
Note that in government everyone is paid on the same scale. Highest degree + years of experience = pay. Someone with an English master's degree gets paid the same as a CS master's degree. Bottom line: any competent tech person can get paid far more outside of government than inside.
No, instructing her staff to remove the "Top Secret" marking from the document does NOT make the information no longer top secret.
The Secretary of State is one of many people who are were authorized by The President to unilaterally declassified such documents. I can't find the link any more. Funny thing, I saw the official rules, because someone here said she violated them by not having the declassification reviewed. Such a review requirement only applies to peons.
The Secretary of State -could- declassify some State materials. She can't declassify any material from agencies outside DOS. But she didn't declassify it. It remained classified as it shared classified information with friends, and sent it in the clear over the internet to her house.
Why does that make any difference?
All 3 choices were crappy:
1. Own personal server
2. Commercial service, like AOL
3. State Dept. regular email server (which got hacked, by the way).
Why should any one be elevated above the other? It's like a choice between a Yugo, Pinto, and Chevy Chevette.
Table-ized A.I.
You seriously expect her to know the ins and outs of IT security? Really?
Did you really think that at any point she would have been like: You know, It was raining on Sunday, so I was flipping through the email setup manual from the DoD, and I did a quick audit of my email server, here's a list of things that need to be fixed.
-----
Back to these clowns, who in their right mind wouldn't just add her email, domain, or ip to the white list? I'm guessing the same clowns that were thinking "Hey, we got this notice that Hillary set up her own email server and now wants email routed there, good for her, you go girl!" instead of raising some alarms.
It certainly wouldn't be news if it were anyone else. But she was approving drone strikes on targets via email, effectively handing out death sentences from her server in a bathroom... But hey, good thing it didn't have encryption turned on for several months. That would make it more difficult to spoof. Personally, I'm ok with enforcing higher security standards on email systems where orders to kill other people are issued and followed.
It makes a difference because commercial providers are presumably better at InfoSec than the nobody that ran Clinton's email server.
Will vote for this cunt to be president.
In every poll done of journalists in the US in the past hundred years, over 90% of journalists self-identify as Democrats or as further-left independents (more willing to settle for a left-wing Democrat than ever consider voting Republican).
American "mainstream" journalists used to get away with pretending to be unbiased because there were so few outlets (before there was cable TV, most Americans got no more than 3or 4 channels of TV: local affilliates for ABC, CBS, and NBC and possible the local PBS) and because they tended to be more subtle with their biases. Rather than boldly telling people what to think, they decided what to cover (and often more importantly what NOT to cover). When average people take a little time from their other more-immediate concerns to watch "the news", they absorb a subtle message about what's important just based on what is reported and attitudes about it based on how it's reported.
Sadly, there are still no major news outlets that are right-of-center. Fox News, which many modern young progressives have convinced themselves is extremely right-wing, is actually to the left of where the supposedly left-wing mainstream press of the 1970s was. Fox has a left-leaning former CNN guy running its media analysis show. The left-leaning son of late 60-Minutes host Mike Wallace runs the Fox Sunday morning talking heads show. The biggest name at Fox is an old left-leaning New York Catholic Democrat from a Kennedy-supporting family who looks like a conservative to people NOW only because he still lives in a Jack Kennedy style world-view which today's Democrats have left behind. The reason Fox seems so right-wing to these people is simply that it is one of the only outlets that tolerates right-of center content within its left-of-center institution, and it has an obvious right-winger on his own show every evening (Hannity), which violates the "safe spaces" these modern little cupcakes now insist on.
That's questionable because it's potentially easier to buy an exploit on the black market for the common carriers than for a single one-off machine.
But even if you were correct, it's a rather subtle difference that I wouldn't expect somebody like Mrs. Clinton to grok. She could ask for expert advice, but likely would get different answers depending on who she asked, because there is no hard evidence either way. It's all speculative.
Further, the custom server argument could also be used against usage of the State Dept's regular email system, the one she "should have" been using.
These differences are all speculative and subtle, yet people's political beliefs seem to magnify perceived differences. Politics blinds people. I may be susceptible also; I'm human.
Table-ized A.I.
It is a matter of historical FACT that the Democrats created the KKK.
The early Klan papers that were posted on trees in the south called for the lynching and murder of BOTH blacks AND Republicans.
The founders of the Klan were honored guests at several Democrat national presidential conventions.
Up until 2003, the Democrats in the US Senate (including then Senator Hillary Clinton) voted to be lead by Senator Robert Byrd - a KKK leader. This is a Historical FACT.
oh, and one more thing: The NRA was active in the south teaching black men to maintain and shoot rifles to help them have a chance of defending their families from those hooded Klansmen.
Hey, I loved my Chevette. It was a great car till the transmission locked up and burned the second clutch up.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
https://politics.slashdot.org/...
Apparently, it wouldn't have even been hard to compromise her server as it had more holes than swiss cheese.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
But now that you mention it, I suspect it depends on your location and perhaps the people you circulate among.
I've used both terms when having a little rhetorical fun, and have heard others use plenty of other alternatives.
The point still stands, however, that we now have a slice of the population with a bizarre mindset that is new in the US and contrary to our historical traditions: they get upset/frustrated and even claim to be wounded/hurt/scared simply by hearing a viewpoint that differs from the mindset they have been programmed to have. It's a very freaky thing to see if you are somebody like myself who is old enough to see this as the shocking thing that it is. I hate going all Godwin on this, but the only real example I can think of like this is from a friend I once had who told me about his cousin. My friend's cousin was an actual member of the Hitler Youth (the kids of Germany at that time had no real choice in that) who survived the war and ended up getting arrested by American soldiers immediately after the war (accosting an American soldier with a NAZI flag in 1945 in Germany was not such a clever thing). The young person in question was a bit of a basket case, having been raised in that environment with NAZI teachers programming all the kids to think a certain way and reject any other viewpoints etc. A non-NAZI perspective was simply unthinkable to this person, and when the regime fell and the only views allowed were the ones that were unthinkable the result was pretty messed up. Sorry,the tale was much more detailed, but I've forgotten a bunch and the person involved may still be alive so I am being deliberately vague here. My point really is that I have heard of people elsewhere being so unable to accept contrary opinions and have rational discussions - but never before in the United States, where this seems to suddenly be a big thing in the youth who MUST be getting this crap from SOMEWHERE. It's not natural. Somebody is propagandizing an entire generation of Americans into a VERY un-American attitude, and they get super offended if you even point it out to them.
Yet another Slashdotter who convinced themselves that they can read minds.
Table-ized A.I.
I bet there's also a Yugo lover or two out there somewhere.
Table-ized A.I.
Could be the filter worked as designed. It sensed the e-mail coming form Hillary was total bullshit so it blocked them.