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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.

16 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Typical . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    big boss tells IT to do whatever it takes to make THEM happy, even if it violates policy. Same story everywhere.

    1. Re:Typical . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Um, no.

      "IT" works *for* the boss - the "boss" doesn't work for IT.

      U fail.

    2. Re:Typical . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, both the boss and IT work for the organization. U fail big time.

  2. PLAY IT SAFE !! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    VOTE TRUMP 2016 !!

  3. Whitelist by stabiesoft · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Whitelist by ebonum · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They couldn't simply white list her IP. It is a little know fact that her server was on a home connection and she had a dynamic IP. However, the IT team was surprised to learn that bitch.dnsdynamic.com was available for DDNS.

      (all my facts may or may not be of a questionable source and I preemptively plead the 5th)

  4. Re:This wouldn't even be news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If it was anyone else. Executives at IT always demand crap like this.

    Yes. IT peons are often overruled by executives.

    But in this case, when this executive demanded crap like this, it was illegal.

    Clinton should go to jail.

  5. Conniving bitch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  6. FOIA requests by bangular · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:FOIA requests by SensitiveMale · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      The majority of those news outlets want her to win.

      And are willing to help her any way they can.

  7. Re:BINGO by SensitiveMale · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    Really? Look, I'm no fan of the govt, but I seriously doubt that the email admin for the State Department, The State Department of the United States, is incompetent.

    Now the person that set up Clinton's open email system in her bathroom, yeah. I believe he was incompetent.

  8. Re:BINGO by dfenstrate · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You're free to advocate prosecution of Colin Powell if you wish. Nothing Powell did, legal or illegal, exonerates Hillary Clinton.

    --
    Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
  9. Re:Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. by davester666 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Of course, the luggage still opens with 1 of 7 keys, which can be 3d printed at home, since some moron at the TSA allowed all the keys to be photographed and published in a national magazine.

    They definitely don't pick from the top shelf when stocking the TSA with talent...

    --
    Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  10. Re:BINGO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's a huge difference between Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton: by the time Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, email had become the standard way to do things, there was an email system all set up for her, and there were regulations requiring her to use the official email system unless she had a good reason to do something else (and to routinely use her own email system required approval she never asked for and never got).

    Colin Powell says he didn't send or receive classified information. Recently, a grand total of two emails that were sent to him were "retroactively classified" (to use Hillary Clinton's term). Neither of the two were classified "Secret" or above. In comparison, of Hillary Clinton's known emails, over 2100 contain classified information, 65 "Secret", 22 "Top Secret" (source)

    In 2005, after Colin Powell but before Hillary Clinton, rules were developed over use of email. Colin Powell couldn't have broken them as they were put together after he was already gone, but Hillary Clinton absolutely broke them. She avoided using an official account set up for her to use, and went to great lengths to continue to use it rather than the official one. And she was required to take a training course every year about how to properly keep secrets, but there is no evidence she did so. She took the class once right after she got the job and then never took the class again.

    And of course, even if Colin Powell was guilty of the exact same crimes as Hillary Clinton, that still wouldn't excuse her.

    And it's obvious to anyone with common sense what her motive was: she wanted to control access to her emails. Some of her email could be embarrassing if someone read it (after filing an FOIA request) so she wanted to make sure there were no official copies of anything she didn't like. She committed conspiracy to avoid keeping Federal records that she was legally required to keep.

    If you are willing to excuse Hillary Clinton for this kind of egregious lawbreaking, then you will have no moral right to complain later when President Trump does something just as bad. We're geeks here in ./ and we understand well enough to damn well know why what she did was stupid as well as illegal and wrong. Don't give her a pass for immoral behavior just because she is on your side. If you have to hold your nose and vote for her because you really really just can't even Trump, then fine and dandy, but just admit it to yourself: you would be voting for someone willing to break the law and lie about it (as proven by this email controversy).

    http://www.weeklystandard.com/why-colin-powells-emails-are-not-like-hillarys/article/2000949

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/03/10/the-misleading-democratic-spin-on-hillary-clintons-emails/

    http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2016/02/05/no-the-powell-and-condi-classified-emails-story-is-not-a-gamechanger-n2114842

  11. Re:Hillary for prison 2016! by David_Hart · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Hillary for prison 2016!

    And yet, having your own email server wasn't against the law... So, good luck with that...

    I'm not a Clinton supporter, but I do believe in a fair representation. What she did was against the spirit of the law and certainly shows an attempt at keeping communications private that should be part of the public record. But there is no proof that anything that she did broke the laws as written.

    http://www.npr.org/sections/it...

  12. Re:BINGO by khallow · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you are willing to excuse Hillary Clinton for this kind of egregious lawbreaking, then you will have no moral right to complain later when President Trump does something just as bad.

    Morality as well as objectivity goes out the window with politics. Instead, we should be asking, would we want our worst enemies to get away with what Clinton did? Ten years from now do we want every stooge and crony to have their own personal servers and absolutely no accountability for all the resulting emails that are never archived by the government?

    If your team gets away with something, then anyone can do the same. And there are some real nasty pieces of work out there.