Hillary Clinton Used BleachBit To Wipe Emails (neowin.net)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neowin: The open-source disk cleaning application, BleachBit, got quite a decent ad pitch from the world of politics after it was revealed lawyers of the presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton, used the software to wipe her email servers. Clinton is currently in hot water, being accused of using private servers for storing sensitive emails. "[South Carolina Representative, Trey Gowdy, spoke to Fox News about Hillary Clinton's lawyers using BleachBit to wipe the private servers. He said:] 'She and her lawyers had those emails deleted. And they didn't just push the delete button; they had them deleted where even God can't read them. They were using something called BleachBit. You don't use BleachBit for yoga emails or bridesmaids emails. When you're using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see.'" Two of the main features that are listed on the BleachBit website include "Shred files to hide their contents and prevent data recovery," and "Overwrite free disk space to hide previously deleted files." These two features would make it pretty difficult for anyone trying to recover the deleted emails. Slashdot reader ahziem adds: The IT team for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used the open source cleaning software BleachBit to wipe systems "so even God couldn't read them," according to South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy on Fox News. His comments on the "drastic cyber-measure" were in response to the question of whether emails on her private Microsoft Exchange Server were simply about "yoga and wedding plans." Perhaps Clinton's team used an open-source application because, unlike proprietary applications, it can be audited, like for backdoors. In response to the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013, privacy expert Bruce Schneier advised in an article in which he stated he also uses BleachBit, "Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software." Ironically, Schneier was writing to a non-governmental audience. Have any Slashdotters had any experience with BleachBit? Specifically, have you used it for erasing "yoga emails" or "bridesmaids emails?"

Comments

Too secure for insecure?

[dirk]

I really can't find something to bitch about here. Sure, Clinton sucks, but the big knock against her and her email server was that she wasn't secure enough with it. Then, when she does do something secure, the knock is "See, she is so secure she must be hiding something!" Sorry, you can't bitch when she isn't secure and then bitch when she is. Was she hiding stuff? Most probably, since all politicians are. Do I trust her? Not a chance. But you can't set up a now in scenario as your reason for not liking her. You can't bitch about insecurity and then bitch about too much security at the same time.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

All indications are she wasn't very careful while actively using the server. However, once she started getting requests to produce data from it, then she suddenly got very careful. Even if she did do nothing wrong, that is a very stark change in behavior that just happened to coincide with legal requests to hand over data.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[NotInHere]

The wiping just means that she is very secure from her own state interfering with her. But it doesn't say anything about how easy it was for third party states to gain information from her email server before it was wiped. So her servers might be secure from the justice system, but not secure from third parties. Both these aspects are how it shouldn't be.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the Freedom of Information Act? Don't secretary of state emails have to be archived?

The big knock against her email server is that any other state employee that ran such a thing would be locked up in jail.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Triklyn]

... the knock against her is that they were shredding documents that a federal prosecutor might see. she's not being secure now, secure doesn't mean destroy the files so that the people that can check or look for corruption cannot now.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[0100010001010011]

Because of who the 'security' was against and when it was applied.

The server was insecure to the Russians, Iranians, and any 16 year old that figured out how to get in.

The server's data was secure against being used against her.

Had she had a secure server but never wiped it but just kept the hard drives in her basement I doubt that the Russians or Iranians would have been able to get to it.

It's like wearing a condom while tight rope walking. You're protected against *one* thing that may happen during the tight rope walk but it's not what you need to be worrying about.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[CaptnCrud]

Two wrongs don't make a right. If I install an application to protect the data I "ILLEGALLY" stored, that doesn't automatically make things all right.

I think you're missing the angle here....when was this software installed/used? Because I have a hunch it was when the FBI first began probing.....

This has been an entertaining election, i'll give it that.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[PopeRatzo]

The big knock against her email server is that any other state employee that ran such a thing would be locked up in jail.

You might want to think about this a minute. The Bush Administration wiped 22 million emails.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two wrongs do not make a right.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Triklyn]

retroactively classified has a different flavor, and apparently, rice didn't use email period. her assistant did.

if you read the link you linked at least.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Remind me when the law went into effect?

You might find out that it was legal for them to use private servers....

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[laing]

In the eyes of the law (courts), spoliation of evidence is equivalent to guilt, but perhaps to a lessor degree.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[CanadianRealist]

The "justice system" is a third party.

If it was easy for third party states to gain information from her e-mail server then the "justice system" could have gained it just as easily. Maybe foreign states did hack her server. It's just as likely that the NSA or some other US government entity hacked her server.

Or is the claim that she wiped the server in such a way that it is no longer readable by the US government or even "God", but somehow can still be read by foreign governments?

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[cahuenga]

Sure, Clinton sucks, but the big knock against her and her email server was that she wasn't secure enough with it.

My quibble was the blatant arrogance of the act. That private server was clearly a move to preserve final editing rights of her tenure at the State Department and evade any future FOIA requests that may crop up during her next run for the presidency; and was there ever any doubt that she would run again? The fact that she thought she could get away with it after experiencing the fallout from the exact same move by members of the Bush administration while she was a sitting Senator in Washington reinforces the feeling that her arrogance knows no bounds. She took a page out of the neocon playbook and figured she would show them how it's done.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[KingBozo]

There is a difference, They talk about email that were sent to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and didn't have any classified markings, Not that they sent classified emails. Big difference in that Hillary send Classified documents that had classified markings in them.

This is blatant trying to say someone else did it also, when the facts are different.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Colin Powell sees it differently:
http://www.people.com/article/colin-powell-hillary-clinton-pinning-email-scandal-on-him

And so does Rice:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/23/politics/condoleezza-rice-colin-powell-email/

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[0100010001010011]

account != server.

Slashdot should know better.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait to read slashdot during her presidency. "Truman dropped two bombs, I don't see you complaining about that!"

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[schwit1]

That does not justify her criminal actions.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

But did Bush delete them AFTER being subpoenaed like Hillary did?
Did Bush say he turned over all work related emails but others were found that were not turned over, like Hillary did?
Was the request about Bush emails about shipping ISIS weapons through Libya or about legally dismissing judges as allowed by the president?
Did we find emails from recipients of Bush's email showing a pay to play scheme to personally enrich himself, like Hillary did?
Did Bush lie under oath to Congress when testifying about it, like Hillary did?

So your bringing it up I assume you had a problem with Bush doing it. Well, congratulations, Hillary did so to delete evidence after an investigation began. She even delete emails showing her being guilty of ethical/possibly legal issues.

So I guess I can count you as someone who thinks Hillary did something wrong as well and should be prosecuted.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah you can bitch, moron. She shouldn't have been doing what she was doing. Then when she got caught she all of a sudden found security.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

goalposts keep getting moved because they scream "that doesn't count" when legitimate goals are scored. She had classified information on her private servers, this was proven. PERIOD.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[whoever57]

account != server.

This is even worse. They did not use a private server, they used a server run by some unknown third party. There is even less control of the security of those emails than the emails on Clinon's server.

Georgia Godfrey, Rice's chief of staff at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, said the former secretary of state did not use email while in the job nor have a personal email account.

LOL. Does anyone believe that? Not even a private email account in 2009? Really?

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Etcetera]

It does not count if Congress declares any one of these emails classified after the fact for political effect.

You're begging the question here. Information is classified based on the content, markings are irrelevant. There's explicitly statutory language that indicates that someone who Should Know that data involved Should Be classified should be treating it as classified, *regardless* of any markings or lack thereof.

Joe Blow on the street may not know that certain info is classified and might pass it along. The Secretary of State is expected to know that something is classified information and has a duty to take care of it responsible. That's something you're "read into" before you ever receive any clearance at all.

If the emails are considered classified retroactively, then someone in her position should have realized they contained sensitive data. Nothing is being classified "for political effect"... and if something is, then that's a scandal in and of itself.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[NotInHere]

The "justice system" is a third party.

No. Members of a government need to be auditable. Thats why there are so strict laws and regulations about government communication preservation. Both for historians, and more importantly, the press. Just look at brazil how well it works there (compared to the US), only possible because the press has hard proof about the corruption.

This auditability is ensured on infrastructure that is given to government officials. Although it can be manipulated inside the government, that's much harder as if it were on a private server.

It's just as likely that the NSA or some other US government entity hacked her server.

I doubt that the NSA or other agency wants to do actions against one of the higher ups. They are designed to follow their commands, not to spy on them. If they hack the politicians, their practices will just be questioned far more likely. Of course, if there is a judicial order, they will act against them, as they should, but not without one.

Or is the claim that she wiped the server in such a way that it is no longer readable by the US government or even "God", but somehow can still be read by foreign governments?

No. But even the most secure form of wiping doesn't help you if someone hacked and downloaded all data before you wiped. It does help you however if the public demands access and you fear whether the FBI might turn up and seize your computers in the future.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hillary did do something wrong but the punishment for it would never be jail time. People keep focusing on this shouting lock her up. The worst she would have endured if she was a normal member of the state department would be a removal from her job and revocation of any security clearance.

The Bush administration knew they had done a lot of wrong and deleted email on a whole different plane of existence. You're talking 22 million emails before we could even submit a FOIA. That was way worse but also still doesn't excuse Hillary.

There is entirely too much corruption throughout our government. We need to fix campaign finance in a big way. We need to overturn the citizens united case. Probably with a new law to clarify things. The whole idea of a Super PAC is stupid. A lot of politicians flagrantly violate the laws that are supposed to seperate them and their PACs.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

At the time that Powell was SoS, there was not a State Department run e-mail server that could communicate outside of the restricted network. While using AOL was naive, using an external account was the only means of e-mail communication and his use was approved. He also used the internal system for all internal e-mail activity. Whereas when Hillary was SoS, they had implemented an external, State Department run e-mail system. She decided not only to not use the provided system for external communications, but to also not use the internal system for classified communications. She can he-haw all she wants, but circumstances were different when she was SoS. She cannot compare and justify her practices based off predecessors with different services provided, different policies and even different laws in effect.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[tsotha]

Destruction of evidence is itself a crime. The difficulty is always in proving that's what happened - by definition you're missing a key piece of evidence.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[tsotha]

There's a time component involved here. It may be the Russians compromised it easily a few years ago, but she wiped the data when it became clear it would be subpoena'd.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[tsotha]

Hillary's defenders seem to engage in a lot of this tu quoque stuff when the facts don't even rise to the level they can reasonably employ a fallacy.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Hillary did do something wrong but the punishment for it would never be jail time. People keep focusing on this shouting lock her up. The worst she would have endured if she was a normal member of the state department would be a removal from her job and revocation of any security clearance.

And revocation of retirement benefits. And a felony conviction, with the resulting future denial of a number of civil rights (such as the right to posses a gun) and - yes - federal prison time.

Are you saying that the government would never enforce some of the more severe portions of the law? They seem to enforce it just fine when dealing with low-level functionaries (or even high-level officials who happen to be conservative.)

There is entirely too much corruption throughout our government.

Yep.

We need to fix campaign finance in a big way.

Yes - by completely repealing any campaign finance legislation at any level.

Buying advertisement is political speech. That, even more than any other forms of speech, is precisely one of the rights that is recognized and protected by the First Amendment. (It just happens purchasing advertisements enables the "speaker" to talk to more people than he can by standing on a soapbox in the park.)

Campaign financing laws are bait-and-switch. They claim to level the playing field, blocking the deep-pocket guys and the incumbents from having an advantage over the ordinary citizens and upstart challengers. But they actually penalize the grass-roots organizers and challengers by imposing complex red tape and arcane limits and requirements with draconian penalties for non-compliance (which incumbents' and professional lobbying organizations already know how to handle - or have the financial backing to challenge in court).

They're incumbent protection laws. Which is exactly what you should expect them to be. They were written by incumbents.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[The Grim Reefer]

The "justice system" is a third party.

If it was easy for third party states to gain information from her e-mail server then the "justice system" could have gained it just as easily. Maybe foreign states did hack her server.

For it to be admissible in court the Justice system needs to get a warrant first. A foreign agency or individual does not. There's a big damn difference.

It's just as likely that the NSA

It's very apparent that the NSA need(ed/s) to be reined in. While they were created in a different time and, possibly, needed to operate by a different set of rules at that time, it's become fairly obvious that they've over stepped their limits. I doubt any evidence that they may have gathered regarding the situation with Mr.s Clinton's email server would be admissible in court.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[14erCleaner]

The Bush Administration wiped 22 million emails.

gwb43.com FTW!

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[PopeRatzo]

Twenty-two million emails.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[quantaman]

All indications are she wasn't very careful while actively using the server. However, once she started getting requests to produce data from it, then she suddenly got very careful. Even if she did do nothing wrong, that is a very stark change in behavior that just happened to coincide with legal requests to hand over data.

It also happens to correspond with the realization that she (and/or her IT person) had been acting carelessly before.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

The big knock against her email server is that any other state employee that ran such a thing would be locked up in jail.

This is a very common misconception.

Comey spent hours in front of Congress explaining, very patiently, over and over, that the reason he could not recommend prosecution against Clinton is because all of the suspected crimes required proof of intent, which the FBI did not have.

In fact, Comey talked in detail about the FBI's treatment of Clinton versus the treatment of a "John Doe" suspect. Comey specifically said that a "John Doe" would in fact not be charged in this case -- again, because the relevant statutes require evidence of intent, which the FBI didn't have. He then said -- repeatedly -- how important it was to make sure that Clinton was treated exactly the same way as a "John Doe".

So your comment strongly contradicts everything that Comey said in his sworn statement to Congress. I have a choice -- I can believe Comey, or I can believe you. I choose to believe Comey. (Or, more to the point, I choose to believe what the FBI's lawyers told Comey to say in his sworn statement to Congress.)

One thing I will not do is to engage in the speculation that Comey conspired to (or was forced to) perjure himself in his sworn statement to Congress on this matter. No credible person has provided evidence of any such conspiracy, nor has any prosecutor brought conspiracy charges. (Conspiracy charges that -- if a conviction was achieved -- would result in a phenomenal boost to the prosecutor's reputation, career, and fame.) Until those charges are filed against Comey and his alleged co-conspirators, I will consider all such conspiratorial thinking as nothing but political propaganda to be safely ignored.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know the rules. You only get paid once per pro-Hillary post. Now stop pasting the same thing multiple times into the same topic.

Yours truly,
George Soros

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[kenai_alpenglow]

The FBI found the "key piece(s)". Comey then said "No prosecutor would pursue this case" and dropped it. He was probably right--but only because of her last name. If I did that, I might get out after 5 years or so. Heck, one of my counterparts got in trouble for a single line in a controlled document which had the same info in the public domain. I'm sick of these "Nothing to see here" claims--just look at any security briefing and it's spelled out. We just had another one, and according to it I would be required to report her if she was in my office.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[reboot246]

Hillary used a private SERVER. There is a difference.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Nostalgia4Infinity]

Please state the part of the law on improperly transmitted classified information that talks about ratio of classified material to non classified material.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[khallow]

I like how the argument has devolved here to "If Bush did it, then it's ok". PopeRatzo, is Dubya really your moral compass? Your guiding light?

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Oligonicella]

You do understand that someone can close down existing accounts prior to taking a sensitive job, right? Then you simply do not use email on the job. Simple.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[argStyopa]

This isn't about Bush.

And "well they did it" didn't work as an excuse in 1st grade, you think it's appropriate for the secretary of state?

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Crashmarik]

I doubt that the NSA or other agency wants to do actions against one of the higher ups. They are designed to follow their commands, not to spy on them. If they hack the politicians, their practices will just be questioned far more likely. Of course, if there is a judicial order, they will act against them, as they should, but not without one.

That's funny, when the NSA gained the ability to hack the entire U.S. they became the real power.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[jeff4747]

either the emails were classified or not when they were stored or sent from the private server.

According to the DNI, the FBI, the DoJ and the State Department IG, they were classified. Not even the Clinton campaign is pushing classified-after-the-fact anymore.

It does not count if Congress declares any one of these emails classified after the fact for political effect.

Congress has no say in what is classified.

In 1947, they couldn't figure out how to create a unified classification system. So they passed a law which basically said "Hey Executive branch! You come up with it". Thus, the Executive branch gets to decide what is and is not classified. And it's codified in a series of Executive Orders and classification guides.

This is why the whole email "scandal" is much ado about nothing.

Says the person who thinks Congress classifies documents at all, much less after-the-fact.

Those of us who had security clearances know we'd be in prison if we did this. In fact, several people are in prison for negligently handling classified information. But they had the misfortune of not running for president at the time.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

We need to fix campaign finance in a big way. We need to overturn the citizens united case.

This is an invalid statement from anyone who says Clinton should not be in jail. Clinton took $600 million in bribes selling State Department favours while in office (Including approving a sale of uranium to Russia for $145 million). Not to a campaign, which you say you would want to stop, but to her foundation and herself personally. The only reason you bring this issue up is you believe in censorship of people you don't like, there is no other reason to possibly have this viewpoint AND say Clinton did nothing wrong. This was a method for Clinton to raise unlimited funds from individuals to fund her presidential campaign, or whatever else, while you want to prevent people who FOLLOW THE LAW from using their money for political speech.

Just admit you hate people you don't agree with having freedom of speech. If you can't be honest, your opinion doesn't count.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but three lefts make a right.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Swave An deBwoner]

Dear Friend,

I am a Prince in the House of Saud. My uncle oversaw numerous companies that awarded to my family contracts for services never rendered at overly high rates of income. We need to transfer this money into Swiss bank accounts but cannot pay it to ourselves for obvious reasons. Our first money transfer will be in the amount of USD 32,000,000 and for your help in transferring the funds we will pay you twenty percent of the total.

Please reply immediately.

Donald.Trump@houseofsuds.com

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Zak3056]

I'm still waiting to hear how Hillary being "extremely careless" does not rise to the level of "gross negligence" that should trigger prosecution. I'm assuming that I'll be waiting until the heat death of the universe for a reasonable explanation of that.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[RoccamOccam]

Comey spent hours in front of Congress explaining, very patiently, over and over, that the reason he could not recommend prosecution against Clinton is because all of the suspected crimes required proof of intent, which the FBI did not have.

Transcript of Gowdy questioning Comey. Lots of context, but note the bolded section:

Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said "I did not e-mail any classified information to anyone on my e-mail there was no classified material." That is true?

Comey: There was classified information emailed.

Gowdy: Secretary Clinton used one device, was that true?

Comey: She used multiple devices during the four years of her term as Secretary of State.

Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said all work related emails were returned to the State Department. Was that true?

Comey: No. We found work related email, thousands, that were not returned.

Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said neither she or anyone else deleted work related emails from her personal account.

Comey: That's a harder one to answer. We found traces of work related emails in — on devices or in space. Whether they were deleted or when a server was changed out something happened to them, there's no doubt that the work related emails that were removed electronically from the email system.

Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said her lawyers read every one of the emails and were overly inclusive. Did her lawyers read the email content individually?

Comey: No.

Gowdy: Well, in the interest of time and because I have a plane to catch tomorrow afternoon, I'm not going to go through any more of the false statements but I am going to ask you to put on your old hat. False exculpatory statements are used for what?

Comey: Well, either for a substantive prosecution or evidence of intent in a criminal prosecution.

Gowdy: Exactly. Intent and consciousness of guilt, right?

Comey: That is right?

Gowdy: Consciousness of guilt and intent? In your old job you would prove intent as you referenced by showing the jury evidence of a complex scheme that was designed for the very purpose of concealing the public record and you would be arguing in addition to concealment the destruction that you and i just talked about or certainly the failure to preserve. You would argue all of that under the heading of content. You would also — intent. You would also be arguing the pervasiveness of the scheme when it started, when it ended and the number of emails whether They were originally classified or of classified under the heading of intent. You would also, probably, under common scheme or plan, argue the burn bags of daily calendar entries or the missing daily calendar entries as a common scheme or plan to conceal.
Two days ago, Director, you said a reasonable person in her position should have known a private email was no place to send and receive classified information. You're right. An average person does know not to do that.
This is no average person. This is a former First Lady, a former United States senator, and a former Secretary of State that the president now contends is the most competent, qualified person to be president since Jefferson. He didn't say that in '08 but says it now.
She affirmatively rejected efforts to give her a state.gov account, kept the private emails for almost two years and only turned them over to Congress because we found out she had a private email account.
So you have a rogue email system set up before she took the oath of office, thousands of what we now know to be classified emails, some of which were classified at the time. One of her more frequent email comrades was hacked and you don't know whether or not she was.
And this scheme took place over a long period of time and resulted in the destruction of public reco

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[PopeRatzo]

I like how the argument has devolved here to "If Bush did it, then it's ok". PopeRatzo, is Dubya really your moral compass?

Twenty-two MILLION emails.

Funny, but I don't remember that being an every night issue on the evening news.

And I never, ever look to politicians for a moral compass. I gave that up when Ronald Reagan became president.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[bondsbw]

Bill, Barack, and Hillary?

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[AthanasiusKircher]

A similar situation: The tea party folks were incredibly upset that Obama ran a big deficit. You wouldn't know it to listen to them now, but for many years the deficit was the most important thing in the political world and proof that Obama was trying to destroy the USA.

But the deficit under Obama shrunk every year, while the deficit under Bush Junior grew every year. Yet the tea party folks never made a peep of complaint when Bush grew the deficit.

So the most likely explanation is that the tea party folks never really cared about the deficit; they are just whining partisan idiots.

I'm neither a fan of Bush nor Obama, but what you've stated here is incredibly misleading (as well as factually inaccurate).

According to the non-partisan CBO data, the on-budget deficit under Bush began at $32 billion in 2001, ballooned to $568 billion in 2004, then decreased again until 2008 (the 2007 deficit was "merely" $342 billion), after which it spiked (due to the financial crisis, bail-outs, etc. with 2008 concluding with $642 billion deficit).

Under Obama, the deficit began at $1.55 TRILLION in 2009 and stayed above Bush's 2008 maximum of $642 billion in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. Only in 2014 and 2015 has Obama's deficit dropped below the MAXIMUM Bush ever attained in deficit spending. Now, you might argue that inflation should be taken into account, but you'll come up with somewhat similar figures if you take percentage of GDP instead of actual deficit amount -- the first four years under Obama all were above ALL of Bush's deficits in percentage of GDP.

Or, another way to see this is that the total debt under Bush grew from $3.4 trillion at the end of 2000 to $5.8 trillion at the end of 2008, an increase of about 70%. Under Obama, the debt has grown from $5.8 trillion at the end of 2008 to $13.1 trillion by the end of 2015 (and he still has a year to go), an increase of 125% (more than doubled).

Personally, I think a lot of the Tea Party's logic makes no sense, and I think deficit spending is really essential for all sorts of reasons.

But you've also just outed yourself as a "partisan idiot" for attempting to make it look like Obama's deficits are less concerning than Bush's (to people who might care about stuff). Except by any metric the Obama deficits have been much larger, regardless of whether they are trending up or down... so to me it seems pretty logical that people who actually care about deficit spending might be concerned about the fact that it more than quadrupled between 2007 and 2009 and has stayed above 2007 levels ever since.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[khallow]

I repeat the question, PopeRatzo. Are you rationalizing Clinton's destruction of evidence as ok because the Bush administration deleted a really big number of emails?

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[PopeRatzo]

And because of that the laws were changed before she took office and she still did it, because you can't touch a Clinton.

You guys, there you go again. First you say it's a moral issue, but then you say, no, it's a legal issue. Are the two things morally equivalent? Absolutely, except it's thousands of emails as opposed to TWENTY-TWO MILLION EMAILS in the case of George W Bush.

Are the two things legally equivalent? Absolutely, since the law has come down the same in both cases.

So really, your beef with Hillary Clinton is just some partisan cum sock.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[khallow]

You're building a strawman; you made a fake argument designed to be easily knocked down. The actual argument being made is: If you complain that Clinton used a non-governmental email server, but you did not complain that Bush+ did the same thing (and "lost" a lot more email), then you are not concerned about the potential email-server crime; you're just a whining partisan idiot.

Bush did the same thing? Then where's the evidence? Here's the problem. You're just wrong here. Bush+ didn't use a private email server (and conveniently, successfully evade both FOIA requests and laws about public records). Bush+ didn't then proceed to destroy evidence when presented with FBI and Congressional inquiries. And there's no evidence for a several hundred million dollar pay-to-play scheme involving a Bush presidential library.

This is the usual outcome. You claim "But Bush did it too!" without any demonstration that was true. But the real problem here is that your words are a tacit admission that Clinton committed wrong-doing. Why are we supposed to look the other way just because someone else might have gotten away with it too?

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[swillden]

If you're a Ron Paul supporter voting for Trump, I fear that "confused" is rather an understatement of your mental state.

I think not so much "confused" as "shallow". I can see a very surface correspondence between Paul and Trump: They both like to buck the establishment. The fact that the do so in very different ways and for very different reasons requires looking past the top millimeter of each. I suppose a vote for Obama (in his first presidential campaign) could fit as well if the same incredibly shallow analysis just focused on the "Hope and Change" slogan.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[PopeRatzo]

I repeat the question, PopeRatzo. Are you rationalizing Clinton's destruction of evidence as ok because the Bush administration deleted a really big number of emails?

Are you asking me for a moral or legal judgement? Morally, I find pretty much everyone who runs for this office is repugnant, with only a handful of exceptions. Currently we have a couple of morally unbalanced people running for president.

However, as a veteran, I have learned that malignant competence is always preferable to incompetent foolishness and moral depravity when it comes to running a big organization. That's why I will vote against Donald Trump in November. It's strictly damage control.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[mysticgoat]

What indications are those? Please specify. Otherwise please quit making noise.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[bongey]

Except ALL 22 MILLION Bush administrative emails were recovered from tape backups. Clinton wiped the data AFTER the FOIA request. I don't know of a single person that has decided one day to delete ALL their personal emails, except Clinton. https://www.wired.com/2009/12/... another source http://www.npr.org/templates/s... , another http://www.npr.org/templates/s... . Yep you're idiot.

Re: Too secure for insecure?

[Bartles]

Its not about national security any more. We know she was careless with it and covered it up. Now its about how much money she made by selling foreign policy through her various foundations, and how much evidence did she destroy. This is the thing that will put her in prison.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[khallow]

However, as a veteran, I have learned that malignant competence is always preferable to incompetent foolishness and moral depravity when it comes to running a big organization.

I don't believe that choice is even on the table. And I think it typical that you can excuse evil because well, it's the lesser of evils by some peculiar metric that only you can see.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[PopeRatzo]

Except ALL 22 MILLION Bush administrative emails were recovered from tape backups.

No sir, they were not.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/...

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[PopeRatzo]

And I think it typical that you can excuse evil

I do not excuse evil, I just measure it against a greater evil. As I said, it's about minimizing the harm.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[StevenMaurer]

But did Bush delete them AFTER being subpoenaed like Hillary did?

This is a 100% FALSE assertion.The emails were deleted in December. Gowdy issued the subpoena (and, mind you, only for Benghazi related subjects) in March.

"In fact, Trey Gowdy did not issue a subpoena until March, months after she she'd done that review. Further, the subpoena was specifically asking for documents pertaining to Libya and the attacks on our facility in Benghazi, documents which, along with tens of thousands of others, she had already given to the Department of State," Merrill said.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the Benghazi panel, called Gowdy's hit Wednesday a "stunt."

"It appears clear that Secretary Clinton was answering a question about whether she deleted emails 'while facing a subpoena,'" Cummings said in a statement Wednesday.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Sax Russell 5449D29A]

I'm sure many have elaborated this point in this long-as-hell chain, but it's not about using secure data erasing tools that's the problem. It's when her team chose to use such tools. It was after she was already under investigation and subpoenaed for the emails.

Your comment is more of a play into the hands of bipartisan politics than you probably think.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[twohorse]

Secure from third party access vs secure from justice. The original poster knows the difference but chooses to use Orwellian BS to try to conflate and confuse the issue.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that is complete an utter crap. If you had done it, we would not have heard of it. You would have gotten a slap on the wrist and your security clearance revoked.

People keep saying this, but they have no reason to believe it. You only get prosecuted in a case like this, if they can show that you had intent to trade national secrets.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[kqs]

Bush did the same thing? Then where's the evidence? Here's the problem. You're just wrong here. Bush+ didn't use a private email server

Dear god. Are you telling me you know that Hillary is evil because of her email shenanigans, but don't know about the Bush email controversy? And also could not google "bush email" and see the first link?

This is what I'm talking about. Both Bush and Hillary screwed up their email handling. Rational people are unhappy about both and complain about both. Partisan idiots wail about one of them but give the other a pass. Or don't even know about the earlier one, which takes some effort since it is often brought up in comparison to the current one, except on news sites aimed at partisan idiots.

Citizens look at all the evidence. Partisan idiots parrot their favorite news site. Please be more of a citizen; we need more. A lot more.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[DaHat]

You forgot about the earlier FOIA requests from groups like Judicial Watch which kept getting reports from the State Department saying they had no records responsive to their requests.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[bongey]

You are a dipshit ,you cited another source. "Bush White House has resulted in restoration of 22 million of the missing messages" Can you read ?
Its not like the Obama IRS emails where multiple hard drives crashed and the tape backups were deleted.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[khallow]

Again, the two are not equivalent. The RNC email accounts were intended for political not official use (and they even had a law to point to which mandated this separation!). Clinton's server was used for official business and as a result induced a number of felony violations of the handling of classified information.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[bongey]

Clinton was even a classified data originator. She didn't have brains or just didn't think the rules applied to her to understand that she shouldn't have classified conversations on an unclassified server. Fucks sakes she didn't even have a login on to the classified system. More telling is the IT security folks were told to shut up about their objections to her email server.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[bongey]

No their name wasn't Clinton. If it were any other candidate in any political party right now, they would have been on trail right now.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[iamhassi]

Destruction of evidence is itself a crime. The difficulty is always in proving that's what happened - by definition you're missing a key piece of evidence.

I'm less concerned about the destruction of evidence and more concerned that even though we know she's committing criminal acts, people are still supporting her for President. What does that say about them? We see criminals get away with things all the time, but usually they don't have a cheering section, and even if they do they're not trying to vote for them as President of the United States. Trump may be all the things they say about him, but Hillary is a criminal NOW, so what is she going to be like as President? If something does happen, it would be a giant SHE TOLD YOU SO.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Reziac]

No, no, no. Their argument is "I didn't do anything wrong when I did X. That guy over THERE did something wrong when he did not-really-X." Clinton logic.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[geekmux]

I really can't find something to bitch about here. Sure, Clinton sucks, but the big knock against her and her email server was that she wasn't secure enough with it. Then, when she does do something secure, the knock is "See, she is so secure she must be hiding something!" Sorry, you can't bitch when she isn't secure and then bitch when she is. Was she hiding stuff? Most probably, since all politicians are. Do I trust her? Not a chance. But you can't set up a now in scenario as your reason for not liking her. You can't bitch about insecurity and then bitch about too much security at the same time.

Yes, in fact we can bitch with the polarity of being insecure and too secure. It's called discussing classified information over an insecure communications medium, and then trying to hide that illegal activity with secure tools that made it somehow impossible to validate. This ultimately allowed her to get away with it in a scenario where anyone else not named "Clinton" would be in a Federal PMITA prison by now. You know, instead of running for the most powerful position on the planet.

Believe me we can speak in conflicting dualities all damn day long when discussing a Clinton. They were born on htraE, and their inexplicable ability to skirt the law proves the logic from their world is bleeding over into ours.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[PopeRatzo]

You are a dipshit ,you cited another source. "Bush White House has resulted in restoration of 22 million of the missing messages" Can you read ?

The trick is that you have to read more than just the headline.

"An investigation into e-mails that seemed to have disappeared from the Bush White House has resulted in restoration of 22 million of the missing messages and a deal to uncover what could be millions of other e-mails that allegedly fell through cracks in the archiving system, two nonprofit groups said Monday.
However, an untold number of official e-mails from President George W. Bush's era will probably never be recovered because it would be extremely costly to do so, lawyers involved in lawsuits brought by the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said.
"While we have not gotten every e-mail, some major gaps have been filled," said Meredith Fuchs, an attorney for the National Security Archive."

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[jeff4747]

These are actually, real life people in actual, real life prison. Right now.

If you insist Clinton should get a pass, why should they not get a pass?

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[jeff4747]

That whole 'we little people would be in prison if we did this' meme is such bullshit.

You used the wrong tense. It's not "would be". It's "are".

There are "little people" currently in prison for negligent handling of classified. Right now. Actually in prison.

She didn't do anything, beyond send and receive stuff she was cleared to see.

Which means she broke the law. Being "cleared to see it" doesn't mean you can see it anywhere you want, any time you want. There are requirements for handling the information.

And a server in her basement that did not use encrypted connections for months, and then had the default VPN keys on the VPN appliance once they started using encryption, and an Internet-connected printer on the same network is nowhere near close to meeting those requirements.

Petreus is brought up endlessly. Y'know, the guy who gave classified stuff to his journalist girlfriend

His journalist girlfriend had a clearance.

According to your gross misunderstanding of our classification system, what crime did Petraeus commit? He had a clearance, and his girlfriend had a clearance. If "had a clearance" is good enough to excuse Clinton, then why was it not good enough to excuse Patraeus?

but you ought to at least acknowledge that it was a tiny percentage of the traffic

Please cite where the statute states the percentage of allowable leaks.

and that stuff probably would've been sent on the unclassified DOS server had she been using that

First, government servers are regularly scanned for classified, so it would have been caught long before there were thousands of classified in her email.

Second, the unclassified DoS server is far, far, far more secure than her basement server. For example, they don't have default VPN keys installed.

What we have here is a witch hunt for something - anything - about Benghazi that could paint Clinton in a politically unfavorable light.

No, this has absolutely nothing to do with Benghazi. But shouting "Benghazi!!!!" does a great job getting people like you to turn off their critical thinking and accept this week's excuse.

Re: Too secure for insecure?

[FeltLion]

How this was upvoted, I don't know. The security and lack of it was done in two completely different contexts, but you've wrapped them up into a single strawman and cried foul. Whether ignorant, naive, or deliberate lying, but definitely not 5 stars.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[chill]

There are "little people" currently in prison for negligent handling of classified. Right now. Actually in prison.

There are also several that aren't. Administrative punishments are common, depending on the material in question, and the circumstances. In some cases, absolutely nothing was done.

For example, all of the people who accessed the early Wikileaks stuff and those people who accessed the Guardian articles that contained the Snowden material. There was an entire PR campaign directed at Executive Branch Agencies reminding people that "until officially declassified, just because it is published in public doesn't mean you can read it".

I personally contacted DHS regarding multiple "classified spills" surrounding the Wikileaks material being accessed on non-Classified systems and sent around in e-mail. Their answer? "Delete it and remind people not to do that. No, you don't have to destroy you entire MS Exchange storage array."

Under your criteria, hundreds of people would have been put in jail. They weren't and some of that Snowden stuff was SCI/Code word.

The Wikileaks stuff in 2010 was Bradley Manning's leak of, mostly, diplomatic cables -- exactly the type of stuff Clinton was dealing with -- except Clinton's was indirect reference (e-mail about) not full cables. In other words, de minimis.

According to your gross misunderstanding of our classification system, what crime did Petraeus commit? He had a clearance, and his girlfriend had a clearance. If "had a clearance" is good enough to excuse Clinton, then why was it not good enough to excuse Patraeus?

You're baiting him. You know the difference, which is Patraeus committed a conscious, direct act in knowingly and intentionally giving classified material to a person who was not authorized to have it. Clearance or not, she didn't have the necessary "need to know".

He also explicitly and directly lied to the FBI investigators by flat out denying he did it. Hillary has been very indirect and there is no indication she every did ANYTHING remotely similar to Patraeus.

There is a significant difference between "here is my notebook loaded with TS/SCI material that you shouldn't see" and, to the FBI, "never happened"; and "received or sent e-mail that may have contained a sentence or two copy-pasted from (95%) Confidential material".

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[flargleblarg]

In the eyes of the law (courts), spoliation of evidence is equivalent to guilt, but perhaps to a lessor degree.

I think you mean lesser. A lessor is someone who leases, e.g., a landlord.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[flargleblarg]

No their name wasn't Clinton. If it were any other candidate in any political party right now, they would have been on trail right now.

She is on trail right now. On the campaign trail.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[flargleblarg]

Destruction of evidence is itself a crime.

Destruction of evidence of a crime is a crime.
If you destroy evidence that you took a poop yesterday morning, that is not a crime.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Etcetera]

Unless they were retroactively classified for political reasons?

I'd say the chances are pretty slim on that, with all of the attention this is getting. There are dozens, if not hundreds of FBI and intelligence folks working on this, and surely any decision to classify (or re-classify) is getting multiple layers of review as a result of the fallout everyone knows it would be getting.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[jeff4747]

There are also several that aren't. Administrative punishments are common, depending on the material in question, and the circumstances

Yes, they mishandled a very small number of classified documents, or mishandled a public-but-not-declassified document like Wikileaks.

They did not set up their own server at home, utterly fail to secure that server, and then put many thousands of classified documents on it. The people who mishandled classified on that scale are in prison....unless they are Hillary Clinton.

Scale of the offense is frequently used when deciding an administrative punishment is sufficient. What Clinton did is much larger than people given administrative punishments, yet she received zero punishment.

except Clinton's was indirect reference (e-mail about) not full cables. In other words, de minimis.

Nope. The FBI found entire classified documents. Not just discussions of classified documents. It's in their report.

You're baiting him. You know the difference, which is Patraeus committed a conscious, direct act

I am baiting him, since he's utterly wrong about the rules on classification. I'm attempting to show him that his framework of excuses is faulty.

But you are wrong about intent. Intent is not required to violate the law here. Gross negligence is explicitly in the statute. And when Comey testified on the results of his investigation, it was clear there was gross negligence. In fact, Comey had to dance around the non-indictment by claiming the law was kinda sorta unclear whether they really meant gross negligence when they passed the law....despite the people in prison under that same statute.

and "received or sent e-mail that may have contained a sentence or two copy-pasted from (95%) Confidential material"

The problem with this argument is the FBI's report does not say it was only a sentence or two. It says there were thousands of classified emails, some of which were entire classified documents, markings and all.

That's why the Clinton campaign switched from their position last summer of "after the fact classification" to "we weren't indicted" today. Because their first defense was shown to be a lie. (And the second, and the third, but this 4th one is totally awesome).

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[chill]

The problem with this argument is the FBI's report does not say it was only a sentence or two. It says there were thousands of classified emails, some of which were entire classified documents, markings and all.

No, it didn't. At least Comey's summary says nothing of the sort.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-director-james-b-comey-on-the-investigation-of-secretary-hillary-clinton2019s-use-of-a-personal-e-mail-system

"Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were âoeup-classifiedâ to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent."

And...

"With respect to the thousands of e-mails we found that were not among those produced to State, agencies have concluded that three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level and two at the Confidential level. There were no additional Top Secret e-mails found. Finally, none of those we found have since been âoeup-classified.â

Finally...

"Separately, it is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information."

So flat out, unless you are in possession of a different report that indicates Comey made up the summary in whole cloth, you're being dishonest in your claims.

An insightful read: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/the-forgotten-1957-trial-that-explains-our-countrys-bizarre-whistleblower-laws-213771

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[bongey]

You're either a troll or a hillary drone or just dumb as box of rocks. The SAME 22 MILLION MISSING EMAILS were recovered and the lawsuit was settled by the Obama administration. Cherry picking that there might be one or two emails out there that are still missing , doesn't mean 22 MILLION emails are still missing. Fuck do you think a liberal lawsuit against Bush would have been settled with the Obama Admin if they still thought even a 10% of the emails were still missing? (Answer Fuck No!)

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[h33t l4x0r]

If it were any other candidate in any political party right now, they would have been on trail right now.

If it were Trump, he would just blame someone else and it would go away immediately. In fact, I'd be surprised if he can go a month into his first term without tweeting something classified. He just gets away with shit.

If it were Gary Johnson or Jill Stein? Well, let's face it, they're never going to have access to anything classified so we don't need to worry about it.

Re: Too secure for insecure?

[khallow]

Gross negligence is not merely mishandling. It's worth noting again that she pulled classified documents and information onto a private email server for years, taking no corrective action until investigations were underway.

I do not want Hillary to be President--but if right wing whackos keep making crap up instead of going after her numerous letitimate bad positions and policies, when something really, legitimately bad does come up nobody is going to pay attention. That's almost handing her a ticket to the White House.

I think it's because there is blood in the water. Clinton hasn't been caught red-handed like this before with multiple felonies. It's like Al Capone and tax evasion. Sometimes someone gets caught on a weaker crime than the main one.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[PopeRatzo]

Cherry picking that there might be one or two emails out there that are still missing

It's not, "one or two". Maybe you missed this part of the story:

However, an untold number of official e-mails from President George W. Bush's era will probably never be recovered because it would be extremely costly to do so, lawyers involved in lawsuits brought by the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[danbert8]

It is if a judge ordered you to submit your poop for inspection.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Triklyn]

nah, incompetent we can deal with. just vote good downballot.

malicious and competent is worse.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[PopeRatzo]

nah, incompetent we can deal with. just vote good downballot.

If voting downballot is your security blanket, then that applies both to bumbling incompetence and ruthless competence.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Coren22]

She destroyed evidence when she had received a subpoena for it.

https://benghazi.house.gov/sit...

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Coren22]

I don't get this sea of ACs defending her actions.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press...

FBI investigators have also read all of the approximately 30,000 e-mails provided by Secretary Clinton to the State Department in December 2014. Where an e-mail was assessed as possibly containing classified information, the FBI referred the e-mail to any U.S. government agency that was a likely “owner” of information in the e-mail, so that agency could make a determination as to whether the e-mail contained classified information at the time it was sent or received, or whether there was reason to classify the e-mail now, even if its content was not classified at the time it was sent (that is the process sometimes referred to as “up-classifying”).

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond.

When the FBI director comes out and says 52 classified, 8 TS, 36 Secret, 8 Confidential (at the time of transmission), and 2000 that were later up-classified, as they had not been previously classified, you know you done f'd up. Defending the 2000 as if the other 52 didn't exist makes no sense. It is trying to conceal the nature of the crime by changing the story.

I can only presume that the ACs are paid by Clinton to defend her, as they are just parroting the talking points that were shattered months ago.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Triklyn]

ruthless competence is competent at being wily though.

don't think hillary is malicious though, not truly.

self-serving yes, but i don't know which i prefer, trump's damage mitigated by congress, or hillary's surface appeasement while selling our liberty to the highest bidder.

to be fair, i don't think either outcome would be what their bases think they'll get.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[mrclevesque]

Powell?

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[mrclevesque]

Please do

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[mrclevesque]

Show me the something that proves that

All I've seen is the satellite picture someone send her that should have been labeled classified but wasn't when she received it, and all the information that wasn't classified but the government decided to classify knowing her emails were going to opened to the public.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[mrclevesque]

Not really

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[mrclevesque]

If there were criminal actions it wouldn't

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[mrclevesque]

Yes, there is, but the difference isn't relevant in this case

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Rakarra]

Again, the two are not equivalent. The RNC email accounts were intended for political not official use (and they even had a law to point to which mandated this separation!).

That was the intention, but not the result. During the attorney-firing controversy, White House officials conducted official business on private servers set up by the RNC. The RNC then admitted that those emails were lost. Now it's not quite apples to apples in similarity, as Bush himself was not known to be one of those people, nor were these top-secret documents.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[rtb61]

So was the evidence in question destroyed or just hidden. To get this straight, the NSA, the CIA, the Secret Service, the FBI and Homeland Security were all totally and utterly blithely unaware that a key intelligence asset, the Secretary of States communications server, was in an unsecured location, exposed to the public with limited security and hooked into unsecured communication lines and receiving communications from around the world including foreign countries and their intelligence services. I find that stupendously hard to believe, in fact based upon foreign communications monitoring of incoming foreign communications, factually impossible. The US government via the NSA has a complete copy of every email sent and via the current corrupt administration is actively hiding them, because Clinton is their stooge and a guaranteed obedient one. What a bloody mess, they have managed to stick themselves in, trying to force the election of a universally hated figure to sell policies the public hates, whilst main stream which no one believes any more is trying to sell this bullshit.

All the emails will come out, plus many other communications, bit by bit to cause as much damage to the US government as possible, so most of it after the election, so the whole world can see the corruption and failure to prosecute.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Agripa]

So is making false statements or concealing information but I do not see Clinton getting the Martha Stewart treatment.

Re:Too secure for insecure?

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Some emails were classified when they were on the server. Some emails were not marked as classified, but still contained classified information. It's not much ado about nothing; she definitely mishandled classified information, and did so on a large scale.

Responsible?

[Ixokai]

Why is this being portrayed like she did it because she had something to hide?

This is the responsible thing to do.

Re:Responsible?

[Triklyn]

no, the responsible thing to do is to turn it over to the justice department and let them fucking shred it.

Re:Responsible?

[GerryGilmore]

Let me try. First, her entire purpose in having said private email server was explicitly to protect her privacy - something she is very sensitive about. The issue, and what separates her situation from that of Colin Powell, is that she used that server for both personal and official email exchanges. This defies both basic common sense and several applicable federal laws - laws which were *NOT* part of the recently concluded FBI investigation. That investigation was about the content of the emails and their classification, NOT - again - the real violation of law and common sense. Bottom line is that her credibility is in question because of a series of actions, all attributable to her paranoia and penchant for secrecy.

Re:Responsible?

[Triklyn]

we're also not the ones who mixed her personal and professional lives. she is.

she's the public face of the state department, which has policies in place to make sure that their correspondence are both secure and archived... so people can go back and look into them to make sure everything is aboveboard.

she sacrificed her right to privacy on her private correspondence when she conducted professional business on the same server.

i don't want to see her fucking wedding photos, but i want someone to make sure that she wasn't selling access to the office of the secretary of state of the united states. and if someone with clearance in the justice department needs to comb through 4 years of "private" emails to make sure, then she has only herself to blame.

Re:Responsible?

[PopeRatzo]

The issue, and what separates her situation from that of Colin Powell, is that she used that server for both personal and official email exchanges.

http://www.pbs.org/weta/washin...

Re:Responsible?

[david_thornley]

Got any evidence that she was selling access? The stuff I've seen seems to say that donating money to the Clinton Foundation may have gotten you access to Bill, but not the State Department.

Re:Responsible?

[0100010001010011]

Got any evidence that she was selling access?

Really? Given the title and subject matter your go to defense is "E-mails? What e-mails?"

Re:Responsible?

[guruevi]

Per definition her e-mail was public record and should've been turned over to the proper archivists, they have the job of filtering out private e-mails (if any). She knew about it and when the investigation started, she destroyed the evidence. You don't use BleachBit on a live Windows server, if you've ever worked with Exchange, all e-mails are stored in binary blobs. You can't destroy 'just the bad', you have to destroy the entire system.

Re:Responsible?

[nctritech]

So it's okay to commit a crime because someone else got away with doing so before you did? Understood.

Re:Responsible?

[PopeRatzo]

So it's okay to commit a crime because someone else got away with doing so before you did?

No. It's hypocrisy to care about a crime only when the person you don't like committed it.

Have a little moral clarity.

Re:Responsible?

[nctritech]

Notice the "current" in "current events." There's nothing to be done about Powell today; the matter could be re-opened, but complaints about that needed to happen when it was a current issue. Hillary's email server issue is a current issue and Hillary wants to be the president of the entire country while Powell is out of the picture. Stop pretending the two issues should carry the same weight today just because the person you like is the one who's currently under the microscope. Shifting the focus to Powell is an attempt at distraction.

Re:Responsible?

[PopeRatzo]

There's nothing to be done about Powell today

The story we've been discussing has nothing to do with Colin Powell.

Maybe you should read some of those links before you give an opinion, see what the whole thing was about.

Former DoD sysad

[OffTheLip]

I used DBAN routinely in 7 wipe mode. I'd be surprised had she not chosen something like that in spite of the cloth remark.

Re:Former DoD sysad

[TykeClone]

BleachBit's new tagline: "We're the dustcloth for the DNC!"

Re:Former DoD sysad

[bongey]

Since it had Secret Data it was still incorrect. Where I worked we would wiped the hard drive and then they were taken to steel mill and melted down. Also it isn't standard procedure to suddenly to delete all the data on all the servers. Also there is offsite data backups for TS/S data, you just don't delete. Clinton's lawyers had the emails on USB drives , then destroyed them too. (Note Google even shreds their disk http://www.doncio.navy.mil/Con...)

Never that specific program

[ArtemaOne]

But any time you stop using a hard drive you should clean it. I have probably 6 hard drives on a shelf in my house because I've replaced them with larger or faster drives. Each one has had the free space randomized twice and then set to all zeros afterward. Bank info, taxes, official (unclassified) work files, all of those have been on them in some variety at some points, and if they are ever disposed, I don't want any of that to be easily recoverable. I have never used it to destroy evidence when it was requested by investigators, as I am not a wealthy and powerful person, I would end up incriminating myself by doing so.

Re:Never that specific program

[orient]

Setting the bits to zero does not guarantee anything. Booting from an OpenBSD install media and dd-ing from /dev/random seems more secure IMHO. Rinse and repeat for the more paranoid type.

Re:Never that specific program

[phorm]

Nothing is every guaranteed, but zeroing a drive is generally good enough for most consumer needs unless you've got some *really* determined people that are going to be after your data. On modern high-density spinning-rust drives, it's pretty hard to reliably recover contiguous bits of information from a zeroed drive without some special hardware (or hardware modifications).

As we move to SSD's, however, I'm not sure even a random-write will work when the hardware itself may be marking off various parts of the disk as do-not-use over time. I would think that in that case, those bits aren't being overwritten during zeroing and might have useful little bits of data in some cases.

Re:Never that specific program

[ArtemaOne]

Several people already pointed out your mistake, but randomized twice before a zero wipe shows that you aren't hiding encryption within the randomization. I'm not hiding bad things, and don't want to make it look like I am, so zeroing is legally safer than leaving it looking like an encryption technique.

Re:Never that specific program

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Don't forget to take the platter out and smash it up whichever way you want. If the NSA can get the data off a drive that's being zeroed several times and platter smashed up, they deserve a trophy.

Grind it into dust.

Smashing the platter helps some. But taking it out of the drive just saves them a step.

When a surface has been overwritten a couple times you're not going to have much luck trying to read it with the ordinary heads, even with tweaked signal and head-positioning electronics.

But a scanning magnetic-force microscope makes the last several layers of writing visible to the naked eye (observing the false-color image on a monitor or printed page).

Re:Never that specific program

[NotAPK]

Wasted opportunity. Yes, wipe the drives as you do: then fill them with encrypted backups. At the very least those "dust collectors" may be useful in the future. Otherwise, smash the top of the drive with a hammer hard enough to damage the platter(s) and throw them in the bin.

Re:Never that specific program

[andersenep]

But any time you stop using a hard drive you should clean it. I have probably 6 hard drives on a shelf in my house because I've replaced them with larger or faster drives. Each one has had the free space randomized twice and then set to all zeros afterward. Bank info, taxes, official (unclassified) work files, all of those have been on them in some variety at some points, and if they are ever disposed, I don't want any of that to be easily recoverable. I have never used it to destroy evidence when it was requested by investigators, as I am not a wealthy and powerful person, I would end up incriminating myself by doing so.

This was my thought as well. I will say up front that I don't like Hillary and I think she's unquestionably guilty of mishandling classified information, but I think it's entirely within the realm of reason that her server was wiped as a matter of standard procedure vs something more nefarious. I wouldn't put it past her to have it wiped to prevent anything she doesn't want us to know, but I would hope that anyone involved in government IT wipes drive as a matter of SOP.

Re:Never that specific program

[guruevi]

This isn't about proper disposal. The e-mails were destroyed after the server had gone offline and the inquiry had started. She was ORDERED to turn the drives over, instead she wiped the drives and then turned them over.

Re:Never that specific program

[Oligonicella]

Cut it into quarters with a friggin' oxy torch. Jeez, the lack of votech training nowadays.

Re:Never that specific program

[ArtemaOne]

Actually it is about proper disposal. Read the last part of the original post up top. They asked if people use disk wiping for very standard and boring stuff. The answer I gave addressed that well. I then addressed that I have never done what she did.

Re:Never that specific program

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Cut it into quarters with a friggin' oxy torch. Jeez, the lack of votech training nowadays.

If you've got a torch, don't bother cutting it. Just heat it red hot.

Once it's over the curie temperature of the recording medium, all the stored magnetic fields go away.

Re:Never that specific program

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Make that "yellow hot". Red might be a bit below the relevant material's curie point.

Re:Never that specific program

[darkseid]

Bullshit. The alleged ability to read data that's been erased multiple times (with slack space overwritten as well), is a blind for the black bag placement of keyboard readers and EMF bugs.

Re:Never that specific program

[AK Marc]

That's not in TFA. The Fox News article indicates she's obviously criminal because her team used BleachBit. There was no indication given in TFA as to the time of the wiping, or the content wiped or anything like that.

The highly biased single-source news article doesn't even assert what you said. Did you hear that somewhere else, or is that your hallucination to help justify your irrational hatred of Hillary? If not Hillary, then who are you voting for in November?

Re:Never that specific program

[Bartles]

Do you clean your hard drives after you receive a subpoena?

Re:Never that specific program

[ArtemaOne]

That was clearly covered in my post.

Re:Never that specific program

[jez9999]

Quite hard to do with HDDs. I tried doing that once outdoors with a sledge hammer and I broke one of my patio tiles.

Re:Never that specific program

[NotAPK]

He he, easily done I guess: poor patio!

On a concrete floor I use a small or "normal" hammer and twist the head slightly on the swing. With the drive flat, and aiming right on top of the drive, halfway between the spindle and the edge, I find it easy enough to leave a huge dent, if I don't go right through the thin top plate!!!!

Re:Never that specific program

[nctritech]

That is bad information that's been circulating for decades, from back when that was not really bad information. It originates from a paper by Peter Gutmann during a time when hard drives didn't do the insane signal processing they do today. One zero pass on a drive is sufficient today. This was brought up on Slashdot ten years ago.

I don't have any yoga emails ....

[King_TJ]

But I can say that something like this isn't too surprising, assuming you hired a lawyer with a brain in his/her head. They really like the idea of deleting evidence that could be used against you in a court of law, if they're hired to work FOR you.

This is why businesses are being pushed to start purging all of their employee's email on a regular basis. They want to preserve that plausible deniability and ensure some former employee didn't say something in a company email you weren't aware of that winds up costing you $'s in a lawsuit.

If this is an attempt to discuss if Clinton is guilty of anything or not with running her own private mail server? I think the answer to that is really pretty obvious.... Yes, of course she is. If any of us worked for an employer who provided us with a company email system for use with company-related things and we just decided to conduct business via our personal Gmail accounts, or some home-brew Linux server? How long do you think we'd stay employed there once that was realized? In a case like hers, it's only magnified as a problem because we KNOW she was allowed to handle classified content in her mail. So the hunt is on to prove she actually possessed some of that on this unofficial server. And if her lawyers did their jobs properly, there won't be much concrete proof that she did so, or at least that she ever accessed it once it was sent out. That doesn't make her less guilty though .... just smart enough to dodge some legal repercussions for her behavior.

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[JackieBrown]

In a case like hers, it's only magnified as a problem because we KNOW she was allowed to handle classified content in her mail. So the hunt is on to prove she actually possessed some of that on this unofficial server.

It was already determined that there was. What was lacking was provability of intent per the FBI.

I tried using that excuse when I missed a speed limit sign. I was pretty shocked when intent didn't matter there.

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[0100010001010011]

And you know that accounts are not servers, right?

For example I have my own e-mail *account* hosted on *google's* servers.

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[CCW]

>>it's only magnified as a problem because we KNOW she was allowed to handle classified content in her mail.

This is incorrect. Neither Clinton nor anybody else in the department was allowed to handle classified content in unsecured email. Every case of classified information leaking into email on an unsecured network is a violation, @state.gov email addresses are not for classified material either. That material is sequestered on a completely separate network. Anybody who sent Clinton classified email committed the same infraction she did, and that is still true if she was using hrclinton@state.gov instead of a private address. The underlying issue is that the state department is careless with classified information.

This (obviously) does NOT include retroactively classified material, since that was unclassified when sent by definition.

While I think using a private server was stupid and Clinton should fire the people who recommended it and publicly apologize to both the american people and the staffers who were told to stop telling her it was a bad idea, Gowdy's inference that competently wiping a computer implies wrongdoing is just incorrect and dangerous and seems unconstitutional.

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[harperska]

There is a difference in how the laws are written. The speed limit law simply says you can't go over the posted speed. Whether you intended to or not is beside the point. The espionage act, on the other hand, specifically says in the text of the law that you may not intentionally disseminate classified information to anybody not cleared to see it.

FYI, the other half of the relevant law states that you can't negligibly allow classified information to fall into the wrong hands. But the FBI's investigation found no evidence that anybody nefarious did get a hold of classified emails stored on the server, and she did not put classified emails on the server with the intent to disseminate them to anybody who shouldn't see them. Therefore, neither half of the relevant law was broken.

That being said, if it does come to light that somebody did hack her private server and steal classified emails, then it would be a whole different story. But as it is, with the information we know, simply the act of having emails on a private server did not in of itself break the law.

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[techno-vampire]

Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice used private accounts for classified emails

At this point, what difference does it make?

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[c]

They want to preserve that plausible deniability and ensure some former employee didn't say something in a company email you weren't aware of that winds up costing you $'s in a lawsuit.

I think that in many cases, it's just as much about saving money in lawsuits by not having to pay lawyers to plow through years and years of "hey, lunch at Vinnie's, you in?" e-mails.

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[quantaman]

Yes, of course she is. If any of us worked for an employer who provided us with a company email system for use with company-related things and we just decided to conduct business via our personal Gmail accounts, or some home-brew Linux server? How long do you think we'd stay employed there once that was realized?

If that employee is a high level manager? Probably indefinitely.

In a case like hers, it's only magnified as a problem because we KNOW she was allowed to handle classified content in her mail. So the hunt is on to prove she actually possessed some of that on this unofficial server.

No it isn't, they've had those emails all along.

And if her lawyers did their jobs properly, there won't be much concrete proof that she did so, or at least that she ever accessed it once it was sent out. That doesn't make her less guilty though .... just smart enough to dodge some legal repercussions for her behavior.

Irrelevant. The question is whether she was intentionally disseminating classified emails, and even then it needs to be more than a handful or classified emails among thousands if they're actually going to pursue charges, it just doesn't happen.

Feel free to criticize her for being careless, she was. And the fact that no one realized or felt comfortable saying that the situation was amiss is pretty disturbing.

But criminal charges and jail time? The idea is, and always has been, absurd.

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[shutdown -p now]

Your mention of corporate policies for mail deletion is key here. If emails were deleted in a secure wipe manner as part of a routine schedule for that sort of thing, we have to assume no foul play. But if it was a one-off thing, and especially if it was after they knew there was an investigation, it's very suspicious.

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[bongey]

They didn't delete ALL their personal emails.

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[techno-vampire]

Actually, all three should go to prison. Jail is where you go when you're awaiting trial, prison is where you serve your sentence.

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[AK Marc]

So committing a felony is fine, so long as you don't properly dispose of the improperly handled classified materials? Or is it that it's only allowed if it's a Republican? As bad as she is, who are you voting for in November?

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[Cytotoxic]

This is why businesses are being pushed to start purging all of their employee's email on a regular basis. They want to preserve that plausible deniability and ensure some former employee didn't say something in a company email you weren't aware of that winds up costing you $'s in a lawsuit.

Any company with half a brain will now have in place a document retention policy that destroys most communications within a year or two. But then you have to have an archiving system that allows the team of lawyers you have to go in and flag certain things for preservation, pursuant to pending or active litigation.

The whole thing is a mess, really, with class action trolls combing through decades of internal documents looking for any embarrassing email that they can hold up in a tobacco-industry like moment to earn themselves billions. All it takes is one employee saying something stupid... maybe even at odds with corporate policy.

So if you are a corporate type who isn't in IT and for some weird reason you read slashdot, if you don't have competent IT leadership, go out and hire it today. It isn't just about making sure the email server has good uptime anymore. IT can be the key to good corporate governance for a hundred reasons.

Re:I don't have any yoga emails ....

[mrclevesque]

I know, but but how is that relevant?

Free space wiping controversial?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the server used an SSD, the trim or SSD internal cleanup routines would have scrubbed the empty blocks too. Would that also be news?

This is fantastically low quality shit for a Slashdot post. Really. It's an SC Republican talking to Fox news about Hillary, hoping to stir up a Benghazi 2.0.

This isn't tech news. It's to bait.

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[OhPlz]

They intentionally destroyed data while an investigation was underway. If it was a Republican that got caught doing it, you'd probably go nuts about it. As it is, it's disgraceful for Slashdot to post this in the late afternoon on a Friday when people are going to be less likely to see it.

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[OhPlz]

Everything on that server is part of the investigation. She chose to have her own server and she chose to mix personal emails in with government emails. She shouldn't be the one to decide what the investigators get to see. For all we know, she didn't have any personal email on there and she's been having her people wipe sensitive info that would impact her electability or land her in prison.

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[kqs]

I haven't seen any evidence that the wiping was done during the email investigation; do you have a citation that says otherwise?

And Slashdot posted this a bit after it hit the mainstream news. The fact that you think that the timing was a plot by Slashdot implies that you are less interested in facts than in political conspiracy theories. When you look around and complain about all of the political mudslinging, now you can think "hey, I'm causing all that! Cool!"

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[AthanasiusKircher]

I haven't seen any evidence that the wiping was done during the email investigation; do you have a citation that says otherwise?

It wasn't done during the FBI investigation, but it seems to have been done after the State Department requested her emails pursuant to an investigation by the House about Benghazi.

According to Clinton's lawyer, the emails must have been deleted sometime between December 5, 2014 and March 27, 2015. That article is from last year, so perhaps they've managed to narrow the window further.

As discussed in the New York Times timeline on the investigation, the select committee in the House to investigate Benghazi was formed in May 2014 and began negotiating with Clinton in July 2014 to obtain all of her emails. The State Department turned over "a handful of emails from Mrs. Clinton, all from her private account" in August 2014, and the House committee requested the remainder of the emails. As noted in the Politifact story above, Clinton's lawyer said the "review" of Clinton's emails to separate personal correspondence, etc. happened in fall of 2014. Clinton apparently finally turned over (what she claimed to be) the remainder to the State Department in December (almost two years after leaving office), after which she deleted the rest. On March 10, 2015, the New York Times reported that Clinton had deleted 32,000 emails. After finding classified information, the FBI began its investigation in July 2015.

So, yes, the emails were deleted before the FBI investigation began. But they were deleted after repeated requests to turn over all her correspondence by the House committee.

Personally, I have my doubts that there was some sort of "evil memo" smoking gun to be found in this mass of stuff, but the fact is that the server was wiped AFTER an investigation (at that time limited to Benghazi) and official government request for all her email happened. It at least has to go in the "somewhat shady" category that Clinton only gave paper copies of emails and wiped the server clean at this point. (Why they were delivered on 55,000 pages of paper is still unclear, but it would have potentially erased a lot of metadata -- the redigitized email I've seen had no detailed headers. Oh, and the redigitization process required more than 2400 man-hours of work.)

It seems more likely (to me) that if there were anything "shady" going it, it was probably to delete personal correspondence -- rather than State Department business -- that would make her look really bad if it ever got out. But I guess we'll never know.

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[im_thatoneguy]

If it was a Republican that got caught doing it, you'd probably go nuts about it.

You mean like when Bush's Whitehouse deleted 22 million emails? Nobody actually gives a shot about Hillary's emails. But the GOP knows that people are so tech illiterate that they can frame it as "Hillary funneled all of our state secrets to Benghazi Terrorists to help them kill our diplomat!"

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[AK Marc]

TFA is Fox News quoting a Hillary hater saying that "wiping drives is proof of guilt". That's all the story is. There's nothing in the story even implying that the wiping happened after the investigation was underway. So where are you getting your facts from? Making them up and hoping nobody checks?

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[AK Marc]

Let's say she's guilty of everything she's been accused of (I think she assassinated Gandhi and JFK/RFK as well), what would it be if the timeline went as follows:

She's investigated for Benghazi.
During that investigation, someone realizes there's classified material on the "private" email server.
The legal, prudent, and best practice thing to do when such an error is noticed, is to wipe the offending material. So, while being investigated for Benghazi, she wipes unrelated emails.

So, between killing Michael Jackson and founding ISIS, she properly disposes of mishandled classified material. And she's faulted for the one time she does properly handle it?

The misogynist Republican stance is showing. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. They hate her, and anything she did is a crime. Anything she didn't do is criminally negligent for not acting. She's been under investigation constantly for 20 years, not because she'd done bad things for which she's hated, but she's accused of bad things because she's hated. It seems so obviously irrational to everyone but the Hillary haters, who hated her before she did anything on their list of reasons they hate her.

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[SeattleLawGuy]

They intentionally destroyed data while an investigation was underway. If it was a Republican that got caught doing it, you'd probably go nuts about it. As it is, it's disgraceful for Slashdot to post this in the late afternoon on a Friday when people are going to be less likely to see it.

Slashdot didn't pick the timing of when Fox News released it. Although it is kind of interesting that it was released on a day to minimize its political impact.

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[Bert64]

The legal, prudent, and best practice thing to do when such an error is noticed is to seize the server holding the classified material and place it into evidence until a thorough investigation can be performed.

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[AK Marc]

There was no investigation at the time (a Benghazi inquiry that wasn't a legal investigation, and wasn't concerned with the emails at the time), and turning over your classified material to the FBI for an investigation into your self is not only stupid, but illegal. It's an illegal mis-handling of classified material. Leaks should not be handled by leaking the material to others, even law enforcement. They are to be handled by destroying the offending materials, so as to eliminate/minimize the leak.

Her actions, as described in TFA were the proper course. But she's vilified for them. The whole thing is illogical.

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[Bartles]

Actually she wiped emails pursuant to the Benghazi investigation. Some of the 15,000 emails that the FBI was able to recover relate to Benghazi. They will be released in the next month due to court order if the State Department fails to stonewall.

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[Bartles]

The hell it wasn't. A congressional investigation most certainly is a legal investigation.

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[AK Marc]

It's not an investigation by a law enforcement organization, they are called "hearings" not investigation.. And it wasn't interested in unrelated emails. It was Benghazi-only, at the time.

Re: Free space wiping controversial?

[Bartles]

Sec Clintons personal server was discovered as a result of the Benghazi hearings. There are nervous lawsuits going on as a result.

Re: Free space wiping controversial?

[AK Marc]

Yes. In the defense of a non-crime at a non-investigation, if she noticed improper emails stored on her server, she's essenially required by law to wipe them securely.

Yet, when she does follow the law, it's seen as proof she planned to break it all the time.

This shows an improper bias in the investigation (and trial by public), not proof of intent.

So, if she's so bad, who are you voting for in November?

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[Bert64]

Handing the classified data to an organization cleared to handle such data so they can investigate a crime is not illegal, destroying evidence is highly illegal.

Re: Free space wiping controversial?

[Bert64]

I'm not voting, i'm not eligible to vote in american elections.
If i was, i wouldn't be voting *for* anyone, rather i would be voting against whoever i considered the worst of the two.

Re:Free space wiping controversial?

[AK Marc]

Someone isn't "cleared" to handle all classified material, once they are cleared to handle any material at that level.

destroying evidence is highly illegal.

No, it is not. A murder who washes his hands after the crime isn't prosecuted for destroying evidence. Destroying evidence after being ordered to turn it over is obviously clearly illegal. But that's been proven to not be the case here. Destroying all backups at 7 years old (an American standard for destroying old data) absolves you 100% if someone at 7 years and one day, sues you about something you just destroyed. So destroying the evidence would be 100% legal in that case. Arguably even if you knew the lawsuit was coming.

Re: Free space wiping controversial?

[AK Marc]

That's not how ballots work. There is no "anyone but" box. And if you are not an American, why are you so keen on American elections? A foreigner living in the US? Or a disinterested observer who thinks it would be hilarious if Trump were elected, so you'll do what little you can to get that result?

Re: Free space wiping controversial?

[Bert64]

And that indeed is the problem...
I dislike both candidates, and if i was american i wouldn't want to vote for either, but there isn't an "anyone but" box as you pointed out so you have to choose the least intolerable of the two in the hope that the other won't get elected.

Re: Free space wiping controversial?

[AK Marc]

The problem is that people that would grudgingly vote for Kang over Kodos, end up joining the campaign for Kang, to ensure the defeat of Kodos, despite hating both candidates. If those with no great love for their candidate would just shut up and get out of the way, we'd not end up in the situation we are in, with the two most hated candidates in US history up against each other.

Should be ashamed to imply this is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Implying that using wiping software is automatically suspicious is shameful.

This should be accepted as common practice which implies nothing suspicious. If you don't want certain data anymore, whether it's inconsequential or not, it SHOULD be wiped-out. If I want the data deleted, then I want to to be gone, whether it's sensitive financial data or a 19-byte file named phpinfo.php.

There's plenty of other facets of the story to latch-onto, whether legitimate or overblown. But this one is not valid.

This is akin to a prosecutor making the argument that you are guilty of something just because "history | grep shred" returns more than a single result. Bullshit.

Re:Should be ashamed to imply this is wrong

[JackieBrown]

Then we might as well as get rid of the freedom of information act since it's legitimate to wipe out government records as long as someone doesn't want it.

Re:Should be ashamed to imply this is wrong

[sexconker]

She wiped it after they began investigating her. She was destroying evidence.

Re:Should be ashamed to imply this is wrong

[fustakrakich]

Smart move. Lighter sentence.

Re:Should be ashamed to imply this is wrong

[AK Marc]

She wiped unrelated emails after an investigation into Benghazi. If they were, as asserted, classified material improperly held on insecure servers, it would be her duty to wipe them. Why do you hate Hillary when she does what's legally required? Oh, you'd hate her if she gave you $20 ("Not $50? You bitch.").

Re:Should be ashamed to imply this is wrong

[sexconker]

You're a dumbass. She destroyed evidence related to an active investigation. That's certainly not her duty.

Re:Should be ashamed to imply this is wrong

[AK Marc]

Nope. There was no active investigation into her emails at the time. Just Benghazi, and it wasn't an investigation, because it was "just" a congressional hearing, not an investigation by a law enforcement organization.

Re:Should be ashamed to imply this is wrong

[AK Marc]

it's not up to her to police [classified materials].

Isn't that the point? It's up to her to police the classified materials? She didn't so she should be in jail. Oh wait, we found one point where she might have. Proof she needs more jail.

Every argument I see on this topic is irrational and contradictory. It all looks to be simple hate of Hillary, steered towards whatever the talk show told the Hillary haters to target.

All of you should just sign your posts "Heil Trump." After all, in a two party system, that's your effect, intended or not.

She's just following protocol

[daveywest]

It's nice to see our next President turning over a new leaf and following DOD standards for data destruction.

Re:She's just following protocol

[bongey]

Except she didn't. DoD standards require wiping and disk destruction. Even Google fucking wipes and shreds their disks. http://www.doncio.navy.mil/Con... http://www.networkworld.com/ar...

Re:She's just following protocol

[nctritech]

An unfortunate waste of a bunch of perfectly good disks from which the old data is irretrievable after a simple zero fill.

It shows intent to cover up a crime

[Anonymous Coward]

No wonder her IT guy ran to the FBI for immunity the moment he could.

Not responsible - it's a crime.

[zerofoo]

Hillary Clinton co-mingled personal and official government communications on her private email server. All of those communications are subject to the Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act.

Her personal emails ceased to be personal when she co-mingled them with official government communications. HRC and her lawyers were not authorized to decide what is relevant to FRA and FOIA and what is not.

HRC and her lawyers deleted 30,000 or so emails that are not recoverable - therefore she is in violation of both the FRA and FOIA.

HRC should be, at the very least, in front of a jury to answer for her actions.

Re:Not responsible - it's a crime.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because she is in violation of the FOIA and can't provide any evidence whatsoever that the emails she deleted were personal. There is no innocent until proven guilty here, in this case she is ALREADY in violation of the FOIA, so the right thing to do is turn ALL emails to a neutral third party to filter out what is personal and what is not.

Right now there is no way to guarantee that the deleted emails were exclusively personal except for her word. And we all know the value of a politician's word.

Re:Not responsible - it's a crime.

[Bartles]

Are you claiming then, that she only deleted personal emails?

Re:Not responsible - it's a crime.

[david_thornley]

How is she in violation of the FOIA? What official information was she asked for that she failed to provide without a valid reason not to? I read the Wikipedia article, and saw no signs that (a) it applied to personal email not on a government server, or (b) that it assumed guilty until proven innocent.

I don't see how she can be guilty of FOIA violation for information not under the control of the Federal Government. She could be guilty of other things (we can probably agree on bad judgment, although that isn't illegal), but until someone can come up with actual evidence of something worth prosecuting she's not going to be prosecuted.

Re:Not responsible - it's a crime.

[david_thornley]

I'm not claiming anything. I've gotten real tired of all the Clinton hate, so I'm just challenging anti-Clinton claims that I don't see as verified (for example, using her own not-well-secured email server for official business).

Re: Not responsible - it's a crime.

[Bartles]

You don't think it's been verified that she used her personal non-secure server for official business?

Re: Not responsible - it's a crime.

[david_thornley]

My confusing syntax, I see. We all know she used her personal server, which was not managed well for security, for official business. That's verified. Whether she deleted official emails is, as far as I've seen, not verified.

Re: Not responsible - it's a crime.

[Bartles]

James comey did a pretty good job verifying it when he testified in Congress. Do you need video?

Any Evidence that this story is correct?

[Art Challenor]

If we have a story about a politician talking reasonably correctly about a technical topic, I have to question the source. I'm fairly sure that Trey Gowdy is not a BleachBit contributor. Who told him all this information and where's the supporting evidence?

Re:Any Evidence that this story is correct?

[arbiter1]

Here is what we know for a fact, 30k emails WERE deleted after the subpoena, If they used such a program to make sure they never could be recovered well that does show sign of something to hide cause in case like this if they weren't anything bad then let investigators see them to prove you didn't have anything to hide. You destroy them if they are very damning and could put you in prison for a LONG time. Conspiracy theory that all you want but its fact and truth of what person will do, like Tom Brady did with his cell phone he had destroyed AFTER he knew NFL wanted it.

Re:Any Evidence that this story is correct?

[StevenMaurer]

Here is what we know for a fact, 30k emails WERE deleted after the subpoena.

Again (and I have to repeat myself because this keeps coming up), this is a 100% FALSE assertion.The emails were deleted in December. Gowdy issued the subpoena (and, mind you, only for Benghazi related subjects) in March.

"In fact, Trey Gowdy did not issue a subpoena until March, months after she she'd done that review. Further, the subpoena was specifically asking for documents pertaining to Libya and the attacks on our facility in Benghazi, documents which, along with tens of thousands of others, she had already given to the Department of State," Merrill said.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the Benghazi panel, called Gowdy's hit Wednesday a "stunt."

"It appears clear that Secretary Clinton was answering a question about whether she deleted emails 'while facing a subpoena,'" Cummings said in a statement Wednesday.

Re:Any Evidence that this story is correct?

[bongey]

Except Gowdy, the FOIA requests and the FOIA lawsuit(s) were BEFORE they were deleted. Gowdy only followed up with a subpoena after the Clinton team didn't hand over anything. Clinton WILLFULLY broke the FOIA laws, she was talking back in 2009 ish about FOIA laws but the Clinton team just ignored it. Clinton only handed over emails nearly 2 YEARS after a FOIA request. She left office Feb 2013, they deleted them Dec 2014. Everyone learned of the email issue after the original FOIA request said there were NO Clinton emails.

And the winner of Election 2016 is...

[redshirt]

BleachBit.

Just like a woman ...

[daveywest]

... cleaning up after themselves. If it had been a man, he'd have just fsk'd the drive and used it for a minecraft server.

Re:Admin Wipes Drives on Decommissioned Server

[arbiter1]

Um WRONG, her lawyers and her went through said emails then deleted them AFTER they subpoena for them it wasn't before the fact. Deleteing them before FBI wanted them would be diff but after they asked for them is destruction of evidence.

Re:Deflection

[OhPlz]

I can't believe her campaign signs are "4 her" and not "4 us". Pretty much says everything you need to know. There are laws 4 us, and there are special exceptions to those laws 4 her.

Decommissioning servers

[freedom_surfer]

At my previous employer, it was standard practice to use shred whenever we decommissioned our Linux servers. We didn't see what was running on them first, or if it was worth shredding, you just did it. What a ridiculous argument.

Next up, anyone who has a paper shredder at home is up to no good! What are all you people hiding!

Re:Decommissioning servers

[sexconker]

Did you run shred on a server after the FBI said it wanted the data on it?

Re:Decommissioning servers

[dissy]

I still disagree with you.

When I decommission a hard drive, best practices state you wipe the entire hard drive.

You don't go and delete specific files like exchanges .EDS data store files and your web browser cache only.

In fact the way BleachBit deletes data, even though recovery of emails on these drives would be impossible, the windows SAM file remains undeleted and in perfect operating condition along with the entire OS.

I could easily extract password hashes from those untouched files and brute force them.
There could be many other files left littered around the HD that would provide or point to other authentication credentials, not to mention all the saved passwords in the windows password store and all the applications that do it on their own.

No, wiping the entire hard drive with something like DBAN is the only way to properly decommission a hard drive if you are concerned it may leave your possession (selling or disposal doesn't matter)

BleachBit is absolutely nothing like a paper shredder. It is more like using a black marker to redact lines printed on those papers and then leaving the entire stack of paper out so anyone can still read the rest and see there is text redacted.

Shredding the whole paper would plausibly be proper disposal. Marking out lines while keeping the paper is not.

Re:Decommissioning servers

[guruevi]

That is not how FBI investigations work. You can't just turn over the data, there is a chain of evidence.

Re:Decommissioning servers

[Swave An deBwoner]

I think that dd is sufficient for most cases.

Re:Decommissioning servers

[StevenMaurer]

Did you run shred on a server after the FBI said it wanted the data on it?

HILLARY CLINTON AND HER TEAM DID NOT DO THIS.

My god, this is like the fifth person to falsely claim that she did in this discussion. Don't you people read jack shit before you post? Or it is all "Beitbart" and the "Weekly World News", Hillary Clinton with space alien? You seriously imagine that the GOP in Congress wouldn't be trying to find her in Contempt if she'd done anything like this? That the FBI wouldn't have done a thing?!?

http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/08/politics/hillary-clinton-benghazi-subpoena-gowdy/

"In fact, Trey Gowdy did not issue a subpoena until March, months after she she'd done that review. Further, the subpoena was specifically asking for documents pertaining to Libya and the attacks on our facility in Benghazi, documents which, along with tens of thousands of others, she had already given to the Department of State," Merrill said.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the Benghazi panel, called Gowdy's hit Wednesday a "stunt."

"It appears clear that Secretary Clinton was answering a question about whether she deleted emails 'while facing a subpoena,'" Cummings said in a statement Wednesday.

God DAMN do I want silly season to be over, where people will go back to merely lying about their high scores on games, rather than crap like this

Re:Decommissioning servers

[sexconker]

Feds wanted the emails.
Hillary and her goons went through them to filter out "personal" emails despite the clear conflict of interest, and handed over a bunch of innocuous emails while claiming "They weren't classified.".

Hillary and her goons wiped the server, like with a cloth, destroying all other evidence (or so they hoped).
Many of the innocuous emails that were handed over were determined to be classified.
The claim then became "They weren't classified at the time.".

We then learned she had staff fax, scan, etc. emails without the classified header.
We then found out about more emails from various hacks and 3rd parties (typically emails end up on more than one server) that were indeed classified at the time.
We then learned that if this were anyone else, they'd be prosecuted, but since it's HRC, they're gonna drop it.

We recently found out about another 14,000 emails that are currently being sifted through by investigators in another investigation.
She's currently trying to slime her way out of it again.

This is what is happening. If you refuse to see the plain truth in front of your eyes, please don't vote.

Re:Decommissioning servers

[Bartles]

So why is is that some of the 15,000 deleted emails that the FBI was able to recover contain information about Benghazi?

Re:Deflection

[mrclevesque]

"sky rocketing people on food stamps"

yeah, and rocket trips don't come cheap

Powell is not the prototype !

[Anonymous Coward]

Powell used an aol account.
He did NOT put a private server in his house!

Same for Rice. Powell used it for non-state NON-classified business.

Hillary has lied so many times about this server, is is clear to any hones observer that she was hiding activities of corruption with the Clinton foundation and did not want FOIA to discover her activities.

Hillary was supposed to have government archivists sort through the mails, not her personal attorneys. That was a violation of the federal records act.

She had classified information on the server, despite assertions that she did not- caught in another lie.
She said all work related mails were turned over. Another lie- the FBI found thousands of work related mails not turned over, including classified.

Re:Powell is not the prototype !

[Anonymous Coward]

And he ensured that it was secure because he kept changing accounts every 30 days to use the free discs they kept mailing to him.

Re:Powell is not the prototype !

[mrclevesque]

Yes Mr anonymous I believe you

Re:You think it matters?

[david_thornley]

You do realize that the Clintons have interacted with a very large number of people, so being connected to a good number of people who have died isn't unusual. The reason why she and Bill have dodged what looks like scandals is that the scandals were mostly made up. (Besides, if she can disappear people without any traceable connection, we want her on our side, don't we?) The election is real. Sanders came in a pretty close second, and the Republicans didn't have to nominate Trump. Since Sanders didn't win, and the Republicans couldn't find a real candidate, Clinton will be elected.

Re:I use something regularly; am *I* a criminal?

[OhPlz]

The most likely reason for her to use a private email server is to hide her email from investigators and/or FOIA requests. The government started investigating and what happened? Her team started "going through" her email and destroying whatever they decided they wanted to destroy. She claims they were personal emails, but we'll never know. To erase the data with a secure erase program is good technique, but doing that while the authorities are requesting access to the data is pretty much destruction of evidence, which itself is a crime. If the utility was run automatically once a week and that's how the data was erased, then fine. But if they ran this intentionally because they wanted to make sure there was no chance for the authorities to recover the data, that's something else entirely. And even so, that's just more reason why private mail servers should not be used for government business. We need to be able to hold our officials accountable, and that means they don't get the ability to purge potential evidence whenever they feel like it.

srm?

[Game Genie]

Have any Slashdotters had any experience with BleachBit? Specifically, have you used it for erasing "yoga emails" or "bridesmaids emails?"

No, srm works fine for deleting things locally. As for email, secure erasure wouldn't help much; it's stored by Google so the NSA already has it.

Re:More political redirection

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't mud slinging. This is technology news about obfuscating forensic evidence in practice on a technology website.

FBI Email dump source?

[mveloso]

If they used BleachBit, then where did they FBI get its last batch of emails from?

Re:FBI Email dump source?

[Swave An deBwoner]

Ah, but there's a very good story here:

https://www.bleachbit.org/

South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy. says Hillary Clinton's team deleted emails "so even God couldn't read them" using BleachBit. (more)

Re:I use something regularly; am *I* a criminal?

[KingBozo]

You are correct to a point. Cleaning up is a good thing to do before decommissioning a server, but doing that after a subpoena for those emails is called destruction of evidence.

Lots of suggestive evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

Half here meetings and calls with non-governmental people were Clinton foundation donors.
This is reported in the AP yesterday.

Now if we had a fair investigation, we might find out what transpired in these meetings and what favors were discussed.

There is a lot of appearance of conflict of interest and impropriety. (like the uranium mining deals and the Haiti gold mining deals for here relative)

Re:Lots of suggestive evidence

[Bartles]

You realize that John Podesta, the founder of ThinkPrigress, and Hillary's campaign chairman, took a bunch of money from Russia that he failed to disclose?

Re:Lots of suggestive evidence

[david_thornley]

The uranium mining deal was completely legit, and I suspect anyone who doesn't think so of being an irrational Clinton-hater. Nor does "AP yesterday" a citation make. I still haven't seen evidence.

God can read them

[WillAffleckUW]

If by God, you mean the NSA.

Already stored on the relay device reads collected.

So it is available, even if they tell you it isn't.

And they can recover it from the physical disks. It's just a lot harder.

Lies

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it does, read the laws. There is a Navy person who facing 20 years to life for disposing of a phone which had his picture while inside the sub. That is one of the more extreme cases, but it's literally a Web Search to prove you are wrong (shill?) Intent comes in to play _only_ for the penalty.

Re:Lies

[AthanasiusKircher]

Intent comes to play in guilt or acquittal in accordance with the charge. Intent to kill marks the difference between murder and manslaughter, for example. Holding some coke and possessing with intent to sell are wholly different charges, applied well before the penalty phase, turning on the question of intent, which is a question for the fact-finder (don't confuse this with plea-bargaining).

Intent is important in some charges. I don't know whether or not it is relevant to the Clinton case or not, and frankly I don't care to bother trying to sort it all out. However, it is clear the "negligence" or "gross negligence" can result in conviction for mishandling classified information, regardless of intent.

And as long as it's literally a Web Search away (shill?), howabout a link to this story about that Navy person who facing 20 years to life for disposing of a phone.

I'm not sure whether this is the case or not (I don't follow such cases), but literally the first hit that came up in a web search is this one, where a navy sailor has now been sentenced to a year in prison (had been facing 5-6 years under federal sentencing guidelines) for taking photos on a submarine. According to the link, he actually made a legal appeal for probation based on the recent precedent set by the FBI ruling on the Clinton investigation!

Anyhow, you can easily find dozens of cases like this one where people end up with prison terms for mishandling classified information in relatively "innocent" ways.

Re:Lies

[bongey]

He got 1 YEAR for 6 photos in trying to show off to his girlfriend and another girl(aka trying to get laid). The statue was could have been used on Clinton but well she is Clinton. Comey was actually incorrect when he testified to congress that the FBI hasn't brought charges under 18 U.S. Code 793, most recent as 2014. Note the section 793(f) Comey has referred to has been brought against others, they all made plea deals for lesser charges. https://www.justsecurity.org/w...

Re:Lies

[Cl1mh4224rd]

There is a Navy person who facing 20 years to life for disposing of a phone which had his picture while inside the sub.

A quick Google search tells me that you're not representing the situation accurately.

The sailor isn't facing charges for simply having taken pictures of himself while on the sub; he had several pictures of classified engineering spaces: "The photos that raised red flags at NCIS and the FBI included images of various control panels, a panoramic view of the reactor compartment and a panel that showed the condition and exact location of the submarine at the time the photo was taken." (source)

Re:Lies

[bongey]

He got 1 YEAR for 6 photos/selfies that had only secret info in trying to show off to his girlfriend and another girl(aka trying to get laid). Clinton had 6 Above Top Secret emails special access programs information on a public email server that was unencrypted for months. https://www.theguardian.com/us...
Yes 6 photos.

Re:Lies

[flargleblarg]

The word you are looking for is statute, not statue.

Re:Lies

[bongey]

I am as good at spelling as Hillary and the DNC is with email.

Never heard of it

[undefinedreference]

When I need data unrecoverable, I use dd. You don't really need anything else. /dev/zero and /dev/zero | tr '\000' '\377', do until you get bored or start getting errors...

Of course, if I only ran Windows, I guess I wouldn't have many choices.

Re:Too late, said the Hunter

[Plugh]

Just yesterday Johnson said he *opposed* a Carbon Tax at a rally in Concord, NH

Re:Really

[Wraithlyn]

It's easy to criticize. What do you propose as an alternative?

Because your options this election are:

1) Clinton
2) Trump
3) Throwing your vote away

Yeah they all suck. But those are your options.

Re:More political redirection

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't mud slinging. This is technology news about obfuscating forensic evidence in practice on a technology website.

Your statement is mudslinging.

Whether the secure wipe was used as a simple matter of Best Practice, or was done for Nefarious reasons, is not known. So when the article makes judgements such as "When you're using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see." it becomes a political mudslinging story.
I don't personally use this software, but I personally always securely wipe any drive which I'm done using. Even if there's nothing on there, even if it only contains "yoga emails" or etc.

The disturbing thing to me is that this article is all but using the "If you have nothing to hide, you wouldn't use secure wipe methods" line of bullshit. Using strong encryption, secure wipe software, etc. should not be allowed to be seen as a "shady" or "suspicious" activity- it should rather be seen as the Intelligent and Normal way of doing things.

Re:Really

[JustNiz]

Vote for who you like most, even if they have no chance of winning.

The whole reason we're in this shit in the first place is because most Americans repeatedly vote "tactically" for the least worst mainstream option, rather than who they think would actually be the best.
Its a chicken and egg thing.

Good security policy

[OrangeTide]

You should be securely erasing your emails, even if they just contain the password to your favorite forum, let alone if they contain sensitive communications to the secretary of state.

Re:Impeding investigation = being responsible

[OrangeTide]

Well we all kind of assumed that she, or really any one in government leadership, is above the law.

What are Americans smoking?

[JustNiz]

Just how blatantly obviously criminal does Hi-liar-y have to get before enough of the brainwashed American masses finally start to figure it out and she becomes unelectable?
I mean at some point even her levels of dirty money can't pay off the obviously corrupt US legal system to keep her out of jail any longer right?

Re:What are Americans smoking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just how blatantly obviously criminal does Hi-liar-y have to get before enough of the brainwashed American masses finally start to figure it out and she becomes unelectable?
I mean at some point even her levels of dirty money can't pay off the obviously corrupt US legal system to keep her out of jail any longer right?

Well, I can't speak for all Americans, but...

Some Americans don't pick up on the newest anti-Hillary hit piece until it's a week later and already discredited. Some do pick up on the latest anti-Hillary hit piece and withhold judgment until, a week later, it's discredited. Only a precious few read the latest hit piece and ignore the bit where it's discredited. These are the people still talking about Bengazi, the Clinton Foundation, Vince Foster, ACORN, and so on.

Now, certainly there's also a canny few in between, who aren't particularly fazed by the Imaginary Scandal of the Week, but also see that Clinton is still just another fairly unprincipled politician, based on her voting record in the Senate alone. Nothing jail-worthy, of course, but not exactly squeaky clean. But then we see that a vote for anyone other than Hillary supports Trump. And, for foreigners who don't know much about US history, it's very important that Trump is so soundly defeated that nobody attempts to repeat his campaign--because it's basically the third act of the US Civil War with its white supremacists, and that shit just has to end, and should have ended over a century ago when the Confederacy got it's ass handed to it the first time.

Re:What are Americans smoking?

[JustNiz]

>> Clinton is still just another fairly unprincipled politician, based on her voting record in the Senate alone. Nothing jail-worthy, of course,

Bullshit. Anybody else and they'd be in prison.

Re:What are Americans smoking?

[JustNiz]

Your having no balls to stand by your own words and posting as AC causes the rest of your message to be ignored. Well done.

Re:Really

[Wraithlyn]

No.

You're in this shit because the FPTP electoral college system makes a two party lock-in inevitable.

• - Nearly 1 in 5 Americans voted for Ross Perot in 1992, and didn't receive any representation in government whatsoever.

• - The last time a "third party" gained traction was 1860, with Lincoln's Republicans. There is a reason it hasn't happened since.

The system is broken. And the two-party duopoly has no interest in fixing it.

I'm sorry but acting like things would get better "if only more people voted for better candidates" is a hopelessly naive pipe dream. That requires viable 3rd party candidates, and the US system makes that effectively impossible.

So I'm afraid I must repeat (and I take no pleasure in saying this, believe me) your only three options this election are Trump, Clinton, or throwing your vote away.

Of course Clinton is horrible. But would you prefer Trump?

Re:More political redirection

[meerling]

I know a rather large number of people that use secure delete or wipe tools.
It may be considered strange by computer neophytes and people that don't work with government computer systems, but it's pretty common for techies and government computer people with security clearance required jobs to employ that kind of software.
I guess the people that are making accusations over that are either ignorant, or disingenuous.

Re:Open Source cos lower chance of NSA exploits

[guruevi]

Criminal investigations don't use 'undelete'. They use electron microscopes to read areas that were microscopically out of alignment the next time the drive passed it's head. It's very expensive to actually recover large amounts of data this way, but for 'spy agency' needs it's trivial.

Regular folk logic

[Tablizer]

You don't use BleachBit for yoga emails or bridesmaids emails. When you're using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see

But being the Clintons, aggressive Foxnews-like snoops would love to get their hands on yoga and bridesmaids info also. Look how many conservatives sites are claiming a health conspiracy. Why give conspiracy nuts more fuel? They'll weave yoga into their narrative also.

You're being willfully ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

1. She put classified info on a private unsecured server where it was vulnerable, contrary to the law which she was fully advised of upon taking office.
2. She did all her work through that server, hiding it from all 3 government branches (congressional oversight, executive oversight, and the courts) and public FOIA requests.
3. When the material was sought by the courts and congress, she and the state department people lied under oath claiming the material did not exist (perhaps Nixon cronies should have all lied about tapes existing).
4. After her people knew the material was being sought, the server's files were transferred (by private IT people w/o clearances) to her lawyers (no clearances).
5. She and her lawyers deleted over 30000 e-mails, claiming they were only about yoga and her daughter's wedding dress (Nixon cut a few minutes of tape).
6. They then wiped the files with bit bleach (a step not needed for yoga or wedding dress e-mails). (Nixon did not degauss all his tapes)
7. They handed the wiped server to the FBI, and hillary publicly played ignorant with her "with a CLOTH?" comment (absolute iin-you-face arrogance against the rule of law) (Nixon did not hand tape recorders with erased tapes to the FBI)
Prove you are sincere, and not a total unprincipled partisan hack:
Are you a Nixon supporter?
Would you accept this behavior from Donald Trump or Dick Cheney?

Backup appliance and server have all emails

[Anonymous Coward]

Hillary Clinton's IT guy purchased an MS Exchange hosting contract from Platte River. The standard package came with a periodic backup to a Datto appliance, which takes snapshots of the Windows disk image several times a day. The appliance copies the snapshot to Datto's data center in real time. You can erase or even destroy the Windows machine drives and still use the snapshots to restore the disks to the snapshot of the time and date of your chosing.

The FBI confiscated the appliance from Platte River and seized the server from Datto. They have all the emails she sent and received since the start of her State Department tenure.

Re:More political redirection

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the people that are making accusations over that are either ignorant, or disingenuous.

I prefer option 3, they are pointing out the peculiarity that, given all the other shit she's pulled, in this one instance, she chose to follow best practices.

Re:More political redirection

[Anonymous Coward]

They deliberately used the software and then said there was nothing there. The point is they deleted something that would be called up by discovery, to ensure that no one could get it *for* discovery.

You, good sir, are most obviously misdirecting. Good try.

Re: More political redirection

[Anonymous Coward]

There are record retention laws, so the fact that she is trying to irevocably wipe a system is suspicious. Even if they were her mailingz of her super secret cookie recipes to chelsea on a server that would make them records unless this tool can show yourbwhich ciles it will overwrite. Not a fan of donntrump but hillary is shite. No vote for the binary candidtates, any monkeys, animated cartoon characters or indy candidatess? Otherwise might just have to go trump to spite the establishment.

Re:More political redirection

[Anonymous Coward]

A: "But anyone could hack in and see her emails, it's totally unsecure!"
B: "She used BleachBit."
A: "That proves she had something to hide!"

Being that Clinton didn't give a damn about securing the physical server and didn't give a damn about securing the messages sent through the server, it seems strange that she suddenly cares about security practices when deleting e-mail messages about yoga classes.

Oh, did I mention that deleting the e-mail messages would be considered an obstruction of justice if it were done by a typical citizen?

Re: More political redirection

[Anonymous Coward]

That may well be all true, but she specifically defeated those emails, and only those emails so that they were unrecoverable. If this is in fact standard practice, she should have known that IF those emails contained nothing but yoga appointments or whatever, that deleating those emails would have at least been PERCIEVED as have been done for nefarious purposes. Knowing that she was going to run for President, and I would think at least somewhat politically self aware, it seems almost silly to think that she would risk hurting herself politically if those emails were benign.

A motto for Clinton?

[Panoptes]

"Noblesse Obleach"

Dead Lincoln and Gary Johnson

[RoccamOccam]

Very funny video that lays out the case for Johnson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:More political redirection

[penguinoid]

I thought she wiped the server with a towel?

Love the hyperbole

[HalAtWork]

"You don't use BleachBit for yoga emails or bridesmaids emails."

Why yes I do, I use it for the most benign shit constantly, because it's easy and automatic. I only archive and preserve the stuff I care about.

Re:More political redirection

[Darinbob]

Let's be pragmatic here. She didn't decide the logistics of her email server and how to secure it or delete emails. Her IT intern did this.

Vote Green

[mdsolar]

Vote Jill not Hill 2016.

Re: Too late, said the Hunter

[Darinbob]

No one really knows Trump's political stance since he's not really giving out any details of his policies. He just says whatever gives the biggest cheers at his rallies.

Politics isn't as simple as left vs right or liberal vs conservative. That's just simplistic hand waving to stop the mases from thinking things through. It is possible to be anti-immigrant and pro-gun-control at the same time, for less regulation and more social safety nets at the same time, and so forth. It's more complex than even a Gartner Group quadrant diagram; if there are N political issues then there are N axes on the political spectrum.

Got it. You're not voting. Enjoy irrelevance.

[Brannon]

no text

Re:Really

[AthanasiusKircher]

So I'm afraid I must repeat (and I take no pleasure in saying this, believe me) your only three options this election are Trump, Clinton, or throwing your vote away.

That logic only follows if you believe that voting for any losing candidate is "throwing your vote away."

I completely agree with you that we have a horrific two-party duopoly and that it is reinforced by the first-past-the-post voting.

HOWEVER, that system only indicates a trend toward a two-party system -- it doesn't guarantee that those two parties will be the only parties for all time, nor does it guarantee that the platforms of those parties will remain stable for all time.

The losing party in a Presidential election will most certainly pay some attention to what went wrong in the previous election, and if a huge number of votes were siphoned off to a third party, they might consider taking some action to prevent that from happening in the future. That might involve tweaking the platform or something to avoid losing those voters again.

Or, even better -- a large enough showing by a 3rd-party candidate could finally break the MEDIA reinforcement of the duopoly, since that's truly where the problem lies today. Perot's run was essentially a one-off, but the alternatives in most election years are durable parties (like the Libertarians, the Greens, etc.). If one of them actually could succeed in getting even 10% of votes, it might be harder for media folks to ignore them continuously as they do in most election years.

That's the real battle -- trying to get media attention. Because this year is truly a year that anything could happen. It's why the two parties fought so hard to keep the 3rd parties out of public debates. (That's the big mistake the parties made with Perot in 1992, and had he not dropped out for a while before rejoining the race again, he likely would have ended up with even higher numbers of support.)

So many people hate BOTH Clinton and Trump that if you put a better option on a national stage with them, a significant number of people might actually start thinking "Huh, maybe there are better options out there!" Recall all the massive swings in support that happened during the primaries this year due to the debates... now imagine you actually put somebody on stage that starts making sense next to the person the majority of Americans think is a liar and the person the majority of Americans think is loud-mouthed blowhard.

But go ahead -- keep up your "throw your vote away" nonsense and reinforcing the duopoly.

Re:More political redirection

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Whether the secure wipe was used as a simple matter of Best Practice, or was done for Nefarious reasons, is not known. So when the article makes judgements such as "When you're using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see." it becomes a political mudslinging story.

What exactly is the purpose of BleachBit? As described on its own web page, BleachBit "tirelessly guards your privacy." It doesn't matter if it was wiped because of "best practices" (something rather laughable given that Sec. Clinton was violating the "best practices" of the very department she was head of according to the head of IT at SecState) or to hide nefarious activities. The main purpose of BleachBit is to preserve privacy by "obfuscating forensic evidence." The OP's statement was completely correct and made no judgments whatsoever about the guilt or innocence of Sec. Clinton. You're calling it mudslinging because you don't like the idea of people questioning her motives and wish to deflect attention.

the routine exaggeration

[cats-paw]

of everything she has done wrong, and the relentless pursuit of "where's there's smoke there's fire" witchhunting without any substantial evidence has got me convinced that this really is a witchhunt.

I wasn't too excited about her before, but at this point, I'm positively thrilled.

meanwhile the fake billionaire who wants to instutionalize racism gets far less negative press. i haven't seen or heard one interview that's gone after the Trump campaign morons with 1/2 the gusto i've seen that they go after the most trivial details of what Clinton has allegedly done.

if she can put up with all this bullshit she deserves the job, she's definitely got the temperment for it.

Re:More political redirection

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Let's be pragmatic here. She didn't decide the logistics of her email server and how to secure it or delete emails. Her IT intern did this.

Let's be realistic here. She didn't tell her IT guy what tools to use. She didn't have to. Someone -- and it doesn't take too much intelligence to guess who -- gave a directive to make that server and all its contents disappear Jimmy Hoffa style. That directive was given only after the existence of the server became public knowledge and its contents were requested. Can guilt be proven by such an action? No. But can anyone make any remotely plausible, intelligent, cohesive argument as to why someone running for POTUS would knowingly put themselves in such an awkward, damaging position?

Clinton is no fool. She knew wiping the server after it was discovered would leave her open to charges of hiding things. The most plausible explanation of why she'd do this was because there were things on the server that were even more awkward and damaging.

Re:More political redirection

[AthanasiusKircher]

I guess the people that are making accusations over that are either ignorant, or disingenuous.

Here's the problem -- Clinton deleted these emails AFTER they were requested from the House as part of an official investigation. She chose to print out everything she claimed was relevant (probably to avoid giving away metadata in headers, etc.) and then effectively "burned" the server, including (by her lawyer's own admission) tens of thousands of messages.

FBI investigations have now come up with thousands of emails which were NOT turned over in that paper dump. How many could have been part of those that were deleted and then lost when the server was wiped? We'll never know. Many of them were likely deleted in error, with her lawyers not realizing which ones should have been retained as they were going through tens of thousands of documents. But were ALL of these official state department emails recovered by the FBI (now 15,000+) deleted "in error"?

That's what's troubling about all of this. We have no way of knowing whether there may have been significant spoliation of evidence here (that's the legal term for intentionally, recklessly, or negligently destroying evidence). If this were a corporation who had been issued a subpoena and they acted in this manner, and it was later proven that they "lost" over ten thousand relevant documents in the process of their destruction of "irrelevant" documents, they would likely face significant legal sanctions, perhaps even criminal charges.

Legally, the safe course in this instance would have been to put the server in a secure location with legal supervision by Clinton's counsel until the matter could be resolved. Clinton's use of BleachBit is not surprising here -- not because it's proper protocol to delete secure information, but because it's the only reasonable way to delete potentially incriminating evidence of spoliation (even if most of it was accidental or whatever). If they hadn't used a very secure deletion protocol, then Clinton's attorneys would have been doing a VERY poor job at protecting her legally.

Personally, I'm not sure it's likely there was any "evil memo" buried among the State Department correspondence that could prove anything. (And if there were, I'm not convinced Clinton realized it.) On the other hand, I'm sure she had a bunch of private email dealings that she wouldn't want to get out -- if for nothing else then for bad public relations. Hence the destruction of everything on the server -- it's in line with the privacy paranoia that likely caused her to set up the server in the first place. But could there have been worse stuff there too? Maybe. Doesn't seem like we'll ever know, though, does it?

Re: More political redirection

[Bartles]

Do they use those tools to delete data after they were issued a subpoena?

Re:Really

[JustNiz]

Yes I would prefer Trump to Clinton. Fuck I'd prefer Dr. Evil to Clinton.

Re:Admin Wipes Drives on Decommissioned Server

[StevenMaurer]

Um WRONG, her lawyers and her went through said emails then deleted them AFTER they subpoena for them it wasn't before the fact.

Um, YOU are the one who is WRONG. The subpoena was issued in March. They were deleted in thew previous December.

I don't want to spam slashdot with a bunch of redundant posts, but this is just flat out factually incorrect. You can see my other posts where I link to sources.

Re:I use something regularly; am *I* a criminal?

[StevenMaurer]

You are correct to a point. Cleaning up is a good thing to do before decommissioning a server, but doing that after a subpoena for those emails is called destruction of evidence.

And Hillary Clinton didn't do this, although it's now becoming very apparent that people who dislike her incorrectly imagine that she did,

Re:More political redirection

[AK Marc]

Even if nothing on her server was "classified" much of it was sensitive. Using industry best practices to clean up old servers is proper, not proof of criminal activity.

I can't believe the constant anti-tech anti-science politics on a tech site. When hillary uses encryption, it's proof of guilt. Great, so we should arrest everyone who uses encryption. Oops, Slashdot defaults to https, so most everyone reading this is committing a felony, according to the Hillary haters. Encryption and deleted file scrubbing. Best practices, unless you are Hillary. Then it's a felony.

Re:More political redirection

[jaygridley]

Is that you Hillary?

Re:More political redirection

[Zontar The Mindless]

Whereas, for every comment you post like this, you're only getting 20 kopecks?

Re:More political redirection

[Zontar The Mindless]

Seems somebody accidentally hit "Troll" instead of "Insightful". Perhaps they'll realise their mistake and post in this thread to undo the damage.

security

[siamesevodka]

I used to work at a major Aerospace firm. We had annual meetings followed by a test to cover our knowledge concerning classified material. And we also had one covering one about proprietary intellectual property as well. It had a test as well. Both said if you were involved misuse of government secrets or company secrets you could count on prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. In some of the things not to do involved encryption.Nothing was to leave the property without the proper encryption.I'm sure Hillary was warned of this in briefings when she became secretary of state. What is interesting where I worked I never came in contact with proprietary intellectual property or government secrets. But as with the rest of the thousands of people who worked there like it or not you had to annualy go through the briefings and the tests. For her to feign she didn't know she was doing something wrong is a big stretch of the credibility. She should not seek public office and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If Eric Snowden is guilty, she is guilty as hell.

Re:Really

[Cyryathorn]

I wonder if we can invert the "you're throwing your vote away" argument, which is used as a kind of blackmail by the parties against their base voters. Conservatives should say to the Republican party, and liberals to the Democrat party, "if you don't put up candidates worthy of my vote, then you're throwing the election to the other party". With that, the "blackmail" pressure runs the other direction -- now the moral imperative is placed on the party to put up worthy candidates.

I'm absolutely willing to call the party's bluff for the sake of the long-term health of our country. Even if that means Cthulhu gets the White House for 4 years.

Re: More political redirection

[Anonymous Coward]

Your legal system is broken. Until you fix it none of this matters. She could have raped children in public and still not be in trouble.

BleachBit

[multi io]

Gowdy's comments just cater to IT novices who might think that there must be a bad cheap way and a good expensive way to wipe bits from a hard drive, when in fact there's just one way, and it's not particularly clever or complicated. People have written free programs to do it, so everybody uses them. It's just like thinking that anybody who uses a Teraflop/s machine must be using it to design nuclear bombs, until you realise that TFLOPs machines cost 100 bucks these days, so everybody uses them for everything, including writing birthday emails to grandma.

Re:More political redirection

[mysidia]

This isn't mud slinging. This is technology news about obfuscating forensic evidence in practice on a technology website.

Disk sanitization of destroyed files is also standard in corporate IT with systems containing personal data or highly confidential data to safeguard against hackers recovering data and using for ID theft....

Many people concerned about their privacy want to make sure that files they've deleted stay deleted.

Re:More political redirection

[mysidia]

Here's the problem -- Clinton deleted these emails AFTER they were requested from the House as part of an official investigation. She chose to print out everything she claimed was relevant (probably to avoid giving away metadata in headers, etc.)

In other words, she willingly destroyed information she was required to hand over.

The full Headers and all Metadata are part of the Record and part of the E-mail; If you are requested to hand over the e-mails: you have no right to exclude or remove headers, even if your standard e-mail software does not normally display the headers when you are reading the message.

Re:More political redirection

[DaHat]

I prefer option 3, they are pointing out the peculiarity that, given all the other shit she's pulled, in this one instance, she chose to follow best practices.

"Your Honor, just because my client was in the vicinity of the shooting, drove to a near by store to buy bleach & laundry detergent, then drove home to wash his supposedly blood covered clothes, allegedly scrubbed gunshot residue from his hands, randomly decided to meticulously clean several of his firearms in no way demonstrates any consciousness of guilt, instead just best practices with regards to laundry and firearm maintenance"

Yeah, see how that works.

Re:More political redirection

[DaHat]

Depending on the circumstances (such as happening after a subpoena) it's called consciousness of guilt.

A great example of this is if you happen to use a firearm (you claim) in self defense, flee the scene, and not immediately report the incident to police, you are going to have a very difficult time mounting a self-defense case as your actions after the fact suggest you knew you did wrong.

good!

[markhahn]

Why are we criticizing good IT practice? There is no logic to the "if you have nothing to hide, you will perform IT poorly". In fact, this implies that Clinton's email server might have actually been secure, assuming they paid as much attention to best practice back then, too.

Very fuzzy thinking.

[aussersterne]

We are talking about two different things here. Secure retention and secure deletion.

Clinton was very cavalier about secure retention.
She was apparently very serious about secure deletion.
And her argument is that the things retained with poor security were those of state, while those deleted with apparently deliberate security were personal.

One could easily thus infer that she wasn't particularly concerned about protecting the secrets of state, but was very concerned about ensuring that her own secrets never saw the light of day. Whether or not that's the case is another matter, but you're conflating a whole several things together here that are in fact conceptually separate—retention, deletion, national, personal.

Re:Really

[Pfhorrest]

Unless you live in a swing state, voting for Clinton or Trump IS throwing your vote away. The only way most voters can make any difference is by voting third party. It won't affect who wins this election, but then neither would voting a major party. It will, however, influence party policy the the choice of candidates next election.

Re:More political redirection

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Yoga bridesmaid pr0n? Here we come.

Re:More political redirection

[LoverOfJoy]

Except that we know there were a lot of emails that were not personal but work related that she deleted because they were found on other coworkers' email accounts but not on hers. How many other (non-personal) emails she deleted but we haven't been able to recover (maybe sent to foreign entities) we may never know.

Re:Really

[MrSteveSD]

"So I'm afraid I must repeat (and I take no pleasure in saying this, believe me) your only three options this election are Trump, Clinton, or throwing your vote away."

If you vote for someone you believe in, your vote is never thrown away. They may not win, but people will see how much support they get, and that can lead to more support next time. You are right though, that FPTP is a poor system. It's particularly poor when it comes to electing presidents because (as far as I understand it), it is not possible for two candidates to combine their votes in any way, unlike parties which can combine their votes and form a coalition. The upshot of this is that people like Bernie Sanders won't risk standing as an independent for risk of splitting the left wing vote. You could have a system where candidates can pledge to transfer their votes to another candidate in the event they fail to secure enough votes themselves. It could bring an end to the endless oscillation between Republican and Democrat presidents.

Damn Lies

[Anna Merikin]

Which code (law scheme) are you talking about? Being in the Navy, the sailor in question was under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the rules of which are very different than for private citizens. For example, the US Constitution does not apply, except when the Supreme Court intervenes, which is rarely.

Even as Secretary of State, Ms. Clinton was a private citizen, under different laws.

Re:More political redirection

[AK Marc]

The order of events given in TFA and those posting here filling in the gaps, seems to indicate a timing where she was asked to take a close look at her emails for Benghazi, then she wiped unrelated (possibly classified) emails, then completed her requirements with Benghazi, having 100% fulfilled her legal responsibilities into that investigation, then a new, separate investigation started into emails, after they were wiped.

The car analogy would be, you went mudding in your car. Someone reported that you did so illegally on private land. While investigating that, you notice your other car is dirty. You have it cleaned while the first is off being investigated. Then someone sees your receipt for getting your car cleaned, and claims you were guilty the whole time, and that you cleaned your car is proof you did the same thing elsewhere in the second car, but wanted to hide it.

Re:More political redirection

[lsatenstein]

This isn't mud slinging. This is technology news about obfuscating forensic evidence in practice on a technology website.

Your statement is mudslinging.

Whether the secure wipe was used as a simple matter of Best Practice, or was done for Nefarious reasons, is not known. So when the article makes judgements such as "When you're using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see." it becomes a political mudslinging story.
I don't personally use this software, but I personally always securely wipe any drive which I'm done using. Even if there's nothing on there, even if it only contains "yoga emails" or etc.

The disturbing thing to me is that this article is all but using the "If you have nothing to hide, you wouldn't use secure wipe methods" line of bullshit. Using strong encryption, secure wipe software, etc. should not be allowed to be seen as a "shady" or "suspicious" activity- it should rather be seen as the Intelligent and Normal way of doing things.

You can be fairly certain that the FBI part-timer or other consultants who set up the Clinton server(s)s incorporated bitbleach or wipedisk in their backup procedures. The Clintons are not CS graduates, but relied on their computer support staff for maintenance.

Privacy in her level of government representation surely required such a tactic.

Re:More political redirection

[siamesevodka]

I don't know if you can say the lawyers were doing a good job of protecting her.By their actions alone this could be argued obstruction of justice. Your not doing a good job of protecting anybody if you choose to obstruct by deleting the evidence. You are speculating that she had nothing seriously wrong on that server, but by deleting you eliminate the chance for discovery.There is just to much linkage between the Clinton Foundation and the Office of Secretary of State. The conflict between these two entities being run through a server in her sole control without any safeguards until after the fact [bleachbit] is like closing the gate after the horse got out. I think there is a pretty strong case for an obstruction charge and not a misdemeanor one.

To Quote Patton: Every God Damn Day

[tmjva]

Yes I set bleachbit to run after boot when I turn it on every day.

Not because I care about any emails. It the crazy 100MB of crap browsers leave behind from the previous day. I don't bother to shred, just want to free the space. I guess it improves performance too.

Yes it's probably pointless when you have multi-GB of space. It is because I remember HP7920 disc drives the size of a dishwashers with 50MB disc platters.

Re:More political redirection

[richieb]

Wouldn't any email she sent/received from the State Department be also archived on SD servers? You can delete emails from your outbox, but they don't disappear from my inbox.
So any official emails must be available in State Department archives.

Were her servers ever hacked?

[BrianMahoney1357]

Maybe I missed it but I can't remember reading that her servers were hacked. If that's the case, maybe she was on to something. Who would think to look for private servers? I'm thinking that she did it for security, not for illicit activities. If they were never hacked, it worked. Besides that, who set up her servers? Pretty damn sure Hillary didn't do it on her own. Whoever set her system up also had access to all of those emails. There must have been at least one back door. Are there copies of the missing emails somewhere? Having her own servers isn't the problem, from my point of view. Who set them up and who might have backed up those drives is what I see as the big deal about all of this. I'd want to check every person who knew about them and every person who helped her create/wipe/use the servers. If there was anything in the emails, that's pretty good fodder for blackmail and influencing her decisions later on.

Re:More political redirection

[AthanasiusKircher]

Yes, I'm assuming that's how the FBI must have recovered a lot of the "missing" ones. Given how the server was wiped, I'm not sure what their other source would be.

Political privilege

[ebvwfbw]

Nobody seems to be mentioning that if the FBI wanted any of our E-mail servers, we wouldn't be asked so politely and we wouldn't be allowed to turn it over when we damn well pleased. They would probably be there at 4 AM, break the door down, shoot the dogs, trample over the children's toys, they may shoot you or at the very least rough you up, put your kids in handcuffs. They'd also take whatever the hell they wanted. Including that 1970s Coleco football game that hasn't even been turned on in decades, after all, it's a computer... sort of. Take whatever they wanted. I understand that can even be silverware. Actual silverware, not the plated crap. Then you might get it back some day. When they're good and ready, maybe.

You can bet that there wouldn't be any FBI agent testifying that you were just very very careless, or any of the horseshit that they said. I don't know anyone that actually believed she should not be in jail. Where it any of us that did anything like she did, they would be at the trial - hang 'em, hang 'em high. There is no doubt, we have a mountain of evidence. Convict and sleep well at night knowing you convicted someone justly. We'd never get out.

Re:Really

[AthanasiusKircher]

So I'm afraid I must repeat (and I take no pleasure in saying this, believe me) your only three options this election are Trump, Clinton, or throwing your vote away.

Thankfully, someone has found a third option. Don't want to bring in the Trump apocalypse but hate voting for Clinton? Pair up with an "anti-Hillary" voter and negate each other while throwing your support to a candidate you'd prefer!

Trump trumps this

[bobbutts]

I'd care if there were a viable choice, but Trump is the worst candidate in my lifetime and it's not even close.

Re:More political redirection

[MercTech]

It isn't mud slinging to point out that an average Joe who did what Hillary perpetrated would be prosecuted and jailed by now,
A> Use of private email for official business is against federal regulations.
B> Erasing official emails in violation of data retention requirements is a violation of federal regulations.
C> Using private emails to circumvent security requirements of official email servers is against federal regulations.
    Face it, if Hillary were not part of the privileged elite; she would have been in jail a year ago.

Re:More political redirection

[Coren22]

https://benghazi.house.gov/sit...

So, in your mind, deleting emails under a congressional subpoena is normal practice and it is out of the norm to fault Hillary for doing it?

I work in the field you describe, and I gotta tell you, I wouldn't dare run that utility on a mail server after a subpoena was submitted for the data.

Re:Really

[Wraithlyn]

Fair enough. I respect your opinion.

My point though, is that there are plenty of arguments of the "Anybody who reads this stuff and votes for TRUMP is a moron" variety too.

It's too simplistic to just say "candidate X is bad so don't vote for them". Because they're all bad.

Re:Really

[Wraithlyn]

That's actually brilliant.

Who knows, maybe social technology can solve this logjam.

Re:Really

[JustNiz]

You're right they're all bad, however bad is relative.
I would contend that Hilary is obviously worse than Trump because she is blatantly corrupt (primary mechanism being the Clinton foundation), habitually lies on a level bordering psychopathy, and is not even eligible to get security clearance necessary to be president.
http://thehill.com/policy/nati...
http://www.nationalreview.com/...
  At least one source has evidence that in fact she never had actually passed security clearance.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-g...

She has already also clearly sold out the US many times to enrich herself/the Clinton foundation. Do some research for yourself into exactly why middle eastern countries like Saudi are donating millions to the Clinton Foundation.

Trump is a clueless pompous asshat but at least he isn't blatantly corrupt career criminal, and also I beleive he's clearly more of a patriot that Clinton, in that he would be far more likely to put the interests of the US first than she ever would, given she's already provably sold it out for her own benefit many times.

Re: More political redirection

[Rakarra]

We hate her because she belongs in prison, not running for President.

Funny! Still waiting for those amazing revelations that will finally tell us about these horrible crimes she's supposedly been doing.
Still waiting.. still waiting.
Thank God the election is over in two months, but I'm not looking forward to the following four years of the same bullshit.

Hc k toán online

[G cng nghip]

lop hoc ke toan tai Bac Giang uy tín
<a href="http://ketoantonghop.top/trung-tam-dao-tao-ke-toan-thuc-te-tai-hai-duong/">lop hoc ke toan tai Hai Duong</a> uy t&#237;n
<a href="http://ketoantonghop.top/khoa-hoc-ke-toan-tong-hop-thuc-te-o-dong-nai/">lop hoc ke toan tai Dong Nai</a> uy t&#237;n
<a href="http://ketoantonghop.top/trung-tam-dao-tao-ke-toan-thuc-te-tai-bac-ninh/">lop hoc ke toan tai Bac Ninh</a> uy t&#237;n
<a href="http://ketoantonghop.top/trung-tam-ke-toan-tai-le-chan-hai-phong/">lop hoc ke toan tai Le Chan Hai Phong</a> uy t&#237;n
<a href="http://ketoantonghop.top/trung-tam-dao-tao-ke-toan-thuc-te-tai-vung-tau/">lop hoc ke toan tai Vung Tau</a> uy t&#237;n
<a href="http://ketoantonghop.top/trung-tam-dao-tao-ke-toan-thuc-te-tai-quang-ninh/">lop hoc ke toan tai Quang Ninh</a> uy t&#237;n
<a href="http://ketoantonghop.top/dich-vu-thanh-lap-doanh-nghiep-o-thu-duc/">dich vu thanh lap cong ty tai tphcm</a> uy t&#237;n
<a href="http://ketoantonghop.top/cac-dich-vu-ke-toan-ho-tro-doanh-nghiep/">d&#7883;ch v&#7909; k&#7871; to&#225;n</a> uy t&#237;n
<a href="http://ketoantonghop.top/gioi-thieu-ve-ke-toan-ha-noi/">c&#244;ng ty k&#7871; to&#225;n h&#224; n&#7897;i</a> uy t&#237;n
<a href="http://ketoantonghop.top/dich-vu-ke-toan-tron-goi/">d&#7883;ch v&#7909; k&#7871; to&#225;n thu&#7871; tr&#7885;n g&#243;i</a> uy t&#237;n
<a href="http://ketoantonghop.top/dich-vu-lam-bao-cao-tai-chinh/">d&#7883;ch v&#7909; b&#225;o c&#225;o t&#224;i ch&#237;nh cu&#7889;i n&#259;m</a> uy t&#237;n

Hoc ke toan thuc hanh

[G cng nghip]

hoc ke toan tai Bac Giang uy tín hoc ke toan tai Hai Duong uy tín hoc ke toan tai Dong Nai uy tín hoc ke toan tai Bac Ninh uy tín hoc ke toan tai Le Chan Hai Phong uy tín hoc ke toan tai Vung Tau uy tín hoc ke toan tai Quang Ninh uy tín dch v kê khai thu hàng tháng uy tín dch v k toán giá r uy tín công ty lut uy tín dich vu ke toan tron goi uy tín dch v báo cáo tài chính uy tín