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Mike Pence Used His AOL Email For Indiana State Business -- and It Got Hacked (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Vice President Mike Pence used a personal AOL email account to conduct sensitive state business -- including issues related to homeland security -- as the governor of Indiana, according to a report from The Indianapolis Star. Not only that, but Pence's email account was also compromised last year, the report reveals. Because personal email accounts are not subject to same types of public transparency laws, it's up to the official and his or her transition staff to hand over any sensitive state-related messages for archiving. Emails from a state account are automatically stored on state servers and subject to public records requests. Pence's office claims the contents of his personal AOL account used for state business are in fact in the process of being archived. A larger concern, however, is security. By using a private AOL account to conduct sensitive state matters, Pence could have exposed sensitive state business. In the hacking incident last year, Pence's email account was compromised by a scammer who used it to try and extort money from members of his contact list by claiming Pence and his wife were stranded in the Philippines, The Indianapolis Star reports. This hack didn't appear to have had been designed specifically to breach Pence's office, which made clear that his AOL account could be compromised by relatively benign breaching techniques designed by spammers and low-level hackers. It is not illegal in Indiana to own and use a personal account while in office, nor is it against the law to handle work-related matters from a personal account -- so long as those emails are in some way archived. However, the Star reports that Pence made no efforts to preserve his AOL emails under after he left office and is only just now doing months after public records requests were first made. "Similar to previous governors, during his time as governor of Indiana, Mike Pence maintained a state email account and a personal email account," reads a statement given to the The Indianapolis Star. "As governor, Mr. Pence fully complied with Indiana law regarding email use and retention. Government emails involving his state and personal accounts are being archived by the state consistent with Indiana law, and are being managed according to Indiana's Access to Public Records Act."
For a moment I thought there's really one area where the Dems are even stupider than the GOP.
The world is in balance again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Fake News would imply the content was incorrect, invented or misleading.
This is not fake news, it happened. There is proof it happened. Just like most of Donald's "fake news" it's not that it's fake, its that he doesn't like it being made public.
Now, what Pence did is NOT illegal. You're not going to see an investigation into it because he hasn't done anything illegal. That doesn't mean it isn't a highly questionable thing to do. It also doesn't wash away the hypocrisy of being part of a ticket whose main selling point was that the main rival was unfit to rule for doing the exact same thing.
Absolutely not illegal what Pence did- but it's not fake news because it was a foolish choice he made and that partially reflects on his fitness to govern, just like it did, as his ticket pointed out, on Hillary's.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
What was the law in respect to Hillary Clinton?
What was the law in respect to Pence?
It's the law that counts. Not private emails.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Sensitive =/= classified.
Remember, Hillary repeatedly justified her use of a private server by claiming she "never sent or received classified material" (later amended to say "never sent classified material", later amended to say "what hard drive backups?")
The FBI investigation into her server did not focus on "sensitive" information, which is not a legal definition. It focused on "classified" information, which is explicitly defined in the statutes she was found to have broken.
Until such evidence that classified information was passed through an unclassified system, this is going to continue to look like the discordant screeching from a panicked and impotent leftist establishment that has been the story du jour of the past few months.
If that were the case, the FBI conclusion would have settled the matter. Also, if that were the case, the rabidity on display would go unexplained. A much simpler explanation exists, the right's outrage machine riled up a bunch of people and it's not going to do so for Pence.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
A large part of Clinton's problems were because her use of private email servers looked like an effort to avoid legally required oversight: avoiding use of any government email account, not depositing government records when she left government service, and only disclosing things when caught. None of those factors look likely in Pence's case, but maybe something will turn up yet.
It's pretty much the same thing. 1. The law in both cases does not forbid using personal email for official business. (It should) Hillary did break State Department regulations, but those are not laws. 2. Both Hillary and Pence probably violated record keeping laws because there is no apparent effort to preserve those emails 3. Both broke public transparency laws by not adding those emails to the public record. Both had to be forced (Hillary by the Senate, Pence by the courts) to provide them to the public. In Hillary's case the emails inadvertently (as concluded by the FBI) contained some classified information. We don't know if Pence's emails contain any classified information but we do know that his email was hacked. So it's pretty much a tie. Both tried to conduct official business and keep it off the record. There should be a strict law against that. All official business should be conducted through official channels, all personal email and social media accounts should be examined periodically. All public records should be published periodically through out the time the person is in office, we shouldn't have to wait until the end of their term to see what they are doing. I would much prefer if all that information is made available in real time but it's probably not realistic for the government to be that transparent.
One compelling difference b/w the 2 - not that it counts to everyone who wants to see a moral equivalence:
- Pence archived all his emails, so any investigator who wants to look into that and draw conclusions is at liberty to do so
- Hilary deleted some 33k emails of hers, after being subpoena'ed to preserve them, including any emails about the Clinton Foundation.
In other words, no cover up attempt in one case, vs a desperate cover up attempt in the other
Trump is using an unsecured phone to send... tweets.
He might also be carrying it in locations/situations that should be secure. For us mere mortals, just carrying an unsecured phone somewhere that classified information MIGHT be discussed is a big no-no. But, his dinner discussion regarding the North Korean missile launch suggests that he's a little lax on privacy, so why should his phones be any different?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.