Clinton Regrets, But Defends, Use of Family Email Server 609
dcblogs writes: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that, in hindsight, her decision to use a private email server to conduct official business was not the best one. But she is defending it and said the system was secure. Clinton, at news conference in New York, said the email server that she used had been set up for former President Bill Clinton. The system had "numerous safeguards" and is on home property protected by the U.S. Secret Service, she said. "There were no security breaches," said Clinton. "I think the use of that server, which started with my husband, proved to be effective and secure," she said. It still remains unclear about just how appropriate Clinton's system was. As a general rule, government IT policies don't give federal employees the option of using their own email accounts to exclusively conduct government business.
As if SMTP were ever secure... (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad irony here is that the Clinton presidency was the first where they had to set up a real email presence, and they hired some really smart people to do it. They did a great job. But that was a long time ago, and things have moved on. So they're getting criticized for using SSL 2.0 for transport security, which is a valid criticism now, but is still better security than most people have. And of course it's not like security on government servers is better. So this is kind of obviously a deliberate attempt to create a fuss over something that really isn't as significant as it's being pumped up to be.
On the plus side, maybe more people will start using strong TLS transport security for their email...
Re:As if SMTP were ever secure... (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion, the security is not the main point. It's a close second but not the main point.
The main point is transparency. Her official emails need to be controlled by some official other than her. So when someone files a FOIA request it can be assigned to a disinterested 3rd party.
Then it gets down to security.
She keeps switching from the segmentation of roles (official, non-official, personal, etc) to the security. She has got to be smart enough to understand that different roles have different requirements and those requirements are NOT based upon whether bad guys can crack her server.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
General Petraus just plead guilty to talking documents home and giving his biographer access to it.
Hillary seems to have taken everything home and given her entire political team/IT/family access to it.
Re:As if SMTP were ever secure... (Score:5, Informative)
General Petraus just plead guilty to talking CLASSIFIED documents home and giving his biographer access to it.
Note that if Hilary knowingly used even a *federal Internet server* to send *classified* emails, she'd be facing jail.
But go ahead and try to muddy the waters, GOP astroturfer.
Re:As if SMTP were ever secure... (Score:4, Insightful)
Note that if Hilary knowingly used...
We will never know now, will we?
Re:As if SMTP were ever secure... (Score:4, Insightful)
General Petraus just plead guilty to talking documents home and giving his biographer access to it.
Hillary seems to have taken everything home and given her entire political team/IT/family access to it.
Nice spin, but there is a large distinction between Petraus' intentionally distributing classified documents (to someone he was sleeping with) and Clinton keeping her unclassified email on a non-government server (and not intentionally sharing it with anyone).
It's also interesting how you refer to one of those individuals formally and one informally.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hillary should offer up her private emails as soon as the Republicans in Congress release all of their private emails.
If you have credible evidence that any of them did government business on such systems, I would agree.
This is not some petty-assed partisan issue, so please stop worshipping.
Re:What difference does it make? (TM) (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org] , though in that case the email was hosted by the Republican National Committee.
I'm generally a Clinton supporter, and I'm really unhappy with the email thing. But it is the same as has been done before and will be done again.
Not to worry though, I'm sure that we'll have EVEN MORE investigations into this than we had into Benghazi, with the exact same results.
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Are you touched in the head? Seriously? Bush did it, so let's not worry. Wrong is wrong, Bush got away with it, fine. Let's not let another person get away with. Particularly, the person who called the Bush administration corrupt and full of cronyism over their email scandal (she did this in 2007 btw).
Re:What difference does it make? (TM) (Score:5, Insightful)
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There is the political PR side of all this, you are correct.
To you and me she looks stupid because we generally understand what E-mail is and how it works and recognize the smoke and mirror trick she's attempting. But to the less technical, her story is plausible enough to be accepted, even by non-rabid supporters, especially given that those who are already in lock step with her will be repeating the lie as often and as loudly as they can. It's how the left has painted the Republicans as racist and havin
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A moral dilemma is when you're trying to figure out whether to kill one person to save three, not when you are trying to figure out where to store your email. That's an IT decision. Just because the right thing to do is clear to you in the abstract doesn't mean it would even be clear to you in practice. How would you feel about carrying two phones? How would you feel about having your private email on a government server? When you read science fiction, does the character with the smart phone carry
Re:As if SMTP were ever secure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hillary was a Senator, front-row during the Bush Email Fiasco. She knew what was expected and knew it was a liability should it become public. She was also fully aware of the advantages as a future candidate for higher office – Namely, sanitizing rights to her official record if needed.
Re:As if SMTP were ever secure... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the job required it, no problems. As a personal choice, no. Note that Hillary had the choice - she didn't have to be SecState if she found the job conditions too onerous. But obviously she liked the power more than she disliked the job conditions, and intended to ignore the job conditions anyway.
And this is why, when I worked for the government, I didn't do private email from work.
Re:As if SMTP were ever secure... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you read science fiction, does the character with the smart phone carry two of them so that she can have access to her secure stuff and her regular stuff? Hell no.
Science fiction != real life. But that aside, what's up with the whole lame "two phones" argument? Most people who have smartphones know you can have two email clients connecting to two different accounts on two different services on a single device.
It's not a "moral dilemma" to a Clinton (Score:3, Insightful)
Laws are for the little people, not them.
They believe, and act, as though they are above the law. Lying, perjury, obstruction of justice.
There's no dilemma if you feel that laws simply don't apply to you...
Re:It's not a "moral dilemma" to a Clinton (Score:5, Informative)
Laws are for the little people, not them.
The Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014 became law on November 26, 2014. Clinton's final day as secretary was February 1, 2013.
The "Law" that everyone keeps claiming that she broke wasn't effective until a year and a half after she left office.
There was absolutely no legal requirement at the time of her tenure to use a government e-mail. Furthermore, she retroactively complied with the records portion of the law by turning over any business related e-mails she had on her home server archive.
Also, previous Secretaries of State, like Colin Powell, used personal email as well. In his case, they didn't even archive it so many of the emails are lost. We'll never have access to his electronic discusssions about, say, the decisions leading for him to give a speech at the United Nations calling for the Invasion of Iraq.
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The was no law restricting her from using a private email as long as she NEVER sent or received classified emails on it (a separate law prevents that) although State dept. guidelines in place before Obama even took office strictly prohibited it.
There is and always has been a law requiring all federal records (her emails as SoS are by definition federal records) be sent to national archives. The 2014 amendment didn't add or change that requirement in any meaningful way (except change the time limit you had
Re:It's not a "moral dilemma" to a Clinton (Score:4, Informative)
The Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014 became law on November 26, 2014. Clinton's final day as secretary was February 1, 2013.
So? How does that excuse her from existing federal regulations? Section 1236.22 of the 2009 NARA regulation clearly says, "Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system."
... pass along the data to be reviewed? No. She used employees of her family enterprise to print out 55,000 pages of email for them to have to manually wade through (another stalling tactic), and she and only she knows the criteria used to separate those from the 30,000+ messages she says she deleted before hand. Anyone who buys her laughable narrative on this topic is a fool or (more likely, since nobody's that dumb) one of her shills.
She went out of her way to avoid that requirement. She made no provision to have her official emails mirrored over to State's mandated archives. Nor did she lift a finger to do so when she left office. That violates both the letter and the spirit of that crystal clear legal requirement. And when investigators in congress and other FOIA requesters finally understood why her stonewalling was so effective (there WERE no records at State for them to request, because she prevented that from happening!), she did what
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How does manually sending her official emails over to State archives not satisfy the letter of " ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system."?
Because she didn't do it while she was holding that office, didn't do it when she left the office (despite the requirement that, as a federal employee, she turn over and all pieces of federal property and all records, and sign a sworn oath that she did so), and she only DID produce (on purposefully annoying hardcopies, minus all of the meta data, etc) whatever she felt like (we'll never know the criteria) after deleting half of it, once she got busted in the particulars of her stonewalling and foiling FOIA
Re:As if SMTP were ever secure... (Score:4, Insightful)
We know 100% positively for certain that State Department email systems are cracked, therefore Clinton's personal email server cannot possibly be less secure than State Dept email servers. Maybe the security cert was generic, or whatever, but it is literally impossible for her email to be less secure than the alternative.
No it doesn't. (Score:3, Insightful)
"It still remains unclear about just how appropriate Clinton's system was."
The most ridiculous part of the summary. Except for the whole "convenience" pseudo-argument. At best this excuse suggests that Clinton is willing to prioritize personal convenience over transparency and accountability, which is probably not a great look for someone who is expected to announce a presidential campaign in the near future.
Re:No it doesn't. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No it doesn't. (Score:5, Informative)
Physical security is still an important aspect of overall security.
Re:No it doesn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
She is on record saying she didn't like email because it could be audited. Since that recording she apparently figured out that she could self host.
That is almost certainly why she was doing it.
And added to that, many members of the government are being encouraged to use text messages instead of emails etc because they can't be audited.
There is a concerted effort throughout government to communicate in manners that cannot be audited.
All of which is against the spirit of the law regardless of whether it is against the letter of the law.
Its the fucking IRS issue all over again. They said they didn't have her emails or they were destroyed. Turns out that the IRS emails were actually backed up the whole time and the IT department that had them had received no queries for them at any time. Revealing that the IRS in fact never looked for them.
Its just deceit deceit deceit.
And for those that will reflexively say this is just a republican thing... it isn't. This is fucking bullshit regardless of what party is doing it. Stop being such shills and realize that if you accept this then the republicans are going to start doing it. And then MAYBE you might grasp why this is unacceptable.
Re:No it doesn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Like phone calls, or meeting another official at a bar.
I just don't think emails should be regarded this way, they're far too casual and they don't really reflect the official acts of people in the way that a true "record" does (in the sense that someone in the 1960s would understand the term "government record.") Emails should be afforded the same leniency as phone calls -- maybe we keep them for a little while, but people, even people in government, should have the right to delete them.
Sometimes I wonder if transparency advocates won't be happy until they've stapled a Google Glass onto the head of every government employee recording a 24 hour stream of their every sight and utterance. The problem with this approach is that the only people who actually use government transparency are other politicians, mainly to dig up dirt, and lobbyists -- it makes their job so much easier when they can confirm that a politician remains bought. Beyond a certain point transparency only benefits the loud and wealthy, it makes discretion impossible and it subjugates elected officials to the whim of anyone that runs a PR operation.
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It is no kind of fallacy. it is a pre-emptive argument.
It only applies to you if you adopt it.
Don't say it is a republican thing and it won't apply to you.
Think of it like putting land mines on a part of the field before an engagement. It is area denial. :)
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That's fine. So you agree it shouldn't be done. Or should the next republican administration filter all federal government correspondence through the RNC?
Choose.
Is this okay or not? You can't have it both ways.
I'm not defending the republicans. I'm pointing out that your girl is a slime ball. She's a slime ball regardless of anyone else.
Clear to me (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Clueless sycophants will defend politicians anyways. She's Ms. Clinton after all. Naturally she gets a pass.
You mean the same way that clueless sycophants will attack opposing politicians? She's Hillary Rodham Fucking Clinton after all. Naturally she is a demon woman trying to destroy the American way and cover the world in pantsuits.
...I don't really like her myself, but this is ridiculous.
Re: (Score:3)
You are probably at work using work email to put this bullshit up on slashdot
You might be on to something there. All these years, I've been using a web browser, completely unaware that I could post on Slashdot using email. Please elaborate on how this works.
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I refuse to crucify one of mine for a minor transgression when yours walk away with treason time and time again.Simple as that.
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You couldn't have described the fucked up state of American politics and government any more succinctly if you tried.
Re:Clear to me (Score:5, Interesting)
I get the impression that the Secretary of State likely deals with sensitive materials at work from time to time. I similarly get the impression that, if somebody with access to classified material were discovered to have taken a huge pile of it home and stored it in their garage, they might face some rather unpleasant questions and some...'career limitations' in the future.
Even if she is being 100% forthright with the National Archives, and absolutely everything there is on the up and up; in what sense didn't she have a big pile of classified documents just stored at home under who-knows-what security protocols implemented by god-knows-who? Are you actually allowed to do that? Do only little contractors get squished? What's the deal?
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Re:Clear to me (Score:5, Funny)
On record at Wikileaks, that is.
Re:Clear to me (Score:4, Interesting)
Ms. Clinton can use her private server for anything personal anytime she wants.
Well, I don't quite agree, because at that level it's hard to segregate the personal from the professional -- indeed that's what the concern is here, that there might have been some illicit connection between her personal life (the Clinton foundation) and her work as Secretary of State.
But to be fair, since Secretary Kerry is apparently the first Secretary of State with an official email account, the same questions can be raised about Condaleeza Rice; I'll give Powell and Albright a pass because both being born in 1937 they belong to a generation where senior administrators had all their correspondence handled by "a girl".
This suggests an unquestionably fair and non-partisan solution to this controversy. Both Clinton AND Rice should turn over ALL their electronic correspondence for the years they were in office to the State Department for preservation. Any correspondence which they deem personal and private would remained permanently sealed unless there was court order opening them or until they themselves choose to open them. There would be no fishing expeditions through their private correspondence without the equivalent of a warrant.
This would not only be perfectly non-partisan, it would maintain the same or greater degree of discoverability as if they'd used official email accounts, as they both should have.
Its Not the Server (Score:5, Insightful)
It was secure, alright (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It was secure, alright (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever else Hillary Clinton is, she is quite adept at the art of being in government.
Since this system was designed for her husband, she was aware of its advantages (and disadvantages). It was not used instead of the official gov't email on a whim. It just smacks of entitlement....... Maybe you don't know who I think I am!
Re:It was secure, alright (Score:5, Insightful)
Also her claim is she did not want to carry multiple devices. What device was she using that only allows only one email account or just one app to check that one account?
I've had multiple accounts on my phones since my first smart phone. I can switch accounts pretty simply in the same app as well as use other apps specifically for the other accounts with different defaults for each. I don't buy her excuse and seriously question the mental abilities of government official that high up if its too dificult.
FOIA (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me the reasons for her decision to use a private server for government business are pretty simple. It means that she (and her staff) get to decide which documents should be forked over in response to FOIA requests.
In a just world this server would now at an independent expert for thorough inspection.
Same thing for congressional oversight. Case in point: Benghazi.
Also, it keeps all of her correspondence out of the official protocols. She wants to delete some stuff? No problem. That would be more complicated if she had used her government-issued means of communication.
I seem to remember from earlier incidents (like the hack of Sarah Palin's personal mail) that this is *not legal*. For good reasons.
Finally, it is basically a given that some of her correspondence contains sensitive, if not outright secret, information. If someone like Thomas Drake gets threatened with ridiculous punishment for having *un*classified information on his home PC, surely this here should land Mrs Clinton in a whole lot of trouble. But, well, who am I kidding, right?
Re:FOIA (Score:4, Insightful)
Millions of US citizens have work emails and the sense not to use their private email for business unless they have no other choice. This is an issue that even non-technical people should be able to understand.
Re: (Score:3)
None at all, actually, other than some choice bits courtesy of Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.
By the way, it just occurred to me: wasn't a young Hilary part of the legal team advising the articles of impeachment back when Nixon was caught erasing tapes? The irony.
Clinton memo says don't use personal emails (Score:3, Informative)
Section 3 (d), Avoid conducting official Department business from your personal e-mail accounts.
So she was aware of these problems in 2011 and did everything she told other people not to do anyway?
http://www.foxnews.com/politic... [foxnews.com]
On a side note, if she wins the nomination (Score:5, Interesting)
it will begin the death-rattle of the Democratic party. Progressives see through her like a dirty window.
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Server Security Assurances (Score:2, Interesting)
Setting asside the legality of not using government-run email for government business (which is a clear violation of the records act), I have one comment:
Ordinarily, there is no way one could argue that a server sitting in somebody's home was more secure than one sitting in a data center owned and managed by a Federal agency. Then the IRS thing happened, showing an incompetency in their IT department that is deserving of much public ridicule and a proverbial "you'll never work in this field again." After
Not up to their usual standards (Score:5, Interesting)
If the Clintons are known for anything, it is their ability to craft a message and stay on message. Remember, "It's the economy, stupid!"? The entire group is known for being able to quickly respond with a wall of on-message response to any crisis.
Yet in this case we had radio silence for a week, followed by this evasive and strange defense.
She repeated this a couple of times. It surprises me that none of the nerds here have picked up on this. She didn't want to have to carry two phones, so she used her personal email account. Nobody at her press conference thought to raise their hand and say "Uhm, excuse me..... but, you can have more than one email account on your phone."
We have Bill Clinton's people claiming that he's only sent two emails in his life just a couple of days ago, then she goes out and claims that the email server was set up for him, and she had to delete more than half of the email on the server because it was personal, stuff between her and her husband. Yikes. This is not the Clinton machine we are used to.
In the 90's the message was tight, and if facts were uncovered that contradicted the message then the whole team changed messages at the same time. They need to step up their game....
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In the 90's the message was tight, and if facts were uncovered that contradicted the message then the whole team changed messages at the same time. They need to step up their game....
No need for that anymore. People have learned to accept the message no matter what.
Printing out the e-mails (Score:5, Insightful)
Printed texts take more time to search, and they do not contain all the internal meta-data. Perhaps too she just wanted to show her middle finger to the people who asked for her e-mails.
This is honorable behavior?
Isn't it good (Score:2)
But she is defending it and said the system was secure.
Isn't it good that she knows more about web security than the computer consultants who rated it [zicos.com]
A Secr. of State That Never Worked in WDC? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tell me how supposedly one of the most important jobs in the country can be run by a person who's communications are separated from her official office?
When in WDC, she can't refer to incoming email from staff who are just around the corner or down the hall? Someone calls from London and says "look at the email I just sent." and Hillary has to say what? Maybe "I'll look at it tomorrow when I get home." What the hell is that for a high level functioning government cabinet position?
So she must have had official emails for HIllary being sent addressed to some lower person in the Secretary's office (probably clippy.)
This sounds to me like the perfect way to raise funds for a personal project from governments around the world, and eventually destroy the hard drive.
I know what you mean, Hillary (Score:3, Funny)
I know what you mean, Hillary. I didn't want to carry two devices either. I actually managed to get THREE email accounts on a SINGLE phone, but, whoah! It sure weighed a lot. I could hardly carry it around with me. That's why I deleted 30,000 emails too. They were just making my accounts too heavy!
Why now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hillary on e-mail, in 2000 (Score:4, Informative)
Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/watch-an-old-home-movie-from-2000-where-hillary-clinton-said#.re86K3GRo [buzzfeed.com]
When she became Secretary of State, she had to use e-mail. Hence, she got her own private server (at home where it was under protection of the 4th Amendment).
Regret? (Score:3, Insightful)
She doesn't regret using personal email. She regrets getting CAUGHT using personal email.
Set up by her husband when he was in office? (Score:3)
Yeah! I'm sure a server from the mid 90s is VERY secure! I hope they applied all their updates!
As always, dodging the salient issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Security is obviously a concern, but the reason that these rules regarding emails exist is for oversight. Government email servers aren't under the control of the politicians using them, and that mitigates the risk of spoliation of evidence. With that in mind, defending her decision on the basis of security is non sequitur. The ridiculousness of her defense becomes more apparent through hyperbole: Yes, I ate babies, but safeguards were in place to make sure those babies were free of bloodborne pathogens.
UNCLASS emails (Score:4)
Clinton said she never sent classified emails from her server. However, she never said that she didn't receive classified emails on her server. As anyone in the government industry knows, when you get classified emails on an unclass system you have to "sterilize" your servers.
Did she do that? Probably not.
I guess that's why she was such a crappy SecState - everyone's intelligence services were reading her emails.
"Family Email Server" (Score:3)
Like it is some weird variant of MS SBS "for families".
You know, the email server that doesn't let bad things come through...
Nice bob and weave, Hillary (Score:3)
Typical politician. The fact of the matter is that it was a violation of the Federal Records Act. Clinton, by federal law, was required to use a State department email address for all official business. She not only didn't use the state department email - she didn't even have one set up. Since it is policy to do so she must have expressly ordered it NOT to be set up.
Next point - how do we know which emails were deleted and which were not? Remember - Hillary controls the server. Had it been on a government server there would have been records and such. Do we really want to set a precedent where politicians get to decide what records get kept and which ones don't? Remember, Richard Nixon tried this with the Watergate tapes. He didn't want to turn over the tapes themselves, just edited transcripts of the tapes.
Thirdly - other government officials, including Obama, knew she was doing this. She was Secretary of State for 4 years. You can be sure that they traded emails somewhere along the way. Wasn't Obama the one that promised a more transparent government?
Finally - why would someone go to the trouble and expense to set up their own domain and email server? Something to hide perhaps? Now I don't know that she was up to no good but it sure smells fishy. And her track record of slippery half-truths sure don't help.
Does she really not get it? Looks that way... (Score:3)
Whether or not the system was secure is but one concern. Whether the system was transparent and accountable to the authority she worked for as Secretary of State on behalf of the American People is at least an equal, if not greater concern.
Ugh! (Score:5, Informative)
She's saying its secure when we know it was using self signed certs, exposed OWA, and I saw something this morning that said Qualys scanned it and it was riddled with vulnerabilities. She says there were no breaches, but does she have the extensive instrumentation required to detect a breach, especially one perpetrated by government sponsored entities who would absolutely have an interest in the contents of her email?
It's just so frustrating to see the ignorance, and then to read comments from people defending her. You can say the timing is politically motivated. I personally think this is the State Department's fault much moreso than hers...but don't tell me that it was a.) legal, b.) a good idea, c.) secure, d.) in any way, shape or form compliant with even the most basic security frameworks out there.
I wish I could just not see anything else about this issue, but it's like a magnet for my eyes.
Who destroys all their personal correspondence? (Score:3)
Re:In other news (Score:5, Informative)
It specifically is illegal actually.
And the destruction of government records is a felony.
news at 11. ;)
Her email records were sopeniaed by congress in the middle of that bengazi thing and they were never provided because the state department didn't have them despite by law having a right to have them.
If government officials can use private email servers to host government emails then there is no way to know who said what to whom when. The whole point was to have the records with a trusted third party that could be audited.
Because she self hosted her own email there is no such third party and we have to "trust" that she didn't delete government emails.
Given that there are gaps of MONTHS in the records she provided there is no way that she didn't unless she didn't send a government email despite being the head of the state department for months.
How fucking likely is that?
I'm not saying she's going to jail. She's too powerful and her political allies are too powerful. That doesn't mean she isn't as of this moment almost certainly a felon.
Re: In other news (Score:5, Interesting)
This sort of thing isn't unprecedented, the Bush White House had a policy of issuing important staffers two Blackberries [wikipedia.org], one that had a whitehouse.gov email and one that had a gop.org email, and using both systems indifferently for communication.
I sorta don't care in either place, at least from an ethics perspective, since all emails ever seem to do is trigger dopey years-long investigations and pseudo-controversies about the parsing of language and people going off half-cocked. Case in point: Benghazi.
On the other hand, I'd rather not people like this be president of the United States. I think Lindsey Graham has the right idea, if you're an official person, NEVER USE EMAIL. Write official documents carefully, or just call someone.
Re: In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
However we are reminded time and time again no law was broken, what was broken was procedure, if one can not follow a simple procedure set out by their employer their actions are questionable and their motive becomes dubious.
Re: In other news (Score:5, Interesting)
Destruction or attempting to hide federal records (which all SoS emails are) has always been illegal (since the 50's or so). The more recent law changes were more to clarify how records were to be archived (set a max 20 day limit on external records being transferred to your agencies official archiving system for example).
Her use of a private email account is also not illegal although it violated a State policy in place before she took office, but even when using private email all records are required to be turned over for archiving.
So she's not in violation of the 20 day law, since it was passed after her time in office, but she is in violation of the original law requiring all records be archived. Her only defense was that it took her team 2 years to finalize their archiving plan and they were just about to start when they happened to get subpoenaed. So far she has not shown any archiving plan was ever in place.
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Nah, you see the problem was that they didn't really pay attention to what business was running on either blackberry, or they intentionally used the non-government emails for business that was clearly government-related ("we should fire these US Attorneys") but they didn't want captured by the Records Act.
You see, when you give people two email systems it doesn't address the ethical problem, since you're now
Re: In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have a problem with that.
The American public has been doing that for how long now, and without knowledge it was going on?
Re: In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as we know, ONLY Hillary Clinton used her family email server. The rest of her staff used government mail servers. Therefore any correspondents between her and her staff or the president is recorded on an official email server anyway.
I'm not saying that I agree with her using her own personal email server, but I also don't think this "controversy" rises to the level of me really giving a rat's ass about. Actually it rises to the level of "She should have known better... but meh".
What does concern me is that the right decided to use this low grade political material so early that it will be forgotten by the time the election season actually hits full stride. So the more important question is what's going on that requires the gullible media's distraction on something as trivial as email usage by a retired secretary of state?
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Re: In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: In other news (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the part about "I deleted all the unimportant emails. Trust me" part?
I can't wait to hear what happens when forensics gets to their machines and hopefully finds tons and tons of illegal activity.
No person should ever be allowed to do this, especially someone who doesn't understand the impact of doing this from a technology perspective and only from a political one.
Re:Clinton followed a Presidential trend... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Hey - Nixon engaged in obstruction of justice, too! We have precedent!"
Let's see how that one goes over.
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So the defense now is "Bush did bad things, too?" "Hey - Nixon engaged in obstruction of justice, too! We have precedent!" Let's see how that one goes over.
Agreed. And to be fair, apparently the Bush administration at least tried to do the right thing by issuing people a government email account and a secure device on which to use it. Not only that, but considering the Clinton claim that Bill only sent two emails the entire time he was in office, then the Bush administration was the very first to try to figure out how to do email right.
I'm not trying to excuse the Bush administration if staffers failed to do email correctly, but the overall point is this: it'
Re:Clinton followed a Presidential trend... (Score:5, Informative)
What she can't avoid is the memo's she sent out to her own staffers that detailed using private email for public business is a no no.
She even forced out an ambassador in 2012 in part for doing what she did:
http://thefederalist.com/2015/... [thefederalist.com]
The inspector general’s report specifically noted that Gration violated State Department policy by using a private, unsanctioned e-mail service for official business. In its executive summary listing its key judgments against the U.S. ambassador to Kenya who served under Hillary Clinton, the inspector general stated that Gration’s decision to willfully violate departmental information security policies highlighted Gration’s “reluctance to accept clear-cut U.S. Government decisions.” The report claimed that this reluctance to obey governmental security policies was the former ambassador’s “greatest weakness.”
So did she wrongfully remove the ambassador, or did she hold him to a standard she knew she was violating herself?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
sopeniaed
In case it helps in the future:
You probably know a subpoena is a demand with which you'd be penalized if you don't comply. So, a demand under penalty.
The word subpoena comes from "sub", under, (as in submarine), and poena, punishment, (as in penal system or penalty, in sports).
Maybe that will help you with the spelling. :)
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It specifically WAS LEGAL during her tenure as Secretary of State. She's not going to jail because she didn't break any laws. Can we get on to the next conspiracy theory now?
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Sorry, but it was expressly against State Department policy since 2009, she was SoS when one of her underlings got fired for doing the exact same thing in Africa, and the whole thing was very likely against most gov't secrecy regulations considering some of the content that likely got passed around on it.
But, you know, worshippers gonna worship...
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"It specifically is illegal actually."
If that were true, her enemies would quote the law.
Her enemies have not quoted the law.
Therefore it is not illegal, actually.
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To semi-paraphrase her old man: 'It depends on what the meaning of the word 'legal' is...'
While it likely did not violate any specific statutory law, it definitely violated numerous regulations on the matter - regulations that she herself whined about Bush allegedly breaking, and that one of her underlings got fired specifically for during her tenure.
Sorry, but while it may have been technically "legal", it was definitely in violation of regulation, a risk to national security, and definitely sleazy. Presid
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Irony of ironies...
Hillary Clinton once served as a staffer on the Watergate Committee. [wikipedia.org]
You know... the Watergate incident, where former President Richard Nixon was ultimately forced to resign... because he had a personal recording device that had embarrassingly large gaps in the tapes that congress subpoenaed? Yep, that Watergate.
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Re:In other news (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:In other news (Score:4, Informative)
There is still no evidence that any federal laws were broken.
You must not know about the federal records act of 1950 and the national archives and records regulations of 1995. NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) adopted regulations in 1995 which required the preservation of official e-mails created on non-official accounts. The Archivist interpreted the Federal Records Act to apply to e-mail records and further provided that “[a]gencies with access to external electronic mail systems shall ensure that federal records sent or received on these systems are preserved in the appropriate recordkeeping system . . .” So as early as 1995, all federal agencies were required to preserve official e-mails, including those created or maintained on “external electronic mail systems.”
Later NARA regulations merely clarified this requirement. In 2009, after a Government Accountability Office report indicated that certain agencies had lax e-mail practices, the NARA adopted new regulations that provided that any emails created on private e-mail accounts must be preserved. But that regulation merely restated, in perhaps slightly different language, what the 1995 regulation had already mandated, requiring that “[a]gencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record keeping system.”
Now just saying that the other employees with a .gov email address had the emails archived does not meet the criteria of the law. What if other government employees also used personal email? Then there would be no official government archive of the email. What about her official emails to foreign heads of state? Those were not archived either. What about official emails to non .gov addresses in the US? Just these questions show that she did not follow the laws and regulations that were established before and during her time in office.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414913/yes-what-hillary-did-was-illegal-and-has-been-20-years-shannen-coffin
Re:No, It's NOT illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
She has months of gaps in her emails. That's not credible.
There is no way she sent no official emails while head of the state department for months.
As to your ad hominem on Fox news... it doesn't matter who says a thing. If the devil himself stood before you and said 1+1=2... is he lying?
Saying that it is from fox so is wrong is equally stupid. It is ad hominem. Do better.
As to requirements to use the US government servers, yes she is required to use them. She can use private email if she BCCs or CCs all the email to the government account. Otherwise she can't do it.
And even then that is frowned upon.
If on top of that she destroyed government documents then that is a felony.
She has MONTHS of gaps in her emails. Which means she's either filtering mails in sensitive periods of time to carefully redact information she doesn't want to reveal or she actually deleted them.
I suspect it is the first option. The server should have been ceased and gone over by independent computer forensic investigators. Same thing you'd do if you were auditing a corporation that wasn't cooperating with discovery.
She'll almost certainly get away with it. But that is more because she's powerful and has powerful friends rather then because she didn't do anything.
Re:like benghazi (Score:5, Insightful)
No it isn't sedition. It was a reminder of how the constitution works and that the president despite his insistance otherwise does not have the authority to nullify laws passed by congress which the sanctions are. Congress and even state governments have long reached out to foreign officials and even negotiated trade agreements without administration participation. Look up the sister cities project if you doubt that
And we will hear about the clinton email specifically because congress has requested copies of it for oversight purposes and there appears to be gapps in what was provided.
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In 1975, Sen. Sparkman and Sen. McGovern traveled to Cuba and met with government officials. The State Dept. concluded of the Logan Act:
And one of the legislative
Re:like benghazi (Score:5, Informative)
They went to jail for that. Do you still want an equal response?
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They went to jail for that. Do you still want an equal response?
I think the AC would prefer that, as a quite shuffle-off to jail doesn't hurt the Party nearly as badly.
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Do we have a lazy admin at the healm?
A lazy, un-vetted admin, with access to classified emails.
Nothing to see here. Its just the Republicans unfairly attacking the Clintons again.
Re:Why blame her for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course we can blame her for this. She's the one that made the decision to use personal email for government and public purposes, hiding her correspondence from government archives, and hidden from freedom of information requests. If not outright illegal, this is morally wrong. When she becomes president will she continue to hide her official correspondence from government archives and the public? Nixon would have loved to have had a system of off-the-record private correspondence instead of those pesky papers that leave trails.
Re:Why blame her for this? (Score:4, Insightful)
...the IT people that worked with her that never said anything, or raised any kind of fuss over the problem.
That assumes she didn't simply dismiss their concerns with the type of entitled attitude that has come to be a defining mark of both the Left and Right wings of the Demopublican Party.
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Because of course Kodos will be a much better leader than Kang!