Hillary Clinton kept top-secret SIGINT emails on her home email server Hillary Clinton's personal email server and one of her thumb drives held emails containing classified and top-secret information. That's according to a note by the US Intelligence Community Inspector General. While US Secretary of State, Clinton had access to American intelligence. It appears some of Uncle Sam's sensitive …
This is the key. If the TS emails were SENT by her, she would be the one guilty of mishandling classified material by exporting it from a TS system to an unclassified system. She won't go to prison but it would probably sink her candidacy.
On the other hand, if the emails were RECEIVED by her, someone else was guilty of that, and she's only guilty of the lesser "crime" (in quotes because I'm not sure if there is a specific law preventing it, though there probably will be soon if not) of using a personal server for government email.
If the latter is the case it could turn into a bit of a problem for her opposition. They hyped this up to sound like a terrible thing, so if it turns out she never mishandled classified material but it was others who did and she (along with anyone else the email was sent to) was only guilty of receiving it.
The recent Chinese hacks of multiple unclassified government mail servers demonstrates how unreliable the government people (third party contractors mostly likely) are at securing government mail systems, so it is hard to argue that she risked national security by having things redirected to her home email server. Given how much money the Clintons make from speaking engagements, etc. they could and probably did afford more competent administration for that email server. If I had to guess it was probably a lot more secure than the unclassified State Department server she would have otherwise been using.
The law (FISMA) and State Department regulations that apply do not prohibit use of a privately owned and operated server to process and store US government data, although they establish fairly stringent requirements, given partly in NIST 800-53. It is not impossible that Ms. Clinton's server satisfied all the requirements, and was certified and accredited by the State Department CIO. If that were true, though, I expect Ms. Clinton or the State Department would long since have announced that fact. Neither has done so.
Whether the clintonemail.com server was more or less secure than those at the State Department is no more than idle speculation.
How many times has her email server been breached, compared to the government systems?
Exactly what I was thinking.
It is bad practice (and it should not be allowed by policy), but as the government can't seem to keep their own house in order, it seems a bit pot calling the kettle black.
Ah, but in this case Hilary has become Switzerland: like Wall Street has been enthusiastically pointing at Switzerland's handling of tax avoiders to divert attention over the complete wreck they yet again made of the economy, so will the government use this with all its might to divert you from the many, many, MANY breaches it has suffered over the years, most of which were IMHO simply inexcusable. So, I agree with you - Hillary's personal storage may have been a better option than, say, the OPM.
This is happening in the country that impeached the President who so far achieved the best trade balance for being a human being (and an idiot when it came to dealing with staff), yet let the guy who seems to have been rather creative with about intelligence (in apparent collusion with another chap in the UK) in order to start Yet Another War completely off the hook, so let's just say that my expectations are not high for any sanity. Someone must be punished or the spotlight returns to where it actually should be, like on the question how it is possible that a politician can do her own thing for that long without anyone flagging it. It appears someone must have been asleep there for quite some time..
It is not evident that the clintonemail.com administrator would know if the system had been penetrated. Was it configured for security? Was it patched regularly? Was it protected by a firewall more advanced than that on a Linksys consumer router? Were all the factory default passwords changed to be unique and non-obvious ? Was an IDS installed and operating? Were there regular backups? Were the backups replicated off site? Was there a contingency plan to deal with outage?
Whatever the deficiencies of the State Department IT management and staff might have been, there is a pretty good chance they could answer in the affirmative for all their systems. In the case of clintonemail.com, the contingency plan seems to have been "wait for the water to recede and the mains power to return", arguably an entirely inadequate plan for the sole email provider for a cabinet member and top level executive of a major federal department. I have not seen reports that discuss any of the others.
Absurd to think that the lady was familiar with even the tiniest fraction of emails which went through her (2 or more) email addresses which during her tenure ran into the many tens of thousands.
Either that or how did she ever get any work done?
I'd be surprised if she even knew what was on the thumb drive, never mind how it got there.
A different issue but I would be more concerned that 4 million Americans qualify for Top Secret security clearance, and what precisely they are all doing. Now that is scary.
4 million is only 1% of the population.
There are about 2 million active and reserve in the military. They won't all need TS, but many will.
Then there are a whole lot of contractors, people in the arms industry, programmers, engineers, support staff + politicians who also need TS.
Given the US spends over $600BN per year on military, it's quite easy to see there's a lot of paper flying about that needs to be controlled.
Then we have all the alphabet soup agencies: CIA (20,000 employees) , NSA (30,000 employees) , NASA,... + all their contractors who are not employees...
Pretty soon it all stacks up.
Pretty soon it all stacks up.
.. which makes the abysmal state of their security (OPM being a very important case in point) all the more inexcusable.
"Absurd to think that the lady was familiar with even the tiniest fraction of emails which went through her (2 or more) email addresses which during her tenure ran into the many tens of thousands."
Not to mention, who was the person sending TS information to hill-dawg@gmail.com or wherever, surely they're the more culpable ones?
Lets have an investigation into what she was trying to hide. Sure, theres a bit of TS stuff floating about, and that's bad, but its not what she was trying to hide.
Investigators need to get down to the real reason she had the server setup and find out what she was obfuscating/covering up/hiding, why she was doing it, and what laws or protocols have been broken in doing so.
A credible plan to prevent reoccurances can then be drawn up, and Hillary can face whatever punishment she has coming. It probably should be jail time, for the TS documents alone, but I think I can speak for everyone when I say I'm not holding my breath on that.
My other question, not being leftpondian, is - If this is the best candidate for President that the democrats have, then why should anyone vote democrat? I'm certainly no fan of the family Bush, and have no clue who I'd vote for in a US election (as I understand it the democrats are somewhere tot he right of our current Government), but surely any party wanting to run the Presidency has to have a more credible candidate than Free Willy's Wife?
There is a huge list of lies Hillary has told and this email server issue is only one of them.
This indicts the entire Demoncratic party as they are supporting this lying thief.
To my understanding they only sampled 40 emails of several million and found 4 of those to be top secret. That's 10% so expect the actual number of TS emails will be much higher.
If you or I had done what Hillary did, we'd be looking at a long prison sentence!
While you're right here, we have to remember that there's two sets of rules. One for the Morlocks and one for the Eloy. Hillary and all other politicos come under the Eloy rules which makes them somewhat untouchable. It's us Morlocks that bear the jail time.
And there's been several scandals (as such) over the last few years involving emails, data, etc. from CongressCritters.... no one's done jail time yet. I suspect this is pure politics and if she drops out of the race, or loses, very little will ever be said or followed up on.
@Dan Paul
I'm assuming there should be "sarcasm" tags around that post. Hillary is no better and no worse than any other politician. I'd give her a B- or a C+ as Sec of State. GWB flunked out. Reagan slept through class. Obama "didn't work up to his potential", as they used to say about me on my report cards.
None of them were as bad as Nixon. And he served no time.
a) Said emails were probably more secure on that server than on the one sitting with the rest of the thoroughly rooted to Heckenbach machines in the various server rooms paid for by the American People every Republican seems to be so concerned about.
2) Said emails are probably sitting in a number of unauthorized inboxes in various countries after the aforementioned rooting, since those emails likely hopped and skipped their way around many, many American People owned servers to get to Mrs Clinton's. Top Secret you say?
Why do they allow documents with any type of clearance requirements to be attached to emails? Shouldn't anyone who accesses a TS document be required to get it from the secure repository? How do you manage security if you are relying on people to not CC someone who doesn't have the appropriate clearance? It makes everyone a gatekeeper when most don't have the ability to validate the security clearance of anyone else. While it's possible to assume that the Secretary of State (SoS) would have the necessary clearance, how do you know that the SoS hasn't been recently replaced by the President. And thats not even getting into the insecurity of relay servers.
On the subject of US Gov't officials having non-Gov't email accounts. That's not anything new. When he was working for GW Bush's Whitehouse, Karl Rove used to route most of his mail through RNC servers. Private email servers makes it easier to 'lose' embarrassing (and in some cases, illegal) conversations. Politicians have short memories when they are trying to discredit an opponent with an act their own party has been guilty of doing previously.
Whine about it all you like, but until Congress passes a law saying all Gov't email communication must reside entirely on Gov't email servers, and that documents that are not public information need to be accessed on (no local copies) secure repositories, there's really no way to secure the data.
This.
Also, didn't she/her lawyer wipe the server before anything was provided back to the FBI? How do we know the FBI actually received all the TS emails? This thing stinks to high heaven. All you really need to know is she was clearly trying to hide something, there is almost a zero chance that server wasn't compromised, a crime was likely committed, and at best, she was extremely careless and negligent. Then she/her agents take their sweet time going through all the evidence before they hand it over. More than enough to demonstrate that she cannot be trusted.
"So...
Lets have an investigation into what she was trying to hide. Sure, theres a bit of TS stuff floating about, and that's bad, but its not what she was trying to hide.
Investigators need to get down to the real reason she had the server setup and find out what she was obfuscating/covering up/hiding, why she was doing it, and what laws or protocols have been broken in doing so.
A credible plan to prevent reoccurances can then be drawn up, and Hillary can face whatever punishment she has coming. It probably should be jail time, for the TS documents alone, but I think I can speak for everyone when I say I'm not holding my breath on that."
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