>The State Department has lost all archived copies of the emails sent to and from the man believed to have set up and maintained Hillary Clinton’s private email server during the four years she served as secretary.
No, parallel construction. That's what law enforcement does when it has illegally gathered proofs: knowing what they're looking for, they figure out another way to "find" it again, but this time through legal and seemingly lucky paths. The later proof is expected to stand in front of a judge, whereas the "real", original one wouldn't. They might also do it to protect a confidential informant.
Essentially, it's to legal proofs what laundering is to money.
Daveguy was making a joke with the "parallel destruction". I think he already knows what parallel construction is, but your clarification here is well-placed for those unacquainted with the concept.
> the NSA doesn't have a domestic email archive or even domestic email envelope metadata
"Eventually, the NSA gained authority to "analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States", according to a 2007 Justice Department memo, which is marked secret."
"The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology."
The "in some cases" means with a court order for one of the correspondents, which didn't exist for Clinton.
PRISM is a program entirely for processing communications court-ordered to be collected from specific providers (not Clinton's mail server or other federal mail systems) for specific users (not Clinton).
Isn't this the least bit fishy? To say that politicians are held to a different standard than the average citizen is in full effect here. Its a HUGE cover up. How is she not in jail yet?
I love the mythical "cover up". Is she hiding the fact that she knows Ted Cruz dad helped shoot JFK? What exactly do you think is being hidden.
Also, at what point do you get upset about tax dollars being wasted to investigate something to death. Couldn't we be spending this money on better things?
Next time a cop pulls you over or cites you for something, why don't you just tell him leave you alone and NOT investigate. Since Hillary Rodham Clinton can do it, why shouldn't it be passed down to every citizen under her.
Once a countries laws become negligible, the country ceases to exist.
Here is the thing, I don't disagree with you. But the facts in this case point to something different. If were working with your analogy, then my car got taken apart (every last bolt and nut is on the side of the road). The people in the car with me have been investigated... Still found nothing, keep investigating.
At what point does an investigation become a witch hunt? At what point does an investigation become waste? I think were at that point (or just slightly past) it.
The investigation has revealed some rather alarming things about our government:
1. The government doesn't have it's shit together when it comes to archiving email. Go figure, we all knew there was waste there but this is worse than any decent nerd ever expected.
2. Our classification system is a mess. The fact that we can retroactively classify something is INSANE. Documents got out that you don't like, classify them, then prosecute any journalist who writes about them.
3. The number of people recently (not just in clintons case) who have immunity for testimony is amazing. In the case of clinton it looks like there was/is some wrongdoing on the part of the staffer who RECEIVED immunity. We all understand this is a prisoners dilemma problem, but there are external ethics that we don't often think about: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2378070 -- and this doesn't even factor in outside actors (us) who are harmed by the crime.
4. After Chelsea/Bradley Manning(see note) released all the cables, it apparently had ZERO impact on the IT culture at the state department. You would think that after an issue like that, things would have been on lockdown, but apparently government doesn't learn from its mistakes.
Why isn't any one screaming on high about these things?
NOTE: The whole gender and name change thing is confusing when referring to something done under/by the old name/gender so I put both down.
“Each time we asked the question 'What was the solution for POTUS,' we were politely asked to shut up and color,” Donald Reid, State Department coordinator for security infrastructure, said in a 2009 email first obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by the political action group Judicial Watch.
The woman asked for a workable solution, one that former SofS had access to and was told no. She asked what POTOUS had and was told NO, and instead offered something 1/2 assed at best.
There is also the question of a foundation staffer having highly compartmentalized data from the NSA... that is, to say the least, interesting as it apparently came from an "outside source". The story as it is being presented is NSA->leak-> Blumenthal -> clinton. One would think that this would have lead to a swift inditement of him (Blumenthal), yet nothing.
I suspect that there is a LOT more to this portion of the story that has NOTHING to do with Clinton, and it might make one want a tinfoil hat.
We could absolutely be spending this money on better things. If Hillary and Co. would stop doing suspicious things we could move on to spending this money in other places.
That's what annoys me the most about this. what was going through her head when she became one of the most powerful people in government, trusted with securing deals with foreign countries, and thinks that setting up a back channel wouldn't be looked at as suspicious?
It is almost like she doesn't give a damn what you think. I'm beginning to not give a damn about her.
When you're actively orchestrating illegal coups, or using the American soldiers as guns for hire in order to curry favor from various billionaires and autocrats for personal gain or to shape the world according to your own vision of how the global pecking order should work, you might not want that on the public record during your time in office.
There is a meme, where Nixon was complaining about losing his job for 18 minutes of missing tape, but Clinton getting a pass for 30,000 missing emails.
Irrespective of your political leanings, what is the magic behind making emails disappear? Is it incompetence, gross-negligence. I think, its another standard DC "plausible deniability".
Don't forget its not just emails! she never texted anyone either!
"In addition to the emails, the State Department also does not have any text messages or BlackBerry Messenger messages sent to or from Clinton during her time in office, the RNC claimed. The State Department declined to discuss that declaration."
No BBM or text messages TO and from. Let's go with your scenario and say that she doesn't text. You're telling me that she didn't receive a single spam text message from her provider or a random text message from a friend? Come on.
Sadly because of partisanship, almost everyone is worried about their "side" so they will do whatever it takes to protect them. Anyone who has security clearance will tell you they would be locked up already if they even did a fraction of what she did.
Anyone with security clearance who understands the law knows that purposely disclosing classified information like Snowden did will result in prison, while negligently allowing classified information to leak like Clinton did will just get you fired.
> purposely disclosing classified information like Snowden did will result in prison
Not necessarily. General Petraeus purposely handed over documents to his biographer / girlfriend, and he got nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
It seems again to be a high court / low court thing. If you're important enough, your crimes get you lesser sentences, but if not, they throw the book at you.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Here's a corroborating source written in 2013 for the Congressional Research Service
> leaks of classified information to the press have relatively infrequently been punished as crimes, and we are aware
of no case in which a publisher of information obtained through unauthorized disclosure by a government employee has been prosecuted for publishing it.
Remember this was Exchange 2003/2007. It sounds like they didn't have an archiving solution, so most users would probably use Outlook rules or manual actions to move data from their 50/100/250MB mailbox to a PST file on their local PC. Once you do that, it's up to the user to retain or not retain email. It's not a criminal act to clean up old files.
The "fishy" part is a twist on this that isn't in the news -- the use of external BlackBerry devices for stuff other than email. I'll bet you that anything of a substantive nature that was communicated with Clinton was done via PIN messages on the Blackberry devices -- data which was never accessible by anyone other than those folks who had a means to capture and decrypt them in transit. The other thing with PIN messaging is that they were device based, so even if you intercept, you need to establish who had physical custody of the device.
Yes, but regular emails for State Department employees don't fall under that. There are some 25000 State Department full time employees and about as many locally-employed staff around the world, then several thousand contractors. Every email sent by someone with a @state.gov email address is not an official government record.
Even files create in the numerous IT applications are not part of the official record unless that applications was designated a system of record.
We don't know how many of Clinton's top IT aide's e-mails were official government records.
Speculation & Proposition: Since he worked to set up an extra-governmental private server which could potentially be used to hide governmental records, that number should be strictly greater than zero.
> Speculation & Proposition: Since he worked to set up an extra-governmental private server which could potentially be used to hide governmental records, that number should be strictly greater than zero.
If an email came from the Secretary, yes. But other than that, no.
> We don't know how many of Clinton's top IT aide's e-mails were official government records.
When I was a federal employee we took yearly training on this exact topic and the rules for what qualifies as a federal record are surprisingly inclusive. The few exclusions include emails that are purely personal and announcements sent to a wide audience.
Intuitively, it feels that those emails aren't official government records. But according to the law, they actually are official records. [1]
All government employees and contractors undergo annual records retention training that requires them to be aware of the obligation to retain relevant communication for the required time period. It even breaks down what emails should be deleted and which ones should be retained. [2]
> Intuitively, it feels that those emails aren't official government records. But according to the law, they actually are official records. [1]
Emails from top-level officials like heads of cabinet agencies are part of the official record. Emails from rank and file employees typically are not.
There are well over 2.6 million people in government (over 4 mil counting the military) and hundreds of thousands of contractors. If even 10% of all those emails had to be archived and stored in the National Archives it would constitute an enormous amount of data, much of it of little use.
> All government employees and contractors undergo annual records retention training that requires them to be aware of the obligation to retain relevant communication for the required time period.
I can assure you that record retention training is not standard nor is it annual at State Department. Wasn't that way at DoD in the past either. Some jobs and offices would deal with it a lot more than others but regular joes and janes don't deal with that issue much.
I can assure you that the training was required at both State and Defense [1] from 2010 to 2014. The requirement was for all users of the networks to archive their email and other documents. Failure to complete the training would result in revocation of computer network access.
I never claimed that the National Archives performed the records retention. Each individual was required to perform their own retention up until each class of records' retention expiration.
It feels unintuitive, but that was indeed the standard. It is probably still that way, but I no longer work in that sector so I can't authoritatively state that.
Personally, I find it frustrating when commenters on HN make a statement with an authoritative tone without citation or definitive knowledge, just because they truly believe something must be so. It is in fact contributing to noise, not signal.
I have worked at State since 2009, it's not a department wide requirement. Security training is yearly and mandatory but record retention and NARA compliance is a different matter.
I suppose that the head of State (who was that again?) can't be expected to follow correct procedure if they weren't properly trained. If only there were a diplomat running the department at that time who could have directed that all relevant staffers and heads of state received proper training.
Hopefully this carelessness doesn't affect the importance that staffers give to using proper procedures for handling classified documents.
In all seriousness, that is what this part of your position reduces to: the head of a department didn't break any rules because they didn't receive the proper training. You hopefully can see why people might see that as a problem, even if not a crime.
You're talking about a couple of different issues here. Official record retention for the purpose of storing to the National Archives rarely applies to the emails of normal employees. There isn't department wide mandatory training on this because it's not really needed. Secretary Clinton would be required to archive her official email as the head of a major agency.
There is mandatory training on security and handling classified materials.
I'm not saying Clinton didn't receive proper training on either NARA compliance or handling classified material. It just appears that she circumvented the spirit of the archival rules buy maybe not the letter.
Classification-wise it sounds like the information was not marked as classified when it was sent to Clinton. If something is changed to classified after the fact that doesn't mean the recipient of the information committed a violation.
Now if it turns out Clinton knowingly handled classified materials on unclassified systems that would be a security violation. Then the question would get into intent and impact to determine what charges and punishment would be warranted. Usually there has to be some intent and an attempt to distribute classified info before jail time comes into play.
Thanks for responding; I'm surprised and dismayed that records retention training isn't universal. Not that I can see the SecState clicking through hours of computer-based training, that would be delegated to an assistant.
Emails aren't necessarily records. If you put a copy of the constitution in an email, it doesn't make your email the record -- just a transmission of the record.
Hillary's problem is that she was handling classified material. The Manning case is a good example of what happens when a peon breaks those rules.
> All criminal laws require a certain level of intent and, in the area of classified document cases, the intent to disclose it to someone not authorized to receive it," says Lowell, who has a long history of defending politicians in ethics cases, and served as chief counsel to the House Democrats during Bill Clinton's impeachment proceedings. "Secretary Clinton's use of an email server was [for correspondence with] her own staff and other officials. It was not [intended to be provided] to the press or to a foreign country or any other entity, so it would be ridiculous [for her to] even be considered charged under these laws.
It's absurd on is face to claim that the Secretary of State of the United States, exclusively using a private server, "didn't know" that classified materials would be flowing through her server. It's even more absurd to say "they weren't classified at the time." Classified materials don't need to go through a formal classification process in order for them to contain classified materials. Either the material is or isn't and a Secretary of State would know that.
There is more than one network in use at State Department. Opennet is for unclassified materials and that is the network that the Secretary's public email would be interacting with. There is another network expressly for classified material, and the Secretary has a separate email address for that.
Yes, email classifications can be changed after the fact, but that in and of itself would not constitute wrongdoing by the Secretary. Colin Powell did exactly the same thing and wasn't punished after the fact either.
The .gov email would have served the exact same purpose of the personal email: unclassified conversations. There are complete separate networks, with separate email addresses, that are for classified discussions. They are completely unreachable from unclassified networks, and would be required to actually have classified conversations.
And when FOIA requests came in for her .gov emails, she said she didn't have any emails. It took Sydney Blumenthal's hack to get her to admit that she did have an unclassified email address.
Have you ever worked in a government secure environment? Regardless of the politics, if anyone else other than her had done this they would have been fired on the spot, and had possible charges brought depending on the outcome of the investigation.
Saying it was not considered sensitive at the time is exactly why the government defaults to sensitive and will change it later. Additionally, managing your own server off to the side when you are a high ranking government official just looks suspicious.
Is this the best defense available? Republicans do it too so let's just look the other way.
I understand somebody being paid by the Democratic party or one of Hillary's SuperPACs to try to push this argument, but for a regular citizen to attempt it shows just how successful the suggested partisanship of the US political system is in dividing regular citizens to act against their own best interests.
If somebody says "it is obvious that this is illegal and the person should be in jail," and then somebody else says "well all these other people did it and they we're scrutinized for it but didn't go to jail," then perhaps the reasonable thing to conclude is that it is not an act that somebody should go to jail for.
I mean, that's the only thing I can conclude. If you're assuming a priori that there's a crime, then you're putting the cart before the horse.
When you're assuming that counter points can only come from some sort of paid posters, you're being disrepectful.
This is why political topics are bad in HN. There's no news for nerds in here, just lots of people playing fast and loose with the facts to score political points.
then perhaps the reasonable thing to conclude is that it is not an act that somebody should go to jail for. I mean, that's the only thing I can conclude.
If that's the only thing you can conclude than you're choosing to ignore circumstances and the complexity of real life situations. I am arguing that both Bush/Powell and Clinton's misuse of personal email servers should be investigated to the fullest extent and prosecuted without considerations for protection of reputations of those individuals. Any ordinary citizen trying to wiggle credible-sounding arguments for the other side is working against their own interest (unless they are being paid - which I am not accusing anyone of).
It's not a defense, it's a counter to the idea that "if anyone else did this, they'd be fired and charged". Obviously that's not true, because (as noted in the comment to which you replied) others did it and no one was fired or went to jail.
If the OP meant that Hillary being a democrat is somehow uniquely protected from any prosecution then I agree that it is the other side of the coin of polarization of political opinion that divides the ordinary citizens and makes them weaker.
But Powell and Rice, occupying the same level of power as Clinton during her term, I understood it as a condemnation of the privileges of political power in general and not a privilege of a particular political party.
It does seem like it might be worse that they would use their private address even when they had a .gov, because it's more clearly a distinction. But in the end the effect is the same, if it were additional malfeasance than there would be some evidence of selection of particular topics to go off the .gov address.
Not really sure what the huge difference is in this case.
Very huge, that means unlike the others she had NO WAY to access the .gov through an official account unlike Powell etc, And private emails by law must have been kept at the time of her tenure.
"Mrs. Clinton is not the first government official — or first secretary of state — to use a personal email account on which to conduct official business. But her exclusive use of her private email, for all of her work, appears unusual, Mr. Baron said. The use of private email accounts is supposed to be limited to emergencies, experts said, such as when an agency’s computer server is not working.
“I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a high-ranking official at an executive branch agency solely used a personal email account for the transaction of government business,” said Mr. Baron, who worked at the agency from 2000 to 2013.
Regulations from the National Archives and Records Administration at the time required that any emails sent or received from personal accounts be preserved as part of the agency’s records.
> Have you ever worked in a government secure environment? Regardless of the politics, if anyone else other than her had done this they would have been fired on the spot, and had possible charges brought depending on the outcome of the investigation.
Can you be specific with what this means? I hear this comparison all the time yet it never seems to be articulated.
What did she do that would lead her to have been fired "on the spot"?
My understanding is that neither state.gov nor "Hillary email server" are "secure" for classified information. And it seems like over the course of investigating "Hillary email server" ~20 emails have been identified as containing information that should have been considered "Top Secret".
But that poses the question - why was that information being emailed around at all? Who sent it? Who is liable? How did it get on email systems connected to the open web?
Or is there just a certain level of classified information that is expected to be mishandled over the course of time?
And is this like information that is being directly copied from clearly classified reports? Or is this accidental references to topics that should not be discussed in email messages sent over the open web?
I imagine these are all questions are being confronted by the FBI. But it seems pretty common to encounter comments along the lines of yours: Hillary is definitely in the wrong and every one knows it. But I do not see that yet.
Part of it is for security and the other part is traceability. You ask a bunch of questions pertaining to traceability that are now hard to answer because she was conducting business over a personal email server. Most private companies also forbid this for legal reasons.
The problem with classified or even just sensitive information is that it is hard to know what is what. For example a list of naval ship names is likely not sensitive information. That same list with some grouping may suddenly be sensitive. For this reason, it is good to assume all government communications someone at that level is having are at a minimum sensitive and should always be on government property.
Information is born classified, markings are irrelevant. Clinton had to sign a document affirming her understanding of this in order to gain access to classified information in the first place.
As for the crimes she committed, here are a few good candidates:
1. Gross Negligence (doesn't require intent)
2. Espionage (requires knowledge you're compromising security; also chargeable as Gross Negligence)
3. Obstruction of justice
4. Perjury
5. Violation of the Federal Records Act
6. Violation of National Archive and Records Administration's regulations
7. Violation of Freedom of Information Act regulations
8. Materially False Statements to federal agents
9. Conspiracy (under 18 U.S. Code § 371)
>>Information is born classified, markings are irrelevant. Clinton had to sign a document affirming her understanding of this in order to gain access to classified information in the first place.
Exactly. I really wish the whole "it wasn't classified at the time" argument would die already.
> Information is born classified, markings are irrelevant.
Not sure what you mean by this. An enormous amount of effort is expended in government to mark classified and confidential documents properly, set their disposition dates, record who classified it and why, and so forth.
Classification is not just determined at the time of the creation of a document/artifact, it can be changed as a result of being coupled with other information, or by changes in circumstances, or simply by different readings of by different people.
The State Department's review said they should have been classified at the time.
“These emails were not retroactively classified by the State Department. ... Rather these emails contained classified information when they were generated and, according to IC classification officials, that information remains classified today. This classified information should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system.”
That's from the inspector generals at the State Department.
You're right, politicians are held to a different standard-- a much more strict one. Clinton had her own private email server set up. I'm sure that many people on this forum can back me up on this one, it's quite legal to set up an SMTP host on your own domain.
The issue is that she was apparently told to use the .gov email address provided to her by her work, and she did this instead.
People have accused her of doing this for various reasons, but personally I don't believe there's evidence to show that she did this for any other reason than wanting to stand out and look special by sending mail from hillary@clintonemail.com, and so that she could use her own BlackBerry.
Stop speculating. Just ask yourself why are all the emails missing from her IT admins account? I used to own a blackberry. I could use more than one email account on it at a time.
I'm sure a lot of people here own their own domains but kinda don't host and maintain the server themselves. You can be a spoiled politician and use your own device with your own domain without hosting your own server.
Nobody has suggesting that setting up an SMTP server is a crime. Heck, nobody has said she shouldn't be using clintonemail or w/e for her personal communications (inc. Clinton Foundation business).
The issue was and is only with her use of a privately run SMTP server for her government job. There's three key problems, first off it avoids FOIA requests, secondly it can avoid other legal discovery, and lastly information was sent through it of a sensitive nature.
And before someone replies with "nothing was sensitive!" if that were true then why has the government redacted and withheld emails from the public? And retroactive classification is largely a myth, things inherit classifications from their source.
So for example if you attend a classified meeting and you or your staff take notes on that meeting, those notes are classified at the second pen touched paper. It doesn't matter than it lacks a classification marking.
> I don't believe there's evidence to show that she did this for any other reason than wanting to stand out and look special by sending mail from hillary@clintonemail.com
Personally, I think secretary-of@state.gov would be a much better vanity email address than <myname>email.com.
Even if the only reason was to have a custom domain, I'm sure the State Department's IT team could point the MX records to a government-managed mail server.
That's not the right analogy. It would be more like if you were a famous business person brought in to be CEO, and wanted to keep using your personal email.
You'd probably still catch some flak but you might have enough power/influence to actually do it whereas if you're employee #42593 of a big company there's no way in hell you're gonna get your way.
You're absolutely right. I think a lot of people who get to the top in politics or business have an extremely high level of confidence and determination, but sometimes that turns into arrogance and a disdain for rules. Clinton is one of those people that I think has an attitude of 'rules are for little people'.
Hopefully she'll keep that character flaw in check as president, but I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't.
> Isn't this the least bit fishy? To say that politicians are held to a different standard than the average citizen is in full effect here. Its a HUGE cover up. How is she not in jail yet?
I think that's a bit of a misreading of the situation. First, Clinton was allowed to use a non-state.gov email address as Sec of State. Colin Powell did exactly that and ran into the same problem of some unclassified emails being classified after the fact.
Secondly, the Sec. of State has original classifying authority so there are things she can do with respect to classifications that a normal person with a clearance cannot.
Third, State Dept emails sent over the open internet are not meant to be classified, there are other secure networks for that. This is not a case where someone was intentionally handling classified material on a system it should not be handled on.
Lastly, deleting emails does not mean a crime was committed. People delete emails all the time, people fail to archive their emails all the time. Now, with the State Dept there is an archiving requirement with NARA for official email. But would the aide's emails fall under that? Probably not.
Now if there were criminal charges pending or a subpoena and Pagliano destroyed emails to get around that, it would be a different story. But to date, that doesn't seem to be the case.
Clinton showed poor judgement in setting up her own email server simply because she of all people should know there is a target on her back and that the use of a personal email server might look suspicious. But as of yet there hasn't been any clear evidence of criminal wrongdoing. That could still change but I think the likelihood of a smoking gun has gone down considerably.
You haven't read much news on this have you? She is being subpoenad, there is an investigation pending criminal charges. So now that you know those two things, would you consider it a different story like you said it would be above?
The truth is like poetry and everyone hates poetry.
The information that was emailed to Clinton was sensitive but only supposedly from a classified source. There is no proof that it was, just accusations.
So explain to me how a non-classified source would get information from a meeting of Sudanese generals that occurred 24-48 hours prior, in such quantity that it needed Blumenthal to summarize it in a lengthy email.
That's an interesting article but it doesn't really point to wrongdoing by Clinton.
* Blumenthal somehow got his hands on classified info from NSA
* He pulled some of that information into an email to Clinton's public email address
* Clinton at that point could have classified the email herself, or not. The information was not labeled as classified in that email.
The question there is how did Blumenthal get his hands on that information? That means there was some unauthorized disclosure on the NSA's end. The only way Clinton would be on the hook for that is if she solicited that information or knew about Blumenthal obtaining it illegally.
The argument can be made that she should've recognized that the email contained sensitive information and should be classified. But it is not a crime for someone with original classifying authority to decline to classify something that was labeled unclassified when it reached their hands.
Are you basing your argument on the existing law concerning classified information, or what you think should happen?
The problem with your view is that it is not based on what the law actually is.
Clinton was required to report the unauthorized disclosure of classified info. But she didn't.
By your argument, if someone takes a photocopy of a document but puts a blank piece of paper over whatever mark indicates it as "top secret", whoever they then hand that photocopy to is excluded from any liability. That is not how it actually works, however.
BTW if the info came from NSA, they are the agency that determines its classification. Not Clinton.
> Clinton was required to report the unauthorized disclosure of classified info. But she didn't.
If she knew the origin of the information, yes. It seems like no one is saying she knew where the information came or that it was classified. The argument can be made that she should have known but that's a more difficult thing to prove when it comes to holding people accountable.
> By your argument, if someone takes a photocopy of a document but puts a blank piece of paper over whatever mark indicates it as "top secret", whoever they then hand that photocopy to is excluded from any liability. That is not how it actually works, however.
It comes down to whether you know the nature of the information should have made something classified or the origin of the information should have made it classified. Certain types of information would clearly scream "Classified!" regardless of whether it was written on a napkin. Nuclear information, identities of covert operatives, military plans, terror intel, etc. would fall under that umbrella.
Other things aren't so clear cut. Information obtained from an intercept might not raise alarm bells if you didn't know the info came from an intercept. Then there are times when unclassified or sensitive information from multiple sources can combine to create a classified document. The individual pieces of info are not classified but the synthesis is. At that point one would have to rely on someone making the judgement call correctly.
> BTW if the info came from NSA, they are the agency that determines its classification. Not Clinton.
Yes they can classify the information upon its creation. But they could also release it as unclassified or sensitive, then down the line someone else could elevate it to Secret or Top Secret. That person could be anyone with original classifying authority like Clinton.
In this case, Blumenthal somehow got a hold of information that was classified from the NSA, then he made a derivative summary of it. He and whoever leaked the info should be on the hook for that. Clinton would only be on the hook if she knew the info was classified.
"First, Clinton was allowed to use a non-state.gov email address as Sec of State."
By whom? Even the SOS she is required to follow the rules. She did not.
"Secondly, the Sec. of State has original classifying authority so there are things she can do with respect to classifications that a normal person with a clearance cannot."
But she cannot declassify emails.
"Third, State Dept emails sent over the open internet are not meant to be classified"
What actually happened remains to be seen and may never see the light of day.
And then there's intent. One must ask "Why did she request that a separate server be set up?" and then follow her answer to the base of her justification. Why her request? Is her justification valid? Was she ignorant of the ramifications (also bad if you're running for the Presidency)?
In the end one faces the dilemma "Was Hilary evil and deceptive or merely incompetent?" Having read about her part in the Whitewater scandal:
State Department regulations allowed the Secretary of State to use an external email server in their official capacity. As I said, Colin Powell did exactly the same thing, although his reason was because when he came in, State Dept. was woefully behind technologically.
> And then there's intent. One must ask "Why did she request that a separate server be set up?" and then follow her answer to the base of her justification. Why her request? Is her justification valid? Was she ignorant of the ramifications (also bad if you're running for the Presidency)?
These are all good questions. It sounds like she wanted to retain her personal email and be able to field personal business from that same account.
However, as it stands she wasn't required to provide any sort of official justification.
I often wonder if anyone told her how bad this could look for her, and whether she listened or not. I know from people that have worked directly with her that she is not particularly tech-savvy, but that could mean that maybe she thought having a personal server would shield her in ways it cannot, or it could mean that she didn't think it would be a big deal at all. Either way, poor judgement I think.
You keep saying Powell "did the same exact thing" -- but that's undeniably false. Powell used his personal AOL account from time to time when the official .gov mail servers were down. Clinton setup a private email server. Totally different things.
Used personal email for public business. Ended up with some classified emails on his personal account. Same thing.
If you want to get very specific, yes, Colin Powell wasn't using colin@colinpowell.com as his email. But the issue is the same, although as I said, his reason for doing was different.
Setting up a private email server in your bathroom closet to conduct 100% of all your government and foundation business, and using an AOL account from time to time is definitely not the same thing.
> "These are all good questions. It sounds like she wanted to retain her personal email and be able to field personal business from that same account."
Except she could have done that with her .gov email. Classification laws state she can delete personal emails from her .gov account without fear of wrongdoing. So your theory falls flat.
One reason she might have wanted to setup her own private email server was to skirt FOIA requests. Which seems plausible since there were numerous FOIA requests during the Benghazi ordeal. All of which were replied to with 'we have no emails'. It took Syndey Blumenthal's AOL account to be compromised for everyone to discover Clinton's private email server.
> One reason she might have wanted to setup her own private email server was to skirt FOIA requests
This is unlikely. It has to do with her addiction to Blackberry phones and the fact they were insecure. She refused to give up using it. The email server was hosted at home since her 2008 campaign.
I assume she just continued to use the server afterward.
She even contacted the NSA to find a solution to keep using her Blackberry but they couldn't find one. It was just too insecure.
Edit: upon further investigation you might be right...
> One year earlier, during her own presidential campaign, Clinton had said that if elected, “we will adopt a presumption of openness and Freedom of Information Act requests and urge agencies to release information quickly.”
> But in those first few days, Clinton’s senior advisers were already taking steps that would help her circumvent those high-flown words, according to a chain of internal State Department emails released to Judicial Watch, a conservative nonprofit organization suing the government over Clinton’s emails.
You are mistaken. Original classifying authority means that she can classify things herself up to Top Secret. That is how the term is defined.
She can't unilaterally declassify anything so if another agency sent something classified to her, she could not lower the classification.
If something came from one of the intelligence agencies that was Secret or Top Secret, it would not be sent over the open internet to her public email. That would be a security violation on the part of the sender.
We're in agreement, because I said that the documents sent to her were classified by other agencies and that she had no authority on those documents.
Classified items were sent to her to her private email address. Her server, which she had setup for herself, contained those classified items. That is against the law. It is also against the law to handle classified items in a way that puts them at risk.
She is responsible for the content of her server, and therefore broke the law. That she somehow didn't recognize classified material isn't a defense. The people who sent her the classified materials also broke the law (especially since they may have removed any classified markings from the documents).
By your reading, if someone removes classified markings from classified documents or makes a derivative document with classified information and sends it to your email, you are breaking the law by receiving that document.
If something is not marked properly, the receiver doesn't automatically get a security violation.
The aide's emails would fall under NARA; relevant email must be archived. Personal email exchanges, emails linking already archived documents, and other redundant and irrelevant emails may be deleted and not retained for the required amount of time.
Well, not that I'm at all defending what happened here, but the situation is more nuanced than the average citizens. In this case, putting her in jail would effectively put Trump into the White House. I wouldn't be at all surprised if left-leaning (and maybe right-leaning too) groups who could (perhaps) apply more pressure in this situation are backing off by that reasoning.
That comment honestly makes me really sad. People would rather put a criminal in the white house and have her run free because she is the "lesser of two evils".
Regardless of whether or not she is guilty, that flow of logic is deplorable and anyone who follows it is only contributing to the the problem of crooked politics. God damn American politics is fucked up.
I should preface this with the declaration that I'm not trying to start a debate about which presidential candidate to vote for. People get really touchy about that -- I'm just talking about the logic that you are criticizing, because I don't think it's particularly sad.
I don't see why even your characterization of the situation is "deplorable." Let's accept that Clinton is a "criminal" -- that doesn't necessarily disqualify her for public office, so the question becomes whether it bothers voters enough to matter. Personally, I think Donald Trump would be the worst president in the history of the United States. I have lots of opinions about lots of politicians, but he's probably the only one that I'm genuinely scared of.
I'd prefer almost anybody over Trump -- that Clinton may have broken federal laws is just another bullet point in the pros/cons list. I'd have voted for Eugene Debs while he was literally in prison, and hundreds of thousands of people did.[1]
People bemoan the whole "lesser of two evils" thing, but I always wonder: What's the alternative? I'm not saying that I give up on improving the system, because there's a lot that could be improved. But "lesser of two evils" is just a negative way of saying "my preference."
Politicians have a zillion positions, you're never going to agree with one 100% -- and if you do, great, but that means there are literally millions of other people who don't. You pick the one who gets the government a step closer to what you want it to be.
"I'd prefer almost anybody over Trump -- that Clinton may have broken federal laws is just another bullet point"
Why? You want another lawyer as president?
Think of Trump as what he is: a businessman becoming intimately familiar with national politics for the first time. He's being brought up to speed on almost every social topic under the sun. He doesn't have the lifetime of bias that most politicians have (e.g., 20 years of working in the House, Senate, or some federal bureaucracy).
He will be asking questions: crazy questions, dumb questions, smart questions, questions everyman asks.
If you never shuffle the cards then you'll always be dealt from a stacked deck. Trump will shuffle the cards. So it's like randomization/Monte Carlo in machine learning.
We've had decades of lawyers and professional politicians; let's give a real person a chance to be president. Personally I would have preferred a more common man, but I doubt others would have that, because we are primates with social hierarchies.
Trump will be like FDR: desperate to get something done and willing to try whatever it takes to do it but constrained by the law. I like that - it's the "American way"!
But I honestly think Biden could do the same thing, for different reasons, if he would only step out and speak for himself.
I really don't think it will be productive to turn this into a discussion about Trump in particular, but I should clarify: I'm not opposed to Trump because he's not a lawyer, or because he's an "everyman." I am opposed to him because I disagree with the stances that he has taken. If another, more "traditional" politician acted the way Trump does, or endorsed the kind of actions Trump supports, I'd be (almost?) equally repulsed.
> Drumpf will be like FDR: desperate to get something done and willing to try whatever it takes to do it but constrained by the law.
I'll avoid invoking Godwin's law, but that's a very dangerous thing to accept. I personally do not have any interest in voting for someone who does not believe in freedom of religion or speech. If elected, I genuinely fear for the continued legality of dissent.
His only saving grace is that he's probably going to be too ineffectual to get much done. That's what's terrifying about Clinton: she's overwhelmingly competent and completely amoral.
Something about Trump that is different: he changes his mind and, once he does, he doesn't waste time trying to justify his original stance! That alone sets him apart from most politicians. Now, just like FDR, he will be surrounded by lawyers and advisers who tell him "You can't do that!" and he'll argue with them and they'll (usually) come out on the right side of the law and when they don't the courts will correct them. Same as Obama.
"Clinton: she's overwhelmingly competent and completely amoral."
Well, the email investigation would tend NOT to paint her as "overwhelmingly competent" in technical, legal or political senses. Whitewater paints her as a competent and skilled lawyer and quite able to walk a fine line.
I agree she's "completely amoral".
I don't view "incompetent + amoral" as good qualities for a president.
Well, if the choice was 1) Put a Criminal in the US White House vs 2) Risk global nuclear war (an intentional exaggeration of Trump's foreign policy skills) -- for the sake of argument, would you still prefer #2? To be clear, I'd prefer neither -- I'm just not sure that's a choice.
"putting her in jail would effectively put Trump into the White House."
Not at all true.
Joe Biden, "Trustworthy, loyal,... clean and reverent.", is standing in the wings. He is a more capable opponent for Trump than Hilary and would likely pull many conservatives, especially those who doubt Trump's creds, to the Democrat side.
That sounds nice to me, and I like Biden, but I'm not sure this is accurate. Democrats had a Clinton/Biden matchup in 2008, and Biden came up short by a mile. A lot has happened since then with Clinton, both good and bad, but I think it's closer than it sounds.
In Jail for what exactly? EMails that didn't have clasified documents?
I am no Pro-Hilary person but I always ask for what and get weird remarks that never mean anything solid. They also don't know anything about the George W Bush's White House use of unoffical email.
Well looks like there were some but we don't know what extent it was. Since this was from 7/2015 I guess it didn't led to criminal charges but it was a security risk.
People seem to treat it like hse email stuff directly to N. Korea and China on military instulations and nucealer weapon plans.
Because the rich and powerful have a different set of rules that only apply to them.
We Americans live in a very corrupt system, where the people/corporations in charge have absolute power over all. It's spread out over multiple organizations
We live in a time where the corruption is being exposed, but nobody is doing a damn thing about it. Maybe we are all too afraid of getting jailed, beaten, losing our jobs or killed by "law" enforcers.
Regardless - We must wake up and shine a light on the corruption. Voting will not work, it never has and it never will as long as the corrupt persons are managing the entire system.
You cannot go against this system with violence, they are ready for it & they will use it against you or a form of it (terror, fear).
Only though peace can we achieve change. If you desire change and are not afraid of losing what you have, your life, your loved ones then find peace within yourself. Don't participate in the corruption. Look within. Starting being peaceful in your daily life. You cannot ever expect somebody else to espouse peace, it must come from each individual.
Do no harm to your self or to others. Regardless of what others may do to you.
Shouldn't they be in the Datto backups? The ones that even Clinton herself didn't know about because they were kept by mistake (and against her orders)? The ones that contain the 30,000+ emails she and her lawyers attempted to delete because they were "personal"? The ones that still haven't been released despite numerous FOIA requests and a lawsuit?
I have a feeling we're only getting one side of this (the State Department's) while the FBI already has these emails. The FBI would have no reason to chime in and tell the public "It's ok, everyone, we have those emails too." And the State Department obviously wouldn't have them since she wasn't using their email system.
I'm 99.99% sure nothing is missing here, it's just not where they expected it to be. Pagliano already struck a deal with the DOJ and appears to be cooperating, which probably isn't a good thing for Clinton.
He's cooperating with the FBI and DOJ. Do you really think they'd offer him an immunity deal that allowed him to plead the 5th?
What you're talking about are separate investigations by Senate committees. It's understandable that he has no desire to participate in those dog and pony shows.
I may be mistaken, but judicial immunity automatically waives your fifth amendment rights since you can no longer incriminate yourself. I can't really imagine the point otherwise.
Yep - and based on this and the fact that Guccifer was allowed to speak to the press [1], I'm pretty sure the public is being prepared for an indictment.
[1] In the case of unconvicted persons (including competency commitments under 18 U.S.C. 4244 and 4246) held in federal institutions, interviews are not authorized until there is clearance with the court having jurisdiction, ordinarily through the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
..In other words, the people who would be prosecuting Clinton just gave Fox News, who they knew wouldn't hold back, a chance at interviewing the guy that can unravel this whole mess.
See also the "Bush White House email controversy": [1]
> The "gwb43.com" domain name was publicized by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who sent a letter to Oversight and Government Reform Committee committee chairman Henry A. Waxman requesting an investigation.
> Waxman sent a formal warning to the RNC, advising them to retain copies of all emails sent by White House employees. According to Waxman, "in some instances, White House officials were using nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications."
>The Republican National Committee claims to have erased the emails, supposedly making them unavailable for Congressional investigators
It is hopeless to expect voluntary transparency by the government, there is no incentive to
1) comply with the rules when transparency is clearly detrimental to your backroom deals or
2) to punish the very people that appointed you to your high positioned job or
3) to punish the opponents in the other party when they fail to comply while, after 4 years, the positions can be reversed and you may be in the crosshairs in a similar investigation.
Nothing was done when Bush did it, nothing will be done now that is Hillary doing it and don't expect anything different regardless of what party manage to snag the congress and White House.
If regulatory capture is a significant problem in the private sector imagine inside the government itself. It is hopeless.
Many workers are closely supervised and monitored (I think of the facial recognition being used by WalMart to track all their employees continuously.) I think that both wealth and power should come with responsibilities - and the obligation to be monitored for the good of our society. All Big Data techniques should be used to monitor them closely - to keep track of every person they contact and the nature of their conversations. At the same time, there should be less monitoring of ordinary citizens.
The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed the initial suits, suing for information related to Hillary Clinton's e-mails. Then they were taken over by Clinton acolyte and hatchet-man David Brock, using his super PAC money. They have since had a, um, strategic restructuring.
Incredibly, this line of inquiry has been dropped by CREW.
If you're interested in corruption in government, the CREW story is incredibly interesting. Most of these agencies have internal quality control and feedback systems, notably the Inspectors General.
In many cases these systems are no longer working like they should. NGOs tried taking over that role.
Now we're seeing the NGOs being "strategically restructured"
Who's left? The press? They suck up to whomever is in power. If they don't, they get locked out. SV? All they care about is keeping the money machine going.
I'm looking around and not seeing much of an answer.
My concern is that in the near future we're going to start seeing citizens scored on how much of a threat they are to the government. The scoring will be driven by comments in forums such as these. And that scoring system will not distinguish folks who are peaceful yet very angry from folks who are very angry and could become violent.
Combine that with automated enforcement of laws and we could be in a real world of shit.
I don't care which party runs the government. I'll even say screw it about how big the government is. We can have that fight another day. But over the last decade or two we're seeing the feedback systems break down. That's totally fucked.
(For comparison, think about the political tornado that happened in the 70s when the U.S. intelligence services were caught screwing up. Now compare that to them being caught doing as bad or worse things over the last few years.)
Such scoring already occurs, the most obvious example I can think of is the security clearance process. It can be argued that such a filtering is necessary in order to keep those no good commies out, but consider the sort of self protecting cultural feedback loop that creates. I always had to stifle laughter when the question was asked "Have you ever belonged to an organization that advocates the overthrow of the USG?" I'm not laughing anymore, because depending on the interpretation of a couple of words, you can face some pretty serious consequences. US Code 18 § 2385 specifies "by force or violence", but I've never heard that qualifier used.
The gulf between the interviewer and interviewee has grown to the point that Janet Napolitano's report, advising LEAs of the domestic terrorism risk posed by veterans, caused a lot of soul searching among law enforcement.
Seriously? The prevailing biases of both, while not making them completely useless, prevent them from being a useful feedback mechanism. /r/politics sure isn't going to hold HRC accountable for an illegal email server. It's why /r/the_donald has become what it is.
My general feeling about r/the_donald is that it is a perfect example of Poe's Law [1] driving a feedback cycle of continued irrational extremism. I used to think i had a pretty good eye/ear for spotting subtle sarcasm and trolling, but I honestly haven't been able to tell what is a serious post in that subreddit for months now.
I think you may be reading it the wrong way. I've been in their IRC channel a few times - there is very little trolling happening in there, lots of genuine enthusiasm.
..combined with a stated and enforced policy of zero tolerance for public dissent, mostly as a defense mechanism from the divide-and-conquer concern trolls who tend to infest political communities. They characterize it as a "24x7 Trump Rally", and that's exactly what it is.
If you're more interested in the discussion than the echo chamber, there's /r/asktrumpsupporters. You'll find little of value on the main subreddit unless you actually support the guy.
The parent asked "What's the best we have?" and I think perhaps internet forums are probably the best tool we have for holding public figures to account right now. I can definitely imagine better tools, but I don't see any that actually exist.
Actually, the prevailing /r/politics groupthink overwhelmingly despises HRC. You'd be forgiven for mistaking /r/politics for a Fox News discussion board were it not for all the Bernie spam. I'm not a Clinton supporter, but I think it's funny how quickly they tossed her under the bus once they caught a whiff of the bern; it's shameless.
/r/politics hates Clinton. You're thinking of /r/HillaryClinton. You won't find anything negative towards Hillary there; just try saying anything negative and see how fast you get banned. /r/politics is dominated by Bernie supporters, which isn't too surprising considering the demographics of the site. Bernie (similar to Obama in '08, but even more so) is absolutely the favorite of the under-30 crowd by a gigantic margin, so it makes sense that a site (and sub-forum) dominated by young people will be a Bernie echo chamber. Now of course, there are people who aren't Bernie fans, so they've gone and made their own subreddits like /r/HillaryClinton and /r/the_donald, but those don't have nearly the number of subscribers as /r/politics.
I hope you are joking. Popular/big subreddits are astroturfed like crazy and often have mods devoted to controlling the narrative. Example: you'll have to search long and hard before finding anything positive about Trump in r/politics.
Re: HN. The comparatively smaller size and narrower focus helps. Good luck to anyone that says anything out of line with the site's group-think, however. Even if you are as respectful as possible you'll be downvoted at a minimum. Keep it up and you'll be shadowbanned in favor of "keeping the peace".
> I hope you are joking. Popular/big subreddits are astroturfed like crazy and often have mods devoted to controlling the narrative. Example: you'll have to search long and hard before finding anything positive about Trump in r/politics.
Astroturfing definitely explains the heavy Sanders biases at /r/politics, but the anti-Trump bias there doesn't even require astroturfing. Reddit is overwhelmingly left-leaning, significantly harder than the general public. Add that to the fact that Trump doesn't even do well in the general public, the anti-Trump narrative in /r/politics isn't even surprising.
I wouldn't be so quick to call the pro-Sanders bias of /r/politics astroturfing. If /r/politics is truly as left-leaning as you say (I agree), then it is expected that they would prefer Sanders ideologically over Clinton (who, 30 years ago, would be considered a moderate Republican).
And that is before issues with her record come into play: the internet is exceptional at revealing politicians' flip-flops and lies. This hurts Clinton, so you'd expect more bias against her.
So there is definitely a bias, but remember, this is a community which celebrates 4/20. That they'd oppose a candidate who wants to keep the consumption of marijuana as a felony should not be considered artificial.
Putting a lot of weight on the "like" part of that statement, I agree - but likely for very different reasons. I look forward to the continued trend of balkanization in political and moral thought, because the lauding of compromise has brought us to the point where we've got two parties bickering over distinctions without a difference. One is statist and the other is corporatist, both equally self protecting and resistant to social change. Looking at the GOP blessed candidates over the past several years it is easy to see why republicans have basically strapped on a dynamite vest this election cycle. I look forward to seeing the democrat equivalent who, being similarly extreme, would either be Mussolini or Jefferson.
My hot take is that a medium like Wikipedia with its naïve penchant for sourcing and attribution is not the best place for astro-turfing and, ironically, un-Correcting The Record.
Selective sourcing and misdirection is easier on twitter than on a collaborative resource like Wikipedia.
There are ways to do it, and it is done regularly. If you have a badtruth that you want to share, you don't put it in the main article. You put it in a related article where it mentions the subject tangentially. It can fly under the radar of ideologues for a long time that way.
Honestly though, this isn't an astroturfing move as much as it's a defense against the people that camp on articles removing anything that they think makes whatever their political position is look bad.
Wikipedians are often wrong, but have learned to be more vigilant regarding claims about public officials.
Selective sourcing and misdirection are even easier when you own the "media" outlet. Brock's takeover of Blue Nation Review is a shameless reshaping of liberal media to fit the Clinton agenda - a super PAC aligned with a candidate owning a "news" source.
It's probably a smart political move this election, but along with the $1M Correct the Record push for online messaging, shows how Clinton can't gather the kind of young grassroots support that Obama and Sanders could.
The "organic" "cross-pollination" is perhaps the most amusing. For example, the non-organic Brock-funded "Bros 4 Hillary" group receives coverage in the Blue Nation Review, and then lauds its accomplishments in grass-roots organizing. Enough to be published even!
Just because it has happened in the past, doesn't mean the government can't be forced to change.
However, it's that sort of defeatist attitude that:
1) is contagious and makes most people who read it to think the same way. In other words, such comments actively harm any potential progress, even if the authors think that "they are simply stating the obvious."
2) makes those in power see that the People aren't outraged about their actions "because it's expected," which gives them an even bigger incentive to keep doing those actions because they know no one expects them to be punished.
> Nothing was done when Bush did it, nothing will be done now that is Hillary doing it and don't expect anything different regardless of what party manage to snag the congress and White House.
It is hopeless to expect voluntary transparency by the government...
Well, not only that, but transparency rules create certain perverse incentives. If all emails are discoverable, for example, then people will simply tend to shift their meaningful conversations to the phone.
If there are emails that were deleted in a .pst file, they are (or at least were back when I was a MS desktop admin 8ish years ago) entirely recoverable by remapping the index at the head of the file (i.e. the messages are "soft-deleted")...should be a piece of cake to recover...
It increasingly seems that they knew what they were doing since the beginning when they decided to use the private server rather it being a mistake/oversight. One can just hope this drama gets over before the convention.
They don't have a PST archive, but they still have at least some of his emails. FTA:
> “The absence of this email file, however, does not indicate that the department has no emails sent or received by him,” she added. “In fact, we have previously produced through [the Freedom of Information Act] and to Congress emails sent and received by Mr. Pagliano during Secretary Clinton’s tenure.”
The RNC also said they have no text messages or blackberry messages sent to or form Clinton during her time in office lol the state department declined to discuss that, isn't that nice.
"In addition to the emails, the State Department also does not have any text messages or BlackBerry Messenger messages sent to or from Clinton during her time in office, the RNC claimed. The State Department declined to discuss that declaration."
I have a feeling that this case is going to be studied for years no matter how it turns out.
In ethics the appearance of impropriety is generally considered enough to be a breach. I think most independent observers would admit that there's plenty of bad-looking stuff here, however with the election season in full swing I could be wrong.
More interesting, I imagine, is the legal maneuverings going on. Assuming that something went way wrong here, and please enough with the clintonesque tu quoque arguments, it's fascinating comparing what happened to the witnesses after the investigation was launched here compared to, say, aaronsw.
In Aaron's case, a school set up a camera and caught him accessing files he shouldn't. In the Clinton case, scads of sensitive emails were sent all over the internet from a server that shouldn't be handling them.
The difference in evidence here looks astounding, especially if you know something about email.
In the first case, a lone prosecutor is able to use the full force and weight of the U.S. government to harass and threaten. There's a small number of people involved, limited resources, and lots of press.
In the second case, over a hundred FBI agents are working hard night and day, one supposes, but evidence goes missing, hard drives which need to be in evidence are instead sent to secure destruction facilities, and we can't even seem to be able to to locate low-value secondary information. Press consists of lots of pieces slanted against the government's case.
My money says nothing comes of this. I'd give 50-50 odds that in some fashion it's tossed to the Congress to consider impeachment, and of course that'll never happen.
There are a lot more incredible contrasts between these cases. I hesitate to mention them due to folks getting upset about their political candidate not looking so good.
.pst? Microsoft Outlook? Really? Wasn't that software package very exploitable in the 08-12 timeframe? It seems likely the server was some version of Exchange.
Why would anybody in her right mind -- not to mention a powerful and visible government official -- operate her own email server?
In that timeframe there were several SaaS email providers that were very secure. A couple were even certified as HIPAA Associated Business Entities (for certain limited use cases). That's a high standard of security.
It's not hard to believe that servers for staff use operated by a department of the US federal government were ancient, poorly maintained, and vulnerable. It's almost certain they had unreasonable usage limitations. "Sorry, your mailbox contains 24 / 25 megabytes so it's almost full." Plus, they probably thought they were cool because they had a T1.
But why couldn't a powerful person like Secretary Clinton figure out how to contract with a competent SaaS? I bet the big email provider on Amphitheater Road would have jumped at this project.
Finally, how come nobody involved in this cluster*k has ever answered the question "why?"
> In that timeframe there were several SaaS email providers that were very secure. A couple were even certified as HIPAA Associated Business Entities (for certain limited use cases). That's a high standard of security.
Thank you for saying this.
In this crises we're comparing a government IT department that can't keep audit logs via .pst, imap, or exchange and comparing it to a non-cloud provided private email server.
Both should be considered inept in 2008 and certainly now. Unfortunately, the assumption is that the government IT is somehow trustworthy.
Makes me wonder whether NSA is seriously involved. If they were to have vacuumed up and provided all these deleted emails to the FBI in the course of this investigation, that will have been the absolutely most benevolent application of broad surveillance powers I can think of.
The NSA quietly and illegally helping an investigation into a presidential candidate in an election year is pretty much the antithesis of benevolence, regardless of what you think of Hillary. That kind of activity is basically worst-case scenario, war-on-democracy level stuff.
Good and bad. Good for the reason you said, but bad because those emails are 'lost'. Who knows what they could have contained. I hope the FBI can get to the bottom of this because there is probably a lot of sensitive information in them that she is trying to hide. Ugh I want her to get thrown in prison so bad.. but she's gotten out of so much crap so far, so who knows.
Money talks and she's got a ton of it. She's obviously paying off the right people.
After the Microsoft anti-trust trial, people started to realize just how much information there was in an email history log. Later trials just hammered it home.
In response, everyone added a chapter to their document retention policy to cover emails. Emails are typically kept for 1 year, with exceptions for specific named individuals (CEO, Member of Parliament, Senator, Secretary of State, you get the idea). Secretary of State's retention period seems to be 30 years [3].
Individuals would be able to mark a document to be kept, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
As soon as a court case where a person is mentioned starts, that person's documents are typically retained regardless of schedule - destroying docs that might be material is really frowned upon by the courts.
All of this is typically mediated by a custom document retention server which costs a lot of money.
The state department has a document retention policy [1], and I think this section [2] covers email. It lists retention at TEMPORARY:
Transitory Files (including in electronic form)
TEMPORARY: Destroy immediately, or when no longer needed for reference, or
according to a predetermined time period or business rule (e.g., implementing the
auto-delete feature of electronic mail systems).
There might be something specific, but they all seem to be 1-2 years.
With that in mind, let's look at this specific situation. The controversy started in March 2015. That puts Feb 2013 - the date the RNC is saying marks the end of the period they want revealed, outside of the document retention window (Controvery Start - 2 years).
However, once asked you have to _search_ for a record. So the State Department would have searched through backups, there may be an old tape sitting around containing a backup of his personal computer. Nope, they couldn't find a copy of the PST (Microsoft Exchange or Outlook!). They would have found emails that he was party to where the other person was on a longer retention schedule.
They may still find others if he sent emails to departments that don't have retention policies.
Since this is a government department, all of this is defined by statute - it's up to Congress to set the time periods. If they want it changed, they need to pass a bill and then fund it because document retention is expensive (think format conversion).
Finally, I understand that finance companies (stock traders) have additional retention requirements, even covering chat/SMS/etc messages.
There is no cover up here, just proper application of good policy.
Compared to possible life in prison, possible capital punishment, possible gitmo, currently exiled in Russia, I'd say losing one's job is a comparative slap on the wrist
His public service career may have ended, but he got gigs at several private firms, as well as Harvard, Exeter, and several other universities.
I think most people believe it's unlikely Clinton will serve any time for the email lapse; instead, she's considered the front-runner for the White House.
On the other hand, Snowden had to flee the country and, like Assange, he may never be able to set foot in a country with the relevant extradition treaties.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadThey don't even need a warrant.
https://www.aclu.org/doj-report-fbi-activities-under-section...
Essentially, it's to legal proofs what laundering is to money.
"Eventually, the NSA gained authority to "analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States", according to a 2007 Justice Department memo, which is marked secret."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/27/nsa-data-mining...
"The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873241082045790228...
PRISM is a program entirely for processing communications court-ordered to be collected from specific providers (not Clinton's mail server or other federal mail systems) for specific users (not Clinton).
If not then they could just ask GCHQ or CSEC for a copy.
Also, at what point do you get upset about tax dollars being wasted to investigate something to death. Couldn't we be spending this money on better things?
Evidence of corruption.
Once a countries laws become negligible, the country ceases to exist.
At what point does an investigation become a witch hunt? At what point does an investigation become waste? I think were at that point (or just slightly past) it.
The investigation has revealed some rather alarming things about our government:
1. The government doesn't have it's shit together when it comes to archiving email. Go figure, we all knew there was waste there but this is worse than any decent nerd ever expected.
2. Our classification system is a mess. The fact that we can retroactively classify something is INSANE. Documents got out that you don't like, classify them, then prosecute any journalist who writes about them.
3. The number of people recently (not just in clintons case) who have immunity for testimony is amazing. In the case of clinton it looks like there was/is some wrongdoing on the part of the staffer who RECEIVED immunity. We all understand this is a prisoners dilemma problem, but there are external ethics that we don't often think about: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2378070 -- and this doesn't even factor in outside actors (us) who are harmed by the crime.
4. After Chelsea/Bradley Manning(see note) released all the cables, it apparently had ZERO impact on the IT culture at the state department. You would think that after an issue like that, things would have been on lockdown, but apparently government doesn't learn from its mistakes.
Why isn't any one screaming on high about these things?
NOTE: The whole gender and name change thing is confusing when referring to something done under/by the old name/gender so I put both down.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/nsa-re...
“Each time we asked the question 'What was the solution for POTUS,' we were politely asked to shut up and color,” Donald Reid, State Department coordinator for security infrastructure, said in a 2009 email first obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by the political action group Judicial Watch.
The woman asked for a workable solution, one that former SofS had access to and was told no. She asked what POTOUS had and was told NO, and instead offered something 1/2 assed at best.
There is also the question of a foundation staffer having highly compartmentalized data from the NSA... that is, to say the least, interesting as it apparently came from an "outside source". The story as it is being presented is NSA->leak-> Blumenthal -> clinton. One would think that this would have lead to a swift inditement of him (Blumenthal), yet nothing.
I suspect that there is a LOT more to this portion of the story that has NOTHING to do with Clinton, and it might make one want a tinfoil hat.
It is almost like she doesn't give a damn what you think. I'm beginning to not give a damn about her.
She remembered how the Republicans witch-hunted her before, and wanted to keep all her stuff under her control so they couldn't FOIA all her stuff.
I empathize with that. I really do. But there's no exception to FOIA for "the people who want the information are meanie heads."
Irrespective of your political leanings, what is the magic behind making emails disappear? Is it incompetence, gross-negligence. I think, its another standard DC "plausible deniability".
"In addition to the emails, the State Department also does not have any text messages or BlackBerry Messenger messages sent to or from Clinton during her time in office, the RNC claimed. The State Department declined to discuss that declaration."
I'm hardly a Clinton apologist, but I'd like to make sure, before I criticize her of something, that there is actually evidence.
Not necessarily. General Petraeus purposely handed over documents to his biographer / girlfriend, and he got nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
It seems again to be a high court / low court thing. If you're important enough, your crimes get you lesser sentences, but if not, they throw the book at you.
> leaks of classified information to the press have relatively infrequently been punished as crimes, and we are aware of no case in which a publisher of information obtained through unauthorized disclosure by a government employee has been prosecuted for publishing it.
https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/secrecy/R41404.pdf
Remember this was Exchange 2003/2007. It sounds like they didn't have an archiving solution, so most users would probably use Outlook rules or manual actions to move data from their 50/100/250MB mailbox to a PST file on their local PC. Once you do that, it's up to the user to retain or not retain email. It's not a criminal act to clean up old files.
The "fishy" part is a twist on this that isn't in the news -- the use of external BlackBerry devices for stuff other than email. I'll bet you that anything of a substantive nature that was communicated with Clinton was done via PIN messages on the Blackberry devices -- data which was never accessible by anyone other than those folks who had a means to capture and decrypt them in transit. The other thing with PIN messaging is that they were device based, so even if you intercept, you need to establish who had physical custody of the device.
Even files create in the numerous IT applications are not part of the official record unless that applications was designated a system of record.
We don't know how many of Clinton's top IT aide's e-mails were official government records.
Speculation & Proposition: Since he worked to set up an extra-governmental private server which could potentially be used to hide governmental records, that number should be strictly greater than zero.
If an email came from the Secretary, yes. But other than that, no.
When I was a federal employee we took yearly training on this exact topic and the rules for what qualifies as a federal record are surprisingly inclusive. The few exclusions include emails that are purely personal and announcements sent to a wide audience.
All government employees and contractors undergo annual records retention training that requires them to be aware of the obligation to retain relevant communication for the required time period. It even breaks down what emails should be deleted and which ones should be retained. [2]
[1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/mar/12/...
[2] http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/bulletins/2014/2014-06....
Emails from top-level officials like heads of cabinet agencies are part of the official record. Emails from rank and file employees typically are not.
There are well over 2.6 million people in government (over 4 mil counting the military) and hundreds of thousands of contractors. If even 10% of all those emails had to be archived and stored in the National Archives it would constitute an enormous amount of data, much of it of little use.
> All government employees and contractors undergo annual records retention training that requires them to be aware of the obligation to retain relevant communication for the required time period.
I can assure you that record retention training is not standard nor is it annual at State Department. Wasn't that way at DoD in the past either. Some jobs and offices would deal with it a lot more than others but regular joes and janes don't deal with that issue much.
I never claimed that the National Archives performed the records retention. Each individual was required to perform their own retention up until each class of records' retention expiration.
It feels unintuitive, but that was indeed the standard. It is probably still that way, but I no longer work in that sector so I can't authoritatively state that.
Personally, I find it frustrating when commenters on HN make a statement with an authoritative tone without citation or definitive knowledge, just because they truly believe something must be so. It is in fact contributing to noise, not signal.
[1] personal experience
I suppose that the head of State (who was that again?) can't be expected to follow correct procedure if they weren't properly trained. If only there were a diplomat running the department at that time who could have directed that all relevant staffers and heads of state received proper training.
Hopefully this carelessness doesn't affect the importance that staffers give to using proper procedures for handling classified documents.
In all seriousness, that is what this part of your position reduces to: the head of a department didn't break any rules because they didn't receive the proper training. You hopefully can see why people might see that as a problem, even if not a crime.
There is mandatory training on security and handling classified materials.
I'm not saying Clinton didn't receive proper training on either NARA compliance or handling classified material. It just appears that she circumvented the spirit of the archival rules buy maybe not the letter.
Classification-wise it sounds like the information was not marked as classified when it was sent to Clinton. If something is changed to classified after the fact that doesn't mean the recipient of the information committed a violation.
Now if it turns out Clinton knowingly handled classified materials on unclassified systems that would be a security violation. Then the question would get into intent and impact to determine what charges and punishment would be warranted. Usually there has to be some intent and an attempt to distribute classified info before jail time comes into play.
Hillary's problem is that she was handling classified material. The Manning case is a good example of what happens when a peon breaks those rules.
> All criminal laws require a certain level of intent and, in the area of classified document cases, the intent to disclose it to someone not authorized to receive it," says Lowell, who has a long history of defending politicians in ethics cases, and served as chief counsel to the House Democrats during Bill Clinton's impeachment proceedings. "Secretary Clinton's use of an email server was [for correspondence with] her own staff and other officials. It was not [intended to be provided] to the press or to a foreign country or any other entity, so it would be ridiculous [for her to] even be considered charged under these laws.
The emails also weren't classified at the time.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-email...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_United_States_websi...
Yes, email classifications can be changed after the fact, but that in and of itself would not constitute wrongdoing by the Secretary. Colin Powell did exactly the same thing and wasn't punished after the fact either.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/us/politics/hillary-clinto...
Saying it was not considered sensitive at the time is exactly why the government defaults to sensitive and will change it later. Additionally, managing your own server off to the side when you are a high ranking government official just looks suspicious.
I understand somebody being paid by the Democratic party or one of Hillary's SuperPACs to try to push this argument, but for a regular citizen to attempt it shows just how successful the suggested partisanship of the US political system is in dividing regular citizens to act against their own best interests.
I mean, that's the only thing I can conclude. If you're assuming a priori that there's a crime, then you're putting the cart before the horse.
When you're assuming that counter points can only come from some sort of paid posters, you're being disrepectful.
This is why political topics are bad in HN. There's no news for nerds in here, just lots of people playing fast and loose with the facts to score political points.
It's not a defense, it's a counter to the idea that "if anyone else did this, they'd be fired and charged". Obviously that's not true, because (as noted in the comment to which you replied) others did it and no one was fired or went to jail.
But Powell and Rice, occupying the same level of power as Clinton during her term, I understood it as a condemnation of the privileges of political power in general and not a privilege of a particular political party.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/us/politics/hillary-clinto...
Not really sure what the huge difference is in this case.
"Mrs. Clinton is not the first government official — or first secretary of state — to use a personal email account on which to conduct official business. But her exclusive use of her private email, for all of her work, appears unusual, Mr. Baron said. The use of private email accounts is supposed to be limited to emergencies, experts said, such as when an agency’s computer server is not working.
“I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a high-ranking official at an executive branch agency solely used a personal email account for the transaction of government business,” said Mr. Baron, who worked at the agency from 2000 to 2013.
Regulations from the National Archives and Records Administration at the time required that any emails sent or received from personal accounts be preserved as part of the agency’s records.
But Mrs. Clinton and her aides failed to do so."
That is pretty much the most minor and least relevant issue with Clinton's case.
Can you be specific with what this means? I hear this comparison all the time yet it never seems to be articulated.
What did she do that would lead her to have been fired "on the spot"?
My understanding is that neither state.gov nor "Hillary email server" are "secure" for classified information. And it seems like over the course of investigating "Hillary email server" ~20 emails have been identified as containing information that should have been considered "Top Secret".
But that poses the question - why was that information being emailed around at all? Who sent it? Who is liable? How did it get on email systems connected to the open web?
Or is there just a certain level of classified information that is expected to be mishandled over the course of time?
And is this like information that is being directly copied from clearly classified reports? Or is this accidental references to topics that should not be discussed in email messages sent over the open web?
I imagine these are all questions are being confronted by the FBI. But it seems pretty common to encounter comments along the lines of yours: Hillary is definitely in the wrong and every one knows it. But I do not see that yet.
The problem with classified or even just sensitive information is that it is hard to know what is what. For example a list of naval ship names is likely not sensitive information. That same list with some grouping may suddenly be sensitive. For this reason, it is good to assume all government communications someone at that level is having are at a minimum sensitive and should always be on government property.
Information is born classified, markings are irrelevant. Clinton had to sign a document affirming her understanding of this in order to gain access to classified information in the first place.
As for the crimes she committed, here are a few good candidates:
Exactly. I really wish the whole "it wasn't classified at the time" argument would die already.
Not sure what you mean by this. An enormous amount of effort is expended in government to mark classified and confidential documents properly, set their disposition dates, record who classified it and why, and so forth.
Classification is not just determined at the time of the creation of a document/artifact, it can be changed as a result of being coupled with other information, or by changes in circumstances, or simply by different readings of by different people.
The end being, proper handling.
The State Department's review said they should have been classified at the time.
“These emails were not retroactively classified by the State Department. ... Rather these emails contained classified information when they were generated and, according to IC classification officials, that information remains classified today. This classified information should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system.”
That's from the inspector generals at the State Department.
The issue is that she was apparently told to use the .gov email address provided to her by her work, and she did this instead.
People have accused her of doing this for various reasons, but personally I don't believe there's evidence to show that she did this for any other reason than wanting to stand out and look special by sending mail from hillary@clintonemail.com, and so that she could use her own BlackBerry.
The issue was and is only with her use of a privately run SMTP server for her government job. There's three key problems, first off it avoids FOIA requests, secondly it can avoid other legal discovery, and lastly information was sent through it of a sensitive nature.
And before someone replies with "nothing was sensitive!" if that were true then why has the government redacted and withheld emails from the public? And retroactive classification is largely a myth, things inherit classifications from their source.
So for example if you attend a classified meeting and you or your staff take notes on that meeting, those notes are classified at the second pen touched paper. It doesn't matter than it lacks a classification marking.
Personally, I think secretary-of@state.gov would be a much better vanity email address than <myname>email.com.
Even if the only reason was to have a custom domain, I'm sure the State Department's IT team could point the MX records to a government-managed mail server.
And that's for a lowly developer job dealing with absolutely no classified information.
You'd probably still catch some flak but you might have enough power/influence to actually do it whereas if you're employee #42593 of a big company there's no way in hell you're gonna get your way.
Similarly, Clinton will probably get away with it. That doesn't excuse her behavior though. Might does not make right.
Hopefully she'll keep that character flaw in check as president, but I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't.
I think that's a bit of a misreading of the situation. First, Clinton was allowed to use a non-state.gov email address as Sec of State. Colin Powell did exactly that and ran into the same problem of some unclassified emails being classified after the fact.
Secondly, the Sec. of State has original classifying authority so there are things she can do with respect to classifications that a normal person with a clearance cannot.
Third, State Dept emails sent over the open internet are not meant to be classified, there are other secure networks for that. This is not a case where someone was intentionally handling classified material on a system it should not be handled on.
Lastly, deleting emails does not mean a crime was committed. People delete emails all the time, people fail to archive their emails all the time. Now, with the State Dept there is an archiving requirement with NARA for official email. But would the aide's emails fall under that? Probably not.
Now if there were criminal charges pending or a subpoena and Pagliano destroyed emails to get around that, it would be a different story. But to date, that doesn't seem to be the case.
Clinton showed poor judgement in setting up her own email server simply because she of all people should know there is a target on her back and that the use of a personal email server might look suspicious. But as of yet there hasn't been any clear evidence of criminal wrongdoing. That could still change but I think the likelihood of a smoking gun has gone down considerably.
The truth is like poetry and everyone hates poetry.
Was she subpoenaed before or after the deletion occurred?
If nobody can show she was subpoenaed before the deletion occurred, then you're still engaging in idle speculation.
Does that change your response?
I am no fan of the NSA, but the handling and sending/receiving of what was clearly classified info was clearly done.
http://observer.com/2016/03/hillary-has-an-nsa-problem/
(I am speaking to the wider issue, not the specific issue of 1 guy's email archive, as you also seem to be.)
The information that was emailed to Clinton was sensitive but only supposedly from a classified source. There is no proof that it was, just accusations.
That's not clear at all.
* Blumenthal somehow got his hands on classified info from NSA
* He pulled some of that information into an email to Clinton's public email address
* Clinton at that point could have classified the email herself, or not. The information was not labeled as classified in that email.
The question there is how did Blumenthal get his hands on that information? That means there was some unauthorized disclosure on the NSA's end. The only way Clinton would be on the hook for that is if she solicited that information or knew about Blumenthal obtaining it illegally.
The argument can be made that she should've recognized that the email contained sensitive information and should be classified. But it is not a crime for someone with original classifying authority to decline to classify something that was labeled unclassified when it reached their hands.
The problem with your view is that it is not based on what the law actually is.
Clinton was required to report the unauthorized disclosure of classified info. But she didn't.
By your argument, if someone takes a photocopy of a document but puts a blank piece of paper over whatever mark indicates it as "top secret", whoever they then hand that photocopy to is excluded from any liability. That is not how it actually works, however.
BTW if the info came from NSA, they are the agency that determines its classification. Not Clinton.
If she knew the origin of the information, yes. It seems like no one is saying she knew where the information came or that it was classified. The argument can be made that she should have known but that's a more difficult thing to prove when it comes to holding people accountable.
> By your argument, if someone takes a photocopy of a document but puts a blank piece of paper over whatever mark indicates it as "top secret", whoever they then hand that photocopy to is excluded from any liability. That is not how it actually works, however.
It comes down to whether you know the nature of the information should have made something classified or the origin of the information should have made it classified. Certain types of information would clearly scream "Classified!" regardless of whether it was written on a napkin. Nuclear information, identities of covert operatives, military plans, terror intel, etc. would fall under that umbrella.
Other things aren't so clear cut. Information obtained from an intercept might not raise alarm bells if you didn't know the info came from an intercept. Then there are times when unclassified or sensitive information from multiple sources can combine to create a classified document. The individual pieces of info are not classified but the synthesis is. At that point one would have to rely on someone making the judgement call correctly.
> BTW if the info came from NSA, they are the agency that determines its classification. Not Clinton.
Yes they can classify the information upon its creation. But they could also release it as unclassified or sensitive, then down the line someone else could elevate it to Secret or Top Secret. That person could be anyone with original classifying authority like Clinton.
In this case, Blumenthal somehow got a hold of information that was classified from the NSA, then he made a derivative summary of it. He and whoever leaked the info should be on the hook for that. Clinton would only be on the hook if she knew the info was classified.
By whom? Even the SOS she is required to follow the rules. She did not.
"Secondly, the Sec. of State has original classifying authority so there are things she can do with respect to classifications that a normal person with a clearance cannot."
But she cannot declassify emails.
"Third, State Dept emails sent over the open internet are not meant to be classified"
What actually happened remains to be seen and may never see the light of day.
And then there's intent. One must ask "Why did she request that a separate server be set up?" and then follow her answer to the base of her justification. Why her request? Is her justification valid? Was she ignorant of the ramifications (also bad if you're running for the Presidency)?
In the end one faces the dilemma "Was Hilary evil and deceptive or merely incompetent?" Having read about her part in the Whitewater scandal:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/whitew...
which is titled
"Hillary Clinton and the Whitewater Controversy: A Close-Up" By David Maraniss and Susan Schmidt Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, June 2, 1996
I know where I come down.
> And then there's intent. One must ask "Why did she request that a separate server be set up?" and then follow her answer to the base of her justification. Why her request? Is her justification valid? Was she ignorant of the ramifications (also bad if you're running for the Presidency)?
These are all good questions. It sounds like she wanted to retain her personal email and be able to field personal business from that same account.
However, as it stands she wasn't required to provide any sort of official justification.
I often wonder if anyone told her how bad this could look for her, and whether she listened or not. I know from people that have worked directly with her that she is not particularly tech-savvy, but that could mean that maybe she thought having a personal server would shield her in ways it cannot, or it could mean that she didn't think it would be a big deal at all. Either way, poor judgement I think.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/mar/...
If you want to get very specific, yes, Colin Powell wasn't using colin@colinpowell.com as his email. But the issue is the same, although as I said, his reason for doing was different.
Except she could have done that with her .gov email. Classification laws state she can delete personal emails from her .gov account without fear of wrongdoing. So your theory falls flat.
One reason she might have wanted to setup her own private email server was to skirt FOIA requests. Which seems plausible since there were numerous FOIA requests during the Benghazi ordeal. All of which were replied to with 'we have no emails'. It took Syndey Blumenthal's AOL account to be compromised for everyone to discover Clinton's private email server.
This is unlikely. It has to do with her addiction to Blackberry phones and the fact they were insecure. She refused to give up using it. The email server was hosted at home since her 2008 campaign.
I assume she just continued to use the server afterward.
She even contacted the NSA to find a solution to keep using her Blackberry but they couldn't find one. It was just too insecure.
Edit: upon further investigation you might be right...
> One year earlier, during her own presidential campaign, Clinton had said that if elected, “we will adopt a presumption of openness and Freedom of Information Act requests and urge agencies to release information quickly.”
> But in those first few days, Clinton’s senior advisers were already taking steps that would help her circumvent those high-flown words, according to a chain of internal State Department emails released to Judicial Watch, a conservative nonprofit organization suing the government over Clinton’s emails.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-clintons-e...
False. Not on materials created by the CIA, NSA, etc. She would have no authority on those, and those are what everything is about.
She can't unilaterally declassify anything so if another agency sent something classified to her, she could not lower the classification.
If something came from one of the intelligence agencies that was Secret or Top Secret, it would not be sent over the open internet to her public email. That would be a security violation on the part of the sender.
Classified items were sent to her to her private email address. Her server, which she had setup for herself, contained those classified items. That is against the law. It is also against the law to handle classified items in a way that puts them at risk.
She is responsible for the content of her server, and therefore broke the law. That she somehow didn't recognize classified material isn't a defense. The people who sent her the classified materials also broke the law (especially since they may have removed any classified markings from the documents).
If something is not marked properly, the receiver doesn't automatically get a security violation.
http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/bulletins /2014/2014-06.html
Regardless of whether or not she is guilty, that flow of logic is deplorable and anyone who follows it is only contributing to the the problem of crooked politics. God damn American politics is fucked up.
You're suggesting that the best way to fix american politics is to let trump burn it down, and build a new nation from the ashes?
I don't see why even your characterization of the situation is "deplorable." Let's accept that Clinton is a "criminal" -- that doesn't necessarily disqualify her for public office, so the question becomes whether it bothers voters enough to matter. Personally, I think Donald Trump would be the worst president in the history of the United States. I have lots of opinions about lots of politicians, but he's probably the only one that I'm genuinely scared of.
I'd prefer almost anybody over Trump -- that Clinton may have broken federal laws is just another bullet point in the pros/cons list. I'd have voted for Eugene Debs while he was literally in prison, and hundreds of thousands of people did.[1]
People bemoan the whole "lesser of two evils" thing, but I always wonder: What's the alternative? I'm not saying that I give up on improving the system, because there's a lot that could be improved. But "lesser of two evils" is just a negative way of saying "my preference."
Politicians have a zillion positions, you're never going to agree with one 100% -- and if you do, great, but that means there are literally millions of other people who don't. You pick the one who gets the government a step closer to what you want it to be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
Why? You want another lawyer as president?
Think of Trump as what he is: a businessman becoming intimately familiar with national politics for the first time. He's being brought up to speed on almost every social topic under the sun. He doesn't have the lifetime of bias that most politicians have (e.g., 20 years of working in the House, Senate, or some federal bureaucracy).
He will be asking questions: crazy questions, dumb questions, smart questions, questions everyman asks.
If you never shuffle the cards then you'll always be dealt from a stacked deck. Trump will shuffle the cards. So it's like randomization/Monte Carlo in machine learning.
We've had decades of lawyers and professional politicians; let's give a real person a chance to be president. Personally I would have preferred a more common man, but I doubt others would have that, because we are primates with social hierarchies.
Trump will be like FDR: desperate to get something done and willing to try whatever it takes to do it but constrained by the law. I like that - it's the "American way"!
But I honestly think Biden could do the same thing, for different reasons, if he would only step out and speak for himself.
I'll avoid invoking Godwin's law, but that's a very dangerous thing to accept. I personally do not have any interest in voting for someone who does not believe in freedom of religion or speech. If elected, I genuinely fear for the continued legality of dissent.
His only saving grace is that he's probably going to be too ineffectual to get much done. That's what's terrifying about Clinton: she's overwhelmingly competent and completely amoral.
"Clinton: she's overwhelmingly competent and completely amoral."
Well, the email investigation would tend NOT to paint her as "overwhelmingly competent" in technical, legal or political senses. Whitewater paints her as a competent and skilled lawyer and quite able to walk a fine line.
I agree she's "completely amoral".
I don't view "incompetent + amoral" as good qualities for a president.
Not at all true.
Joe Biden, "Trustworthy, loyal,... clean and reverent.", is standing in the wings. He is a more capable opponent for Trump than Hilary and would likely pull many conservatives, especially those who doubt Trump's creds, to the Democrat side.
I am no Pro-Hilary person but I always ask for what and get weird remarks that never mean anything solid. They also don't know anything about the George W Bush's White House use of unoffical email.
[1] https://informedvote2016.wordpress.com/2016/03/18/do-i-reall...
People seem to treat it like hse email stuff directly to N. Korea and China on military instulations and nucealer weapon plans.
We Americans live in a very corrupt system, where the people/corporations in charge have absolute power over all. It's spread out over multiple organizations
We live in a time where the corruption is being exposed, but nobody is doing a damn thing about it. Maybe we are all too afraid of getting jailed, beaten, losing our jobs or killed by "law" enforcers.
Regardless - We must wake up and shine a light on the corruption. Voting will not work, it never has and it never will as long as the corrupt persons are managing the entire system.
You cannot go against this system with violence, they are ready for it & they will use it against you or a form of it (terror, fear).
Only though peace can we achieve change. If you desire change and are not afraid of losing what you have, your life, your loved ones then find peace within yourself. Don't participate in the corruption. Look within. Starting being peaceful in your daily life. You cannot ever expect somebody else to espouse peace, it must come from each individual.
Do no harm to your self or to others. Regardless of what others may do to you.
Love & Peace
I have a feeling we're only getting one side of this (the State Department's) while the FBI already has these emails. The FBI would have no reason to chime in and tell the public "It's ok, everyone, we have those emails too." And the State Department obviously wouldn't have them since she wasn't using their email system.
I'm 99.99% sure nothing is missing here, it's just not where they expected it to be. Pagliano already struck a deal with the DOJ and appears to be cooperating, which probably isn't a good thing for Clinton.
No, not really - http://bigstory.ap.org/article/a2bf597d0dec4780af6f8710822ee...
Unless he changes his mind again or is compelled to testify...
What you're talking about are separate investigations by Senate committees. It's understandable that he has no desire to participate in those dog and pony shows.
[1] In the case of unconvicted persons (including competency commitments under 18 U.S.C. 4244 and 4246) held in federal institutions, interviews are not authorized until there is clearance with the court having jurisdiction, ordinarily through the U.S. Attorney’s Office. ..In other words, the people who would be prosecuting Clinton just gave Fox News, who they knew wouldn't hold back, a chance at interviewing the guy that can unravel this whole mess.
> The "gwb43.com" domain name was publicized by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who sent a letter to Oversight and Government Reform Committee committee chairman Henry A. Waxman requesting an investigation.
> Waxman sent a formal warning to the RNC, advising them to retain copies of all emails sent by White House employees. According to Waxman, "in some instances, White House officials were using nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications."
>The Republican National Committee claims to have erased the emails, supposedly making them unavailable for Congressional investigators
It is hopeless to expect voluntary transparency by the government, there is no incentive to
1) comply with the rules when transparency is clearly detrimental to your backroom deals or
2) to punish the very people that appointed you to your high positioned job or
3) to punish the opponents in the other party when they fail to comply while, after 4 years, the positions can be reversed and you may be in the crosshairs in a similar investigation.
Nothing was done when Bush did it, nothing will be done now that is Hillary doing it and don't expect anything different regardless of what party manage to snag the congress and White House.
If regulatory capture is a significant problem in the private sector imagine inside the government itself. It is hopeless.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv...
Incredibly, this line of inquiry has been dropped by CREW.
In many cases these systems are no longer working like they should. NGOs tried taking over that role.
Now we're seeing the NGOs being "strategically restructured"
Who's left? The press? They suck up to whomever is in power. If they don't, they get locked out. SV? All they care about is keeping the money machine going.
I'm looking around and not seeing much of an answer.
My concern is that in the near future we're going to start seeing citizens scored on how much of a threat they are to the government. The scoring will be driven by comments in forums such as these. And that scoring system will not distinguish folks who are peaceful yet very angry from folks who are very angry and could become violent.
Combine that with automated enforcement of laws and we could be in a real world of shit.
I don't care which party runs the government. I'll even say screw it about how big the government is. We can have that fight another day. But over the last decade or two we're seeing the feedback systems break down. That's totally fucked.
(For comparison, think about the political tornado that happened in the 70s when the U.S. intelligence services were caught screwing up. Now compare that to them being caught doing as bad or worse things over the last few years.)
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/chinas-nightmarish-cit...
The gulf between the interviewer and interviewee has grown to the point that Janet Napolitano's report, advising LEAs of the domestic terrorism risk posed by veterans, caused a lot of soul searching among law enforcement.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2385
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
..combined with a stated and enforced policy of zero tolerance for public dissent, mostly as a defense mechanism from the divide-and-conquer concern trolls who tend to infest political communities. They characterize it as a "24x7 Trump Rally", and that's exactly what it is.
If you're more interested in the discussion than the echo chamber, there's /r/asktrumpsupporters. You'll find little of value on the main subreddit unless you actually support the guy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/search?q=clinton&restrict_...
Re: HN. The comparatively smaller size and narrower focus helps. Good luck to anyone that says anything out of line with the site's group-think, however. Even if you are as respectful as possible you'll be downvoted at a minimum. Keep it up and you'll be shadowbanned in favor of "keeping the peace".
Astroturfing definitely explains the heavy Sanders biases at /r/politics, but the anti-Trump bias there doesn't even require astroturfing. Reddit is overwhelmingly left-leaning, significantly harder than the general public. Add that to the fact that Trump doesn't even do well in the general public, the anti-Trump narrative in /r/politics isn't even surprising.
And that is before issues with her record come into play: the internet is exceptional at revealing politicians' flip-flops and lies. This hurts Clinton, so you'd expect more bias against her.
So there is definitely a bias, but remember, this is a community which celebrates 4/20. That they'd oppose a candidate who wants to keep the consumption of marijuana as a felony should not be considered artificial.
Selective sourcing and misdirection is easier on twitter than on a collaborative resource like Wikipedia.
Honestly though, this isn't an astroturfing move as much as it's a defense against the people that camp on articles removing anything that they think makes whatever their political position is look bad.
Selective sourcing and misdirection are even easier when you own the "media" outlet. Brock's takeover of Blue Nation Review is a shameless reshaping of liberal media to fit the Clinton agenda - a super PAC aligned with a candidate owning a "news" source.
It's probably a smart political move this election, but along with the $1M Correct the Record push for online messaging, shows how Clinton can't gather the kind of young grassroots support that Obama and Sanders could.
It's nearly Kafkaesque.
Otherwise, you would need a combination of financial backing and access to the humans with correct connections to do the digging.
At the moment, The Intercept fulfills this niche, but it isn't a true successor to NGOs like CREW.
However, it's that sort of defeatist attitude that:
1) is contagious and makes most people who read it to think the same way. In other words, such comments actively harm any potential progress, even if the authors think that "they are simply stating the obvious."
2) makes those in power see that the People aren't outraged about their actions "because it's expected," which gives them an even bigger incentive to keep doing those actions because they know no one expects them to be punished.
Something already has been done. It is now illegal to do what Bush and Clinton did, though it wasn't at the time they did it. http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/03/03/the-new-york-tim...
Well, not only that, but transparency rules create certain perverse incentives. If all emails are discoverable, for example, then people will simply tend to shift their meaningful conversations to the phone.
> “The absence of this email file, however, does not indicate that the department has no emails sent or received by him,” she added. “In fact, we have previously produced through [the Freedom of Information Act] and to Congress emails sent and received by Mr. Pagliano during Secretary Clinton’s tenure.”
"In addition to the emails, the State Department also does not have any text messages or BlackBerry Messenger messages sent to or from Clinton during her time in office, the RNC claimed. The State Department declined to discuss that declaration."
In ethics the appearance of impropriety is generally considered enough to be a breach. I think most independent observers would admit that there's plenty of bad-looking stuff here, however with the election season in full swing I could be wrong.
More interesting, I imagine, is the legal maneuverings going on. Assuming that something went way wrong here, and please enough with the clintonesque tu quoque arguments, it's fascinating comparing what happened to the witnesses after the investigation was launched here compared to, say, aaronsw.
In Aaron's case, a school set up a camera and caught him accessing files he shouldn't. In the Clinton case, scads of sensitive emails were sent all over the internet from a server that shouldn't be handling them.
The difference in evidence here looks astounding, especially if you know something about email.
In the first case, a lone prosecutor is able to use the full force and weight of the U.S. government to harass and threaten. There's a small number of people involved, limited resources, and lots of press.
In the second case, over a hundred FBI agents are working hard night and day, one supposes, but evidence goes missing, hard drives which need to be in evidence are instead sent to secure destruction facilities, and we can't even seem to be able to to locate low-value secondary information. Press consists of lots of pieces slanted against the government's case.
My money says nothing comes of this. I'd give 50-50 odds that in some fashion it's tossed to the Congress to consider impeachment, and of course that'll never happen.
There are a lot more incredible contrasts between these cases. I hesitate to mention them due to folks getting upset about their political candidate not looking so good.
NBC says there are 12 FBI agents working on the case:
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fed-source-about-12-fbi-...
titled
"Fed Source: About 12 FBI Agents Working on Clinton Email Inquiry".
Undoubtedly they are a hand-picked group (although whose hand did the picking, I don't know).
Furthermore I fear that FBI agent Comey is in Clinton's pocket/corner. Comey gave Hillary Clinton a bye in the Whitewater investigation:
http://www.westernjournalism.com/wow-something-from-20-years...
Comey has done well in his career in the years since Whitewater.
"Official: FBI team on Clinton email probe not near 150" http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/how-many-fbi-agents-hi...
The Washington Post reports "dozens" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/28/th...
Why would anybody in her right mind -- not to mention a powerful and visible government official -- operate her own email server?
In that timeframe there were several SaaS email providers that were very secure. A couple were even certified as HIPAA Associated Business Entities (for certain limited use cases). That's a high standard of security.
It's not hard to believe that servers for staff use operated by a department of the US federal government were ancient, poorly maintained, and vulnerable. It's almost certain they had unreasonable usage limitations. "Sorry, your mailbox contains 24 / 25 megabytes so it's almost full." Plus, they probably thought they were cool because they had a T1.
But why couldn't a powerful person like Secretary Clinton figure out how to contract with a competent SaaS? I bet the big email provider on Amphitheater Road would have jumped at this project.
Finally, how come nobody involved in this cluster*k has ever answered the question "why?"
Thank you for saying this.
In this crises we're comparing a government IT department that can't keep audit logs via .pst, imap, or exchange and comparing it to a non-cloud provided private email server.
Both should be considered inept in 2008 and certainly now. Unfortunately, the assumption is that the government IT is somehow trustworthy.
In response, everyone added a chapter to their document retention policy to cover emails. Emails are typically kept for 1 year, with exceptions for specific named individuals (CEO, Member of Parliament, Senator, Secretary of State, you get the idea). Secretary of State's retention period seems to be 30 years [3].
Individuals would be able to mark a document to be kept, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
As soon as a court case where a person is mentioned starts, that person's documents are typically retained regardless of schedule - destroying docs that might be material is really frowned upon by the courts.
All of this is typically mediated by a custom document retention server which costs a lot of money.
The state department has a document retention policy [1], and I think this section [2] covers email. It lists retention at TEMPORARY:
There might be something specific, but they all seem to be 1-2 years.With that in mind, let's look at this specific situation. The controversy started in March 2015. That puts Feb 2013 - the date the RNC is saying marks the end of the period they want revealed, outside of the document retention window (Controvery Start - 2 years).
However, once asked you have to _search_ for a record. So the State Department would have searched through backups, there may be an old tape sitting around containing a backup of his personal computer. Nope, they couldn't find a copy of the PST (Microsoft Exchange or Outlook!). They would have found emails that he was party to where the other person was on a longer retention schedule.
They may still find others if he sent emails to departments that don't have retention policies.
Since this is a government department, all of this is defined by statute - it's up to Congress to set the time periods. If they want it changed, they need to pass a bill and then fund it because document retention is expensive (think format conversion).
Finally, I understand that finance companies (stock traders) have additional retention requirements, even covering chat/SMS/etc messages.
There is no cover up here, just proper application of good policy.
[1] https://foia.state.gov/Learn/RecordsDisposition.aspx
[2] https://foia.state.gov/_docs/RecordsDisposition/A-03.pdf
[3] https://foia.state.gov/_docs/RecordsDisposition/A-01.pdf
I think most people believe it's unlikely Clinton will serve any time for the email lapse; instead, she's considered the front-runner for the White House.
On the other hand, Snowden had to flee the country and, like Assange, he may never be able to set foot in a country with the relevant extradition treaties.
I think the high/low court point still stands.
You mean: Disclose that the intelligence apparatus is spying on its own citizens/taxpayers who pay their salaries?
There, fixed it for you.