Is the idea to attack her early so it burns out early, or is this genuinely to attack her? These articles really read like an episode of House of Cards.
Honestly I don't think the haters are capable of exercising restraint when it comes to attacking Clinton.
But if you want to be an optimist about humanity, you could assume that the timing of or level of attention given to this reveal is unrelated to election cycles and merely the natural pace of a crime being revealed and prosecuted.
I expect to see these kinds of things released/rehashed periodically until the conclusion of the race, or until Hillary drops out. That goes for the R's candidates as well.
Regardless if it is to stile a political run or to get the damage over and done with this is the type of behavior by top officials that needs to stop. Is Kerry doing similar? Who else is? There seems to be a concerted effort by the Administration and/or those in it to hide communication from the official record, being Hillary Clinton or Lois Lerner.
What happens to her because of this obvious effort to conceal is the most important aspect of the case. Will she get the wrist slap like Pretraeis and other friends of Washington get? Likely. Whereas everyday citizens are hounded to death by AGs and the like.
To be honest, government officials taking actions like this need to be treated like the criminals they are, they are purposefully betraying the public trust and hiding behind the power of their office and names to do it. The real one percent in Washington
The article says "Secretary of State John Kerry uses a government email account, and his correspondence is preserved as part of the department’s record-keeping system."
> Clinton was not the first secretary of state to use a private account. The State Department said Clinton’s successor as top diplomat, John F. Kerry, is the first secretary to use a standard government e-mail address ending in “state.gov.”
If you read the article linked here, the law was changed in 2009, partly as a consequence of the 2007 scandal in which some Bush emails weren't preserved because they were run off of a server managed by the RNC.
The agency must make sure that emails are being retained according to law. In any private enterprise that must retain records, there is exactly one way to do this: you use your employer's email server, which has a long audit trail and dedicated compliance officers.
pretty much her words about Benghazi and people got killed for our screw up there.
The point it makes is, this is not acceptable, should never be acceptable, and just because you weren't caught when you were in office is no excuse for not going after you.
It definitely seems less than ideal for these rules to be abused like this.
The problem is, how do you stop it?
It's unreasonable to expect all private communications to be on public record, and if you write a note to your babysitter during office hours, why should the wider world have to know about it?
"The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press."
[...]
"Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton's home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking."
They are probably talking about the DNS records. If you look up my domain, it will list my home address, but the server is not in my house. The second quote is pure conjecture once they didn't understand what a DNS record is.
> They are probably talking about the DNS records. If you look up my domain, it will list my home address, but the server is not in my house.
You mean the WHOIS records?
If so, I'm not sure it's so easy to simply dismiss "traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York" as referring to the WHOIS record. It sounds like they're looking at the IP address, in which case I guess it's technically possible that the actual mailserver isn't physically located at her home, but for the purposes of the article it'd be reasonable to say that she ran [part of] the service from her home.
I agree that it'd be preferable if they could explain what evidence they're actually basing this on, but it doesn't read to me like they're talking about the WHOIS.
I disagree. I think that statement makes far more sense if it means the WHOIS records than it does if they mean the physical server.
The key words are "registered to", which means nobody was able to trace the actual traffic to the home. Not that that would necessarily be easy, but in absence of that I think it's far more likely that she's not administering running mail servers from her home.
I'm sure they are. A dig on the current domain returns "clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogic.net." as one of the mail records, which has 4 A records, each which point to servers registered in Englewood, CO.
Note that MXLogic is a managed email service provided by McAfee.
MXLogic is a spam filtering system - I've used it with clients before. It will filter and then re-send emails to whatever system you choose. The email isn't "hosted" at MXLogic unless you tell it to archive email for you. Its typical config is to block spam/viruses and send along.
AP now claims the MX was Google and then changed to MXLogic.
Given that and what you say, the most likely scenario IMO is that she was getting too much spam and asked whoever was taking care of her IT to do something. They decided to front-end her email with MXLogic and it's still going to Google (but of course, we don't know for sure).
If so, the whole premise of the article (Some people use Google, but Clinton built her own server) is false.
Meanwhile, the AP thinks that Clinton's MX choices have to do with her feelings about China.
In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton's private email account was reconfigured to use Google's servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google's accusations in June 2011 that China's government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking.
This is another case where I wish they would just get some IT expert to look at the evidence and explain it technically (not dumbed down, not for a layperson). Maybe only technical people would understand, but at least the media record would be accurate.
Well, the specific law referenced here is a federal law which only applies to high ranking federal officials (e.g. Cabinet secretaries). It would apply to Clinton, but not to most of the people on your list.
"The head of each Federal agency shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities. (44 U.S. Code § 3101)"
The only relevant question is, "are emails 'records'?", and according to the State Department, the answer is yes:
"All employees must be aware that some of the variety of the messages being exchanged on E-mail are important to the Department and must be preserved; such messages are considered Federal records under the law. (5 FAM [Foreign Affairs Manual] "
And I might add that the accusation here is not that she had a personal account in addition to her official one, it's that she didn't have an official one at all.
In the corporate world, the generally accepted internal policy is that email is not a system of record, and that when documents (including the email itself) are sent or received via email, those must be exported separately and saved in whatever is the system of record. This, of course, flies contrary to the trends in e-discovery from a prosecutorial point of view, but it does make sense.
In the corporate world, the generally accepted internal policy is that email is not a system of record
Saying "email is not a system of record" is lot like saying "RAID is not a backup". Just because you don't use reliable a long term storage medium doesn't mean you don't have and use those records.
It doesn't even fly contrary to e-discovery, it's just a difference in multiple contextual definitions of "record."
That's more like saying "RAM is not durable storage, everything must be saved to disk for durability." It doesn't mean it's OK to run the office solely in RAM, it means the opposite.
It doesn't matter. Moral relativism is the name of the game. It would be interesting if the anti-Palin crowd would spend some time looking into all of the criminality from members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Have a look at this list of the most corrupt politicians in the US; then perhaps we can talk about Palin using yahoo. http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judic...
The fact is this, Palin matters because she's not a Democrat. Democrats have Stockholm Syndrome. When a Republican is corrupt, much of the time, they resign. When a Democrat is corrupt, they get reelected. Re: Marion Berry, Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel, Chris Dodd. Tom Delay was another bad one, however he was actually charged with a crime and he resigned.
Palin is nothing more than a proxy to rationalize bad behavior.
Democrats most definitely don't have a monopoly on corruption; however how Democrat voters deal with the corruption is markedly telling.
"Tom Delay was another bad one, however he was actually charged with a crime and he resigned."
And was then vindicated in the courts.
Texas has a weird arrangement where the very Blue Austin area prosecutor has a remit for political corruption in the entire state. The same officer recently indicted (now former) Governor Perry for threatening a veto, a rather unique take on a constitutionally enshrined executive action.
Why exactly would Clinton go to the trouble to set up a mail server? Did state.gov run out of email addresses? Given the Clinton history of obfuscation and secrecy, Clinton's intent was far from innocent. She went out of her way to do this. The question is why? Pointing a finger at Palin is silly. Palin didn't hire some mystery person to hide Cabinet level communicatiins from public scrutiny. Palin wouldn't be smart enough to have that sort of intent. The Clinton apologists are beyond help. Clinton could shoot a puppy on live TV at while at a Papal audience and someone would sputter that Palin once hunted moose. Remember this is the same Hillary Clinton that said she came under sniper fire during a Balkans visit. Brian Williams was crucified for the exact same chicanery and Hillary is being seriously considered as presidential material? The double standard is astounding. Brian Williams can't read the news but Hillary can run the country? Is half of America just brainwashed? Does the entire Democratic party have not a single trustworthy candidate that Clinton is the default? Even Elizabeth Warren lied about her being a Native American. Is there anyone else? I can deal with honest policy disagreements between Republicans and Democrats, but I can't abide politicians like Clinton that have made a career from deception. I am certainly no Obama fan, but I am glad he beat Hillary. She's pathological. America can do much better. We can dump all of the Karl Rove Republicans and the Clintonistas and our government would be a much better place. I have no use for the lot of them.
> The only relevant question is, "are emails 'records'?"
I don't know, I see other relevant questions. For instance, nothing in the quoted law says anything about how they shall "make and preserve" the records, only what purposes those records must be adequate to serve. So, using private email alone doesn't seem to be a violation, it seems to be something that might be the starting point for an inquiry as to whether she made and preserved "ontaining adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities", but it doesn't alone provide an answer to that question whether or not you consider emails as records.
Undoubtedly emails are records. This has been established in previous scandals from both parties that failed to retain them as required.
In the corporate world, if there were a legal requirement for compliance, the auditor would verify that all work email is going over work servers, and then review the policies in place on those servers. You could technically let a special employee run their own server, but then that server would need to be audited, and the policies in place there reviewed. "Nah, you can trust Joe" wouldn't cut it.
Otherwise the entire point of compliance laws just goes out the window.
> In the corporate world, if there were a legal requirement for compliance, the auditor would verify that all work email is going over work servers
Legal compliance audits that I have been involved in tend to go beyond what is unquestionably prohibited by the law and also seek to identify and eliminate activities which might arguably violate the law (and thus create legal risk) including, but not limited to, those which violate organizations internal guidelines which are based on the applicable law but whose requirements may be (generally, should be) more strict than the law itself.
There are three different, but related, categories into which this might fall, in decreasing order of breadth:
1) Behavior that would be of concern to a compliance audit focused on the law in question,
2) Behavior that would violate administration guidance related to achieving compliance with the law in question,
3) Behavior that actually violates the law in question.
You are arguing, and I agree, that it is #1. There are reports that administration sources have indicated that it is #2 (I see no reason to doubt them, though I haven't seen the actual guidance, so I don't have an informed opinion.)
Neither of those, however, is the same thing as it being #3.
As to #3, quoting from the article, as of 2009 (emphasis mine):
> agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.
How did they ensure this? As a few news stories, including the linked article, have reported, they would have been immune from FOIA requests.
> The fact that Clinton’s emails were not a part of official State Department records until recently means many of them would not have been located in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, subpoenas or other document searches conducted over the past six years
> As a few news stories, including the linked article, have reported, they would have been immune from FOIA requests.
They would not have been immune. They may have been overlooked in the course of handling such requests, although assuming anyone in the State Department offices responsible for conducting document searches in response to FOIA requests (or subpoenas, etc.) was aware of the practice, they quite probably wouldn't have been, there just would have been an extra step involved in handling the requests.
"Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to have operated in violation of what the White House said Tuesday was “very specific guidance” that members of the Obama administration use government e-mail accounts to carry out official business."
That can't be the only law that applies. Information derived from classified documents, that should be highly secured, is very likely to have moved through these unofficial channels.
Given that's black-letter illegal, I think that article isn't being quite accurate.
You can have and create a document-deletion policy, no problem. But -- and I've had this drilled into me at multiple employers, because it's really important -- once you are told by legal that an investigation is under way, you don't delete them, no matter what, until legal tells you otherwise. You take active steps to preserve them if need be.
Cuomo's optics suck, but unless you think he's criminally insane, he wouldn't delete emails while investigators wanted emails preserved. There's some part of the story we haven't heard.
IANAL but last time I went through compliance training, it was suggested that I could be personally criminally liable if my boss tells me to delete emails that I know have a legal hold on them.
I've also only seen this story in IBT, not elsewhere, and they carefully don't say that these records are part of the investigation, just that an investigation is happening and that emails are being deleted -- leaving it to the reader to connect the dots that don't necessarily exist.
Why would anyone want to delete emails, period? Anything government-related, HRC's emails included, should be archived ten ways to Sunday and kept forever.
How many of those were high ranking federal officials with access to confidential material at the time and have ambitions for running for President?
None of those even begin to reach the level of Clinton's conduct. She conducted ALL communications through the private email. None of the above used private emails exclusive. Most of them don't even sound like they used the private emails the majority of the time.
This is just an attempt at associating a larger issue with a bunch of smaller ones so people will think of it as a minor one.
Her Presidential ambitions are irrelevant to the question of whether or not the behavior was appropriate. Considering what other officials in similar positions have done is, however relevant. And the answer seems to be that it's mixed: John Kerry uses the official account, Colin Powell reportedly didn't, Condoleezza Rice reportedly did.
And he also set up his own mail server using mystery workers as well? He's running for President? He was a part of Obama's "most transparent administration in history?" It isn't a question of personal email or not; it's a question of intent. Why did Hillary go to the trouble? It isn't about the what inasmuch as it's about the why.
She could email her relatives asking about family health issues which she doesn't wanna share with anyone.
I don't think that a public figure, even in higher ranks, should be exposed to that kind of scrutiny. Privacy is a privilege which everyone should enjoy. Even those who are trying to literally kill it.
I'm as ignorant about this as I suspect everyone else here is (that is, we've seen reports in our respective favored news sources, but not read any source materials), but my understanding is that these are rules, not laws (thus, not what courts are for), and that it isn't clear the current rules were in place at the time (though I'm not sure why people aren't reporting on that facet more, because it seems important).
Yeah, the reporting on it hasn't been great, because the details aren't the story, the story is the name "Hillary Clinton". I'm very curious about the details of how this stuff works for all officials. Are there rules? What are they? Who do they apply to? Are there actual laws? If so, what are they? But "An Investigation Into Government Email Policy" would never be run on its own.
Why do you think General Petraeus just pleaded guilty in court? because of "rules" or "laws"? did Hillary Clinton send and store classified material with her non-government email account? will the law apply to her the way it has been applied to Petraeus?
1. Because he shared classified information with someone who did not have clearance to have it, which is against the law.
2. I don't know, do you? My guess is that, yes, she did.
3. It depends on whether shared classified information with anybody who did not have clearance. My guess is that, no, she didn't, or this would already be a much bigger story.
Using a personal email address is not the same as sharing classified information.
You can get clearance to store classified information at your home. For the vast majority of people it's nonsensical, but the Secretary of State is one of the few for whom I can see it without much trouble.
But this issue isn't (yet) about handling of classified material; it's about government oversight.
> will the law apply to her the way it has been applied to Petraeus?
Your phrasing is very apropos, since if the law is applied to her (which I believe is the question you are asking), it will almost certainly be applied to her "the way it has been applied to Petraeus", as opposed to the way it's applied to someone lower down the totem pole:
"[Former State Dept. official Stephen] Kim did not hand over a copy of the [classified North Korea] report — he just discussed it, and nothing else — and the report was subsequently described in court documents as a “nothing burger” in terms of its sensitivity. Kim is currently in prison on a 13-month sentence."[0]
For context, Petraeus "gave highly-classified journals to his onetime lover and that he lied to the FBI about it."[0]
>Use your personal email to communicate with your babysitter, and your official work email only for work stuff.
One problem with that. I have an official work (.edu) email that is practically useless. Constantly full of spam, both from outside, and from clueless employees. Domain gets blocked from sending to popular domains occasionally for mass spamming. Can't accept attachments (or rarely accepts them). High and unpredictable inbox latency. Goofy, insecure, obsolete pa55woRD! rules. etc. The .gov email addresses I have had from past jobs weren't always much better.
So I have an official work email, an unofficial work gmail, and a private email account for personal business.
But the larger point is that Clinton should have had some procedure to regularly archive her work-related comms (no matter what the method was).
>It's unreasonable to expect all private communications to be on public record, and if you write a note to your babysitter during office hours, why should the wider world have to know about it?
>It's a difficult balance.
No it's not, and you know it.
If you're discussing job-related matters, use your work email, not the system you had set up so that you could evade your workplace data-retention policies. Who knows; maybe Clinton and Blumenthal send all their "re: re: re: funny" cat pictures to each other through this, but I doubt it.
Any maybe your parents never taught you, but just because other people break the rules doesn't give you an excuse to break the rules. If only our politicians had any sense of right and wrong...
It's true. Some companies disallow it altogether. Everywhere else, it's just a bad idea (he says, typing this comment on his work laptop).
However, the answer is not to bring your personal equipment onto the corporate network. Which sucks because if you need to get something taken care of between 8 and 5, how are you going to manage that? Your options are limited if you don't have a guest network at work.
Yup. (As I type this on my work computer too). It sucks. The limited options are go someplace over lunch to get it done, take PTO if your employer is inflexible, or find a new employer.
Your personal, private, and confidential dealings while using employer provided equipment, networks, and time are anything but those things.
I work in a .gov and have had exposure to this issue directly in a few different contexts.
The advocates for full disclosure imo are biting their nose to spite their face. Normal people running everything from little leagues to major corporations use email for strategy development, information delivery, deliberative functions and other normal business processes.
Known figures in government cannot do that, because the second they do, that information is available to the universe. The consequence is that officials don't use email, and either go through couriers, use some grey area communications mechanism, or do something else that is lost to the public record. It's ridiculous that President Obama or any smart governor cannot have a computer on this desk because of this stuff.
I think the current law was designed for paper memos and letters and works counter to its intended goal. Leaders cannot lead if everything they write needs to be staged for this evening's news. There should be a long aging process for this type of material.
That's a good argument for changing the law. However, it is not a defense against Clinton breaking the current law. The President and other executive branch members can claim executive privilege which is the actual legal defense you describe.
Clinton did not claim executive privilege. She set up a secret email account in order to avoid disclosure laws. This criminal and corrupt action should disqualify her for presidential office.
It's not that she used a personal email account, it's that she set up a secret email server under a phony name in order to conceal her email records, which is a felony.
18 U.S. Code § 2071 - Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally
(a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.
The quip about everything being available to the news is not accurate. These are the sorts of records - only for official communications, mind you - that are only meant to come out years later (similar to classified docs) or in the case of legal action.
I also work for an organization where FOIA laws mean anything I produce is available to anyone who asks (and knows what to ask for). The purpose of laws like this is to prevent your elected and/or unelected officials from doing things that are detrimental to society. Those "couriers... grey area communications mechanism, or... something else that is lost to the public record"? Yeah, you're fucked if someone can figure out how to request those, because they're subject to the same laws, and it sure looks like you're trying to hide something.
Leaders cannot lead if they're working against the public interest. If they're not working against the public interest, then they can justify why they're doing what they do. Period.
Government policymakers deal with issues that involve organized labor, various special interests, and business interests.
By making things operate in a such a way that people cannot function in a modern manner, you're pushing much of the deliberative process away from written mediums to telephone and in-person meetings. By doing this, you're empowering people who have access to power (lobbyists, etc), in the name of transparency that is almost meaningless.
First of all, the FOIA process take a long time to go from request to release of documents. And there's all sorts of fudging along the way to either not release everything requested or redact what gets released. I'm sure even you agree with that.
Second, "cannot function in a modern manner"? If you're creating a public record, it's subject to FOIA. End of discussion. The point of FOIA is that you, as a creator of public records, cannot hide your work product from the people you serve. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, or so I've been told.
Yes, but that is self regulation. I think the point here is that, short of having convenient Romanian hackers break into the personal accounts of high ranking officials from time to time to update us, the state and the public have no way of knowing if they are using personal accounts for some of their communication. The only way to get around this would be to actively monitor all web activity by these officials to ensure that the National Archives are fully aware of all pertinent communication through any channel. Obviously this poses serious questions about privacy for public officials, but if they take a position of public office and have been shown to be deliberately subverting the system in place to keep them accountable, then perhaps that is what's necessary?
Various news reports say that Clinton literally did not have a state.gov address, so everyone she communicated with professionally for 4 years, including people at State, knew that she was communicating with her personal account. Not all of them were reporting to her, either.
Indeed. I would say this makes the issue even more difficult to deal with. As you say, people who weren't even reporting directly to her maintained the code of silence over breaching email account rules. If memebers of the government themselves aren't going to be whistleblowers then how can the use of personal accounts be monitored?
It's unreasonable to expect all private communications to be on public record, and if you write a note to your babysitter during office hours, why should the wider world have to know about it?
You can start by using your work email for all work-related purposes.
If someone on Wall Street refused to use work email -- which can be monitored by their employer -- for communicating with clients, it would stink to high heaven.
Eh? Everyone has work email and home email. Just use a state email address for government communications, your gmail to talk to your babysitter, problem solved. This isnt "difficult", it is a deliberate evasion.
The whole disclosure stems from hacking of another e-mail account, apparently.
The disclosure that Hillary Clinton used a non-governmental e-mail address while she was Secretary of State originally came courtesy of “Guccifer,” the Romanian hacker now serving time in a Bucharest prison for his online attacks against scores of public figures.
As TSG first reported in March 2013, “Guccifer” illegally accessed the AOL e-mail account of Sidney Blumenthal, who worked as a senior White House adviser to President Bill Clinton, and later became a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.
When “Guccifer” (who was later identified as Marcel Lazar Lehel) breached Blumenthal’s account, he discovered an assortment of correspondence sent to Hillary Clinton at the e-mail address hdr22@clintonemail.com. The “clintonemail.com” domain was registered in 2009, shortly after her nomination to become Secretary of State.[1]
They host with MX Logic[2], some McAfee's enterprise-y mail service. At least it wasn't statedeptsugarycake22@gmail.com.
The story seems a bit more complicated on how it was setup.
It was unclear whom Clinton hired to set up or maintain her private email server, which the AP traced to a mysterious identity, Eric Hoteham. That name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records or Internet background searches. Hoteham was listed as the customer at Clinton's $1.7 million home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua in records registering the Internet address for her email server since August 2010.
The Hoteham personality also is associated with a separate email server, presidentclinton.com, and a non-functioning website, wjcoffice.com, all linked to the same residential Internet account as Mrs. Clinton's email server. The former president's full name is William Jefferson Clinton.
In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton's private email account was reconfigured to use Google's servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google's accusations in June 2011 that China's government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking.
Then, in July 2013, five months after she resigned as secretary of state, Clinton's private email server was reconfigured again to use a Denver-based commercial email provider, MX Logic, which is now owned by McAfee Inc., a top Internet security company.
Yeah, but is some low-level IT guy going to throw away his government career by confronting the United States Secretary of State with an accusation of wrongdoing?
Hillary is the front-runner in the democratic field. And the republicans are putting Jeb Bush forward as "most electable", whatever the hell that means.
I suppose the power elites are freaking out right now because neither of those bluebloods should be allowed anywhere near the white house.
Will status quo go out the window with the next president, or will we continue with the endless war, bailout, QE, and surveillance policies of the Clintons, Bushes, and Obama?
Oh, definitely more of the same.
Until this nation's citizens stop the my party is better than your party BS and actually start paying attention to what these people are doing to our country, we'll never have change.
I don't blame the public for this. I blame the media. Elections aren't won on the votes of principled liberals or conservatives. They're won based on the easy-votes of people who haven't dedicated the time to investigating whether there's substance behind any of the marketing claims of the two major parties.
So what happens to these people during election season? Candidates are hidden from them, some candidates are given more time to speak during debates, and some major candidates aren't even discussed. Someone who doesn't pay attention to politics and is looking for a quick answer just simply will not get an honest view of the situation from the press.
While I certainly agree the media has an agenda and feeds us what they want, the public has to take responsibility as well. Each of us is responsible for our own actions (in this case, votes).
There is plenty of blame to go around on all sides. Personally I feel like our entire system is antiquated and is due for a modern update. Unfortunately, it would probably take a complete collapse to ever get real change and it would be a really dangerous during the transition period. Things are bad, but they could be a whole lot worse for sure.
The media has a huge hand in this, sure. But fiscal conservatives have been complaining about the corporatists and big spenders in the gop since Goldwater at least. There should have been a popular backlash.
You can claim Reagan was that backlash, but he was just another big government guy. Tea party is interesting, but it seems like it has too many social conservative cranks to breakthrough.
How do you expect there to be a popular backlash if the the public is misinformed? It was even worse in the Goldwater days because there was no internet for the public to use.
The "everything's terrible!" tone of your comment is one of the major problems and main contributors to the partisan divide. It would be harder to get people riled up for their pet party if more people were aware that, hey, things are going pretty well! It would make the things that aren't going as well easier to identify and work on.
I didn't mean to imply "everything's terrible." However, if/when it becomes terrible, and if we are still evenly divided, we'll not have the power to make a positive change.
I've never been one to say, "I'm only voting for this particular party." I simply don't understand that mentality. It makes zero sense to me.
Edit: As my original post indicated, I believe we are on a downward slope towards things becoming terrible. Just not there yet.
Well things are not going pretty well, there is still no real solution to the crash of 2008 in sight, right now we still have essentially bankrupt banks that are trading worthless assets in an artificially created market. Look at the charts in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_... for example, real average hourly wages are still lower than in the 1970s, gdp growth has largely decoupled from the real economy, large sectors of which have shrunk.
Well that's the core of the problem, isn't it? "Pretty well" is extremely relative. The US is recovering from the crash of 2008 better than most countries in the world. Unemployment is down and getting better, but as you say, household income is still not doing great. So what is "pretty well" in this context? Damned if I know.
Yes, I'm right there with you, and "pretty well" is purposefully vague. Listening to the news and often reading here, it's very easy to forget that 2015 is pretty close to the historical maximum of how things are going for humans worldwide, and far more so for humans living in the US. That's no reason to not advocate for improving the many many things that can be improved, but I find the widespread sense of deep foreboding completely maddening, and more useful for fostering division than improvement.
To continue with your specific example, people I talk to seem largely unaware that the economy of the US has pretty much recovered from the crash. A lot of times this unawareness manifests in the thought that everything we've done since then and are still doing has been utterly and catastrophically wrong and we need to scrap it entirely and figure something else out. I don't think that's very useful. The other perspective is to say, that's great that the high level economic indicators have improved, but shouldn't we be seeing wage growth along with it? How can we tweak the system to see the gains spread more equitably? That is, it's not totally wrong, but it's not totally right either. What can we do to get closer to "totally right"? That's the sort of rhetoric I'd prefer to hear.
Everything is terrible -- in that the two leading parties in the United States are doing a poor job of representing the values of the people. They need to be fundamentally readjusted or be replaced by better alternatives, and that is not accomplished easily.
In nerdy terms, if there are N dimensions to public policy and individuals are represented as N dimensional vectors, the ideologies of our current parties do a terrible job of dimensional reduction.
That perspective is absolutely what I'm arguing against, and I believe it is one of the main contributors to exactly the problem it decries. Convincing people that everything is terrible is the first step to convincing them that it's the other side's fault and you have the solution, which is how we end up with the divisiveness that fails to represent the mostly moderate values of the people.
Everything is terrible, because there is no other side. Neither party represents my interests adequately, and both parties are sclerotic and resistant to change because of symbiotic relationships with rent-seeking interest groups.
I didn't miss your point. The divisiveness that follows from convincing people that everything is terrible isn't just bi-directional, it also divides many people (like you and me) into a helpless feeling "nobody speaks for me" group.
I don't know what you should do, but current my strategy (as you can see) is to call out what I see as unhelpfully hyperbolic rhetoric (both negative and positive, though that's rare these days) when I talk to people and point out good things about our society while not papering over things I'd like to see improved.
There are quite a few axes on which to measure how well things are going, and the adequate representation of your (and my) interests is just one of them. I totally agree the system doesn't do a great job of that, but it does a good job of lots of more important things.
> Will status quo go out the window with the next president, or will we continue with the endless war, bailout, QE, and surveillance policies of the Clintons, Bushes, and Obama?
If either Clinton or Bush win and get re-elected to a second term it would mean, ten years from now we would have had either a Clinton or Bush as President for 28 of the previous 36 years...and yet people will wonder why nothing ever changes.
I'm voting this one up although I have concerns the article could end up in some kind of partisan BS here.
So let's be clear about the root of the problem: government regulations demand that public officials have recordable conversations as part of their duties. This allows openness and inspection. (It also allows political shenanigans)
It's a very, very similar situation to where we are with government spying on the citizens. The government, for whatever reason, has decided it wants to record everything you do of type X. As a subject of the government, you are not given a choice. To record some information in some contexts might be reasonable, in other contexts it might not, but all we're given is blanket requirements.
What we're seeing with Hillary -- and probably with anybody else that has any common sense -- is just blowing off the law and "making things work" without regards to whether it is legal or not. For what it's worth, and I am a member of neither political party, I'd do the same thing.
You can try to make this into an election-year deal about Hillary, or stand on a soapbox and talk about government accountability, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. But the real issue here is that the freaking government is trying to collect too much information about everybody. It's not just limited to public servants. And the proper response to a government that refuses to act in a reasonable manner is non-violent non-participation.
Having said all of that, I fully expect that point to be completely lost by folks on both sides of this issue.
It's really too bad that not paying your taxes isn't thought of as a valid way to voice your opposition to what's going on in Washington. I realize why it's that way, but it's a real bummer to me. Not because I'm a greedy bastard who doesn't want to pay a dime, but because elections aren't that great of a feedback mechanism now that career politicians and parties and etc have developed into neigh unstoppable powers that put people into office.
It seemingly has been in the past, but for some reason isn't now.
But what do you think would happen if 100,000 people made a public commitment online to report their taxes but not pay them? What about 500K? A million? Remember: using the net, it would be possible not to disclose any of those people until all of them made the commitment.
Would the government throw all of those people out on the street? Put them all in jail?
Because this is where we're headed. I doubt you'll see mass protests about the NSA tracking cell phones, but at some point in the next 50 years the tax burden will become high enough that people will openly revolt. Future generations will protest the idea that the majority of their taxes are going for debt service on money borrowed by people who aren't even still alive. That's a great "taxation without representation" argument.
Non-participation is always a matter of degree. As the government closes its fist, more and more people will slip through, either openly or not.
So let's be clear about the root of the problem: government regulations demand that public officials have recordable conversations as part of their duties. This allows openness and inspection. (It also allows political shenanigans)
It's a very, very similar situation to where we are with government spying on the citizens.
I don't find those cases to be similar at all. Government officials are public servants granted a public trust. While there are certainly circumstances and topics that require confidentiality for some period of time, those officials' conduct of government business has to be subject to oversight, whether by Congress or the public.
There's a case to be made that record-keeping requirements are overly onerous, and encourage difficult-to-monitor, potentially insecure side channels like this one. But that government communications of our top officials should be private? I don't think so.
The issue seems to be that she could of hid something in her personal emails by not turning everything over. But couldn't any official have just used their gov email for "official business" and use their personal email for stuff they want to hide? Doesn't every politician actually do this?
The fact that Clinton is letting personal correspondence mix with government correspondence indicates to me she has less to hide, not more.
The only issue that has the possibility of being legitimate in is the Benghazi stuff. Technically, it could have been a deliberate move to make emails related to Benghazi un-searchable during the investigation. Of course, this only actually matters if those emails contain anything significant/damning, and they probably don't.
Well yes, if we are discussing why it's illegal to use personal email for this kind of communication, you can't make the assumption that it's legal to use the personal email for hiding stuff and arrive at the conclusion there is no scandal.
This "it could have been worse" is weird. The point of requirements to use official channels is two-fold:
1. It maintains an archive that can be used for accountability.
2. Anyone communicating with not-that-account can potentially flip to the watchdogs, making it harder to use unofficial communications.
I'm not so naive to think that those unofficial communications don't happen. I expect that most campaigns have used them for dirty laundry. It doesn't mean we get rid of the channels we can see.
As a politically motivated Hillary Clinton specific scandal, I agree that it's pretty thin, but it's definitely making me think more than I previously have about how much of officials' correspondence should be subject to freedom of information requests.
The accusation is she deliberately used only a private account so that her emails wouldn't have to be produced upon committee requests:
"The State Department had not searched the email account of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton because she had maintained a private account, which shielded it from such searches, department officials acknowledged on Tuesday."
"The only issue that has the possibility of being legitimate in is the Benghazi stuff. Technically, it could have been a deliberate move to make emails related to Benghazi un-searchable during the investigation. Of course, this only actually matters if those emails contain anything significant/damning, and they probably don't."
Are you saying that she setup a non-gov email so she could make benghazi emails un-searchable before benghazi even happend? CT much?
How about the release of proprietary and sensitive data into an unverified third-party system? Potentially traversing the Internet unencrypted in the process.
I've seen people dismissed from companies for that. Shouldn't Government be even more rigorous?
Maybe, maybe not. The point is we should audit this. And if they do governmental jobs over a private email they should be punished for it, so others don't do the same in the future.
Refusing to use the email server that is under your employer's control is a giant red flag. Document retention, document deletion, FOIA requests, a zillion other compliance requirements: those all need to be handled by a dedicated compliance officer, not a Clinton aide.
They want to keep Benghazi on the radar in case of a potential presidential run, and they're still mad about how easy it was to shatter Palin as a VP candidate, a mistake that is widely believed to have cost them the presidency and locked the U.S. in for 8 years of centrist non-ideologue successes that just happened to be accomplished by a half-black man with an informed global view.
Payback? So this issue is made up? Shouldn't all presidential hopefuls and public officials be subject to the same scrutiny? As far as Palin, there's no Republican that I know that cares one bit about Palin anymore. She's a pundit but she's hardly a front-runner for Republican thought leadership. She's all but irrelevant.
As far as Benghazi, it's a legitimate issue for a Presidential candidate. They claimed a video sparked the attack. That was the official word despite evidence that Hillary knew almost immediately that a video had nothing to do with it. That false narrative whose water was carried by Susan Rice resulted in Rice getting promoted to UN Ambassador. All of this stuff is far more relevant than those stupid stories about Mitt Romney and his family dog.
Look! A squirrel. If Benghazi is a non issue, what was the need for the obfuscation of the truth? Why did the admin insist that YouTube caused the attack? Why not just play it straight? It isn't Benghazi that's the issue; it's the culture of corruption and deceit that voters don't seem to care about.
Classified information security, for one thing. Exposing highly sensitive information via an infrastructure run by unknown persons, presumably without clearances, or acting against the conditions of their clearances if they have them.
One specific law about document retention is mentioned in connection with this case, but this is also a big security issue, with laws and regulations that apply, as well.
There are probably other ethics, regulatory, and legal issues once you get into who she was corresponding with on what topics and how those people used the information they obtained.
I don't understand this story -- according to the smoking gun report, there's only evidence that this one guy sent her emails to her person account ( possibly by an autocomplete or address book oversight? ) and not any evidence that she sent any emails of replies back. If she wasn't sending emails from the account, and just one person was using her person address as the recipient, it seems just like a one off minor oversight from one of her advisors.
From what I understand she is not the first secretary of state to do this (All her predecessors did as well) and the laws that require them to keep emails and/or use provided email were passed AFTER she held the position. I'll agree it's a bad practice but can we fault her for doing that same thing as the people before her when there was no law/rule/regulation to do otherwise?
This of course should not have been the case, but does seem to be.
All of her predecessors appear to have used their personal emails as well. Kerry is the first one to use an official email. She left office at the beginning of 2013, while the official policy banning personal email went into effect at the end of 2013.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/03/hillary-ema...
Careful when you say "the policy of banning personal email went into effect in 2013," because it might suggest to the casual reader that there weren't other requirements being violated. Such as the 2009 law that required the State Department to ensure that, regardless of which email system employees were using, that all emails were being retained properly.
> Mrs. Clinton’s aides have said her use of private email was not out of the ordinary, pointing to the fact that former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a personal email account, before the current regulations went into effect. But since 2009, said Laura Diachenko, a National Archives and Records spokeswoman, federal regulations have stated that “agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.”
Given that retention of email was a scandal in 2007 [1], there is no way someone plugged into Washington was unaware of this.
Simple solution suggestion: if you use your private account for government business it converts into a government account. If you don't want that to happen don't use it that way.
This is an unusually political post to have risen so high on Hacker News. Is that because of the significance of email to the story? The use of email in this case is not very technically interesting. Or is there some other attraction?
A hacker discovers a secret email account and server being run in violation of the law that could bring down the leading Democratic presidential candidate? That's Hacker News.
It's kind of a well-known phenomenon that if you give it any opening, sites will fill up with American-presidential-race news for about 1 out of every 4 years, regardless of the nominal subject of the site. Seems to have expanded to 1.5 now? Requires active efforts from the management to keep the flood out, and most sites don't.
The HN discussion is useful because the news media accounts skip all the tech detail. For example, what provider was used, and what are their security procedures?
Given the sheer number of officials doing thing this, I can only assume this is done mostly out of ignorance about how email works. If I knew nothing about email, I could see myself assuming IT has a magic way to archive this. Remember when Sarah Palin's account got hacked? She probably never thought about how the security questions could easily be looked up once she was in the public spotlight. Once your email account is set up, I imagine most people don't really think about it.
Of course, it's also 2014, there is no reason a high-level official should be this ignorance, but it wouldn't hurt for aides to make sure they are using the correct email account.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadBut if you want to be an optimist about humanity, you could assume that the timing of or level of attention given to this reveal is unrelated to election cycles and merely the natural pace of a crime being revealed and prosecuted.
How did she possibly discuss classified materials?
What happens to her because of this obvious effort to conceal is the most important aspect of the case. Will she get the wrist slap like Pretraeis and other friends of Washington get? Likely. Whereas everyday citizens are hounded to death by AGs and the like.
To be honest, government officials taking actions like this need to be treated like the criminals they are, they are purposefully betraying the public trust and hiding behind the power of their office and names to do it. The real one percent in Washington
The article says "Secretary of State John Kerry uses a government email account, and his correspondence is preserved as part of the department’s record-keeping system."
> Clinton was not the first secretary of state to use a private account. The State Department said Clinton’s successor as top diplomat, John F. Kerry, is the first secretary to use a standard government e-mail address ending in “state.gov.”
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-used-...
The agency must make sure that emails are being retained according to law. In any private enterprise that must retain records, there is exactly one way to do this: you use your employer's email server, which has a long audit trail and dedicated compliance officers.
The point it makes is, this is not acceptable, should never be acceptable, and just because you weren't caught when you were in office is no excuse for not going after you.
- Sarah Palin
- Mitt Romney
- Karl Rove
- Andrew Cuomo
- Chris Christie aide Bridget Anne Kelly
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/5-examples-lawmaker...
It definitely seems less than ideal for these rules to be abused like this.
The problem is, how do you stop it?
It's unreasonable to expect all private communications to be on public record, and if you write a note to your babysitter during office hours, why should the wider world have to know about it?
It's a difficult balance.
[...]
"Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton's home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking."
Source: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b78ba433af3a45209668f745158d9...
You mean the WHOIS records?
If so, I'm not sure it's so easy to simply dismiss "traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York" as referring to the WHOIS record. It sounds like they're looking at the IP address, in which case I guess it's technically possible that the actual mailserver isn't physically located at her home, but for the purposes of the article it'd be reasonable to say that she ran [part of] the service from her home.
I agree that it'd be preferable if they could explain what evidence they're actually basing this on, but it doesn't read to me like they're talking about the WHOIS.
The key words are "registered to", which means nobody was able to trace the actual traffic to the home. Not that that would necessarily be easy, but in absence of that I think it's far more likely that she's not administering running mail servers from her home.
Note that MXLogic is a managed email service provided by McAfee.
Given that and what you say, the most likely scenario IMO is that she was getting too much spam and asked whoever was taking care of her IT to do something. They decided to front-end her email with MXLogic and it's still going to Google (but of course, we don't know for sure).
If so, the whole premise of the article (Some people use Google, but Clinton built her own server) is false.
Meanwhile, the AP thinks that Clinton's MX choices have to do with her feelings about China.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b78ba433af3a45209668f745158d9...
In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton's private email account was reconfigured to use Google's servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google's accusations in June 2011 that China's government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking.
You know what other email server is protected by the Secret Service? whitehouse.gov
Having stuff go through two email servers makes security strictly worse: any security flaws on either server exposes mail.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b78ba433af3a45209668f745158d9...
This is another case where I wish they would just get some IT expert to look at the evidence and explain it technically (not dumbed down, not for a layperson). Maybe only technical people would understand, but at least the media record would be accurate.
"The head of each Federal agency shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities. (44 U.S. Code § 3101)"
The only relevant question is, "are emails 'records'?", and according to the State Department, the answer is yes:
"All employees must be aware that some of the variety of the messages being exchanged on E-mail are important to the Department and must be preserved; such messages are considered Federal records under the law. (5 FAM [Foreign Affairs Manual] "
And I might add that the accusation here is not that she had a personal account in addition to her official one, it's that she didn't have an official one at all.
Saying "email is not a system of record" is lot like saying "RAID is not a backup". Just because you don't use reliable a long term storage medium doesn't mean you don't have and use those records.
It doesn't even fly contrary to e-discovery, it's just a difference in multiple contextual definitions of "record."
The fact is this, Palin matters because she's not a Democrat. Democrats have Stockholm Syndrome. When a Republican is corrupt, much of the time, they resign. When a Democrat is corrupt, they get reelected. Re: Marion Berry, Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel, Chris Dodd. Tom Delay was another bad one, however he was actually charged with a crime and he resigned.
Palin is nothing more than a proxy to rationalize bad behavior.
Democrats most definitely don't have a monopoly on corruption; however how Democrat voters deal with the corruption is markedly telling.
And was then vindicated in the courts.
Texas has a weird arrangement where the very Blue Austin area prosecutor has a remit for political corruption in the entire state. The same officer recently indicted (now former) Governor Perry for threatening a veto, a rather unique take on a constitutionally enshrined executive action.
I don't know, I see other relevant questions. For instance, nothing in the quoted law says anything about how they shall "make and preserve" the records, only what purposes those records must be adequate to serve. So, using private email alone doesn't seem to be a violation, it seems to be something that might be the starting point for an inquiry as to whether she made and preserved "ontaining adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities", but it doesn't alone provide an answer to that question whether or not you consider emails as records.
In the corporate world, if there were a legal requirement for compliance, the auditor would verify that all work email is going over work servers, and then review the policies in place on those servers. You could technically let a special employee run their own server, but then that server would need to be audited, and the policies in place there reviewed. "Nah, you can trust Joe" wouldn't cut it.
Otherwise the entire point of compliance laws just goes out the window.
Legal compliance audits that I have been involved in tend to go beyond what is unquestionably prohibited by the law and also seek to identify and eliminate activities which might arguably violate the law (and thus create legal risk) including, but not limited to, those which violate organizations internal guidelines which are based on the applicable law but whose requirements may be (generally, should be) more strict than the law itself.
There are three different, but related, categories into which this might fall, in decreasing order of breadth:
1) Behavior that would be of concern to a compliance audit focused on the law in question,
2) Behavior that would violate administration guidance related to achieving compliance with the law in question,
3) Behavior that actually violates the law in question.
You are arguing, and I agree, that it is #1. There are reports that administration sources have indicated that it is #2 (I see no reason to doubt them, though I haven't seen the actual guidance, so I don't have an informed opinion.)
Neither of those, however, is the same thing as it being #3.
> agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.
How did they ensure this? As a few news stories, including the linked article, have reported, they would have been immune from FOIA requests.
Here's another from http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/hillary-clinton-used-p...
> The fact that Clinton’s emails were not a part of official State Department records until recently means many of them would not have been located in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, subpoenas or other document searches conducted over the past six years
Yes, that's exactly the question this raises.
> As a few news stories, including the linked article, have reported, they would have been immune from FOIA requests.
They would not have been immune. They may have been overlooked in the course of handling such requests, although assuming anyone in the State Department offices responsible for conducting document searches in response to FOIA requests (or subpoenas, etc.) was aware of the practice, they quite probably wouldn't have been, there just would have been an extra step involved in handling the requests.
"Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to have operated in violation of what the White House said Tuesday was “very specific guidance” that members of the Obama administration use government e-mail accounts to carry out official business."
http://www.ibtimes.com/amid-federal-corruption-probe-andrew-...
You can have and create a document-deletion policy, no problem. But -- and I've had this drilled into me at multiple employers, because it's really important -- once you are told by legal that an investigation is under way, you don't delete them, no matter what, until legal tells you otherwise. You take active steps to preserve them if need be.
Cuomo's optics suck, but unless you think he's criminally insane, he wouldn't delete emails while investigators wanted emails preserved. There's some part of the story we haven't heard.
Did you know that people flush drugs down the toilet when cops knock on the door, in clear violation of the law?
I've also only seen this story in IBT, not elsewhere, and they carefully don't say that these records are part of the investigation, just that an investigation is happening and that emails are being deleted -- leaving it to the reader to connect the dots that don't necessarily exist.
None of those even begin to reach the level of Clinton's conduct. She conducted ALL communications through the private email. None of the above used private emails exclusive. Most of them don't even sound like they used the private emails the majority of the time.
This is just an attempt at associating a larger issue with a bunch of smaller ones so people will think of it as a minor one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/politics/using-private-...
I can't think of a lot of reasons of do this other than to attempt to hide things
I don't think that a public figure, even in higher ranks, should be exposed to that kind of scrutiny. Privacy is a privilege which everyone should enjoy. Even those who are trying to literally kill it.
2. I don't know, do you? My guess is that, yes, she did.
3. It depends on whether shared classified information with anybody who did not have clearance. My guess is that, no, she didn't, or this would already be a much bigger story.
Using a personal email address is not the same as sharing classified information.
But this issue isn't (yet) about handling of classified material; it's about government oversight.
Your phrasing is very apropos, since if the law is applied to her (which I believe is the question you are asking), it will almost certainly be applied to her "the way it has been applied to Petraeus", as opposed to the way it's applied to someone lower down the totem pole:
"[Former State Dept. official Stephen] Kim did not hand over a copy of the [classified North Korea] report — he just discussed it, and nothing else — and the report was subsequently described in court documents as a “nothing burger” in terms of its sensitivity. Kim is currently in prison on a 13-month sentence."[0]
For context, Petraeus "gave highly-classified journals to his onetime lover and that he lied to the FBI about it."[0]
[0]https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/03/petraeus-plea-...
I don't think it is. I do it every day at work.
Use your personal email to communicate with your babysitter, and your official work email only for work stuff.
One problem with that. I have an official work (.edu) email that is practically useless. Constantly full of spam, both from outside, and from clueless employees. Domain gets blocked from sending to popular domains occasionally for mass spamming. Can't accept attachments (or rarely accepts them). High and unpredictable inbox latency. Goofy, insecure, obsolete pa55woRD! rules. etc. The .gov email addresses I have had from past jobs weren't always much better.
So I have an official work email, an unofficial work gmail, and a private email account for personal business.
But the larger point is that Clinton should have had some procedure to regularly archive her work-related comms (no matter what the method was).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_P._Jackson#EPA_Administrat...
>It's a difficult balance.
No it's not, and you know it. If you're discussing job-related matters, use your work email, not the system you had set up so that you could evade your workplace data-retention policies. Who knows; maybe Clinton and Blumenthal send all their "re: re: re: funny" cat pictures to each other through this, but I doubt it.
Any maybe your parents never taught you, but just because other people break the rules doesn't give you an excuse to break the rules. If only our politicians had any sense of right and wrong...
However, the answer is not to bring your personal equipment onto the corporate network. Which sucks because if you need to get something taken care of between 8 and 5, how are you going to manage that? Your options are limited if you don't have a guest network at work.
Your personal, private, and confidential dealings while using employer provided equipment, networks, and time are anything but those things.
The advocates for full disclosure imo are biting their nose to spite their face. Normal people running everything from little leagues to major corporations use email for strategy development, information delivery, deliberative functions and other normal business processes.
Known figures in government cannot do that, because the second they do, that information is available to the universe. The consequence is that officials don't use email, and either go through couriers, use some grey area communications mechanism, or do something else that is lost to the public record. It's ridiculous that President Obama or any smart governor cannot have a computer on this desk because of this stuff.
I think the current law was designed for paper memos and letters and works counter to its intended goal. Leaders cannot lead if everything they write needs to be staged for this evening's news. There should be a long aging process for this type of material.
Clinton did not claim executive privilege. She set up a secret email account in order to avoid disclosure laws. This criminal and corrupt action should disqualify her for presidential office.
18 U.S. Code § 2071 - Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally
(a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.
I also work for an organization where FOIA laws mean anything I produce is available to anyone who asks (and knows what to ask for). The purpose of laws like this is to prevent your elected and/or unelected officials from doing things that are detrimental to society. Those "couriers... grey area communications mechanism, or... something else that is lost to the public record"? Yeah, you're fucked if someone can figure out how to request those, because they're subject to the same laws, and it sure looks like you're trying to hide something.
Leaders cannot lead if they're working against the public interest. If they're not working against the public interest, then they can justify why they're doing what they do. Period.
Government policymakers deal with issues that involve organized labor, various special interests, and business interests.
By making things operate in a such a way that people cannot function in a modern manner, you're pushing much of the deliberative process away from written mediums to telephone and in-person meetings. By doing this, you're empowering people who have access to power (lobbyists, etc), in the name of transparency that is almost meaningless.
Second, "cannot function in a modern manner"? If you're creating a public record, it's subject to FOIA. End of discussion. The point of FOIA is that you, as a creator of public records, cannot hide your work product from the people you serve. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, or so I've been told.
You stop it by holding people accountable for their actions. I manage to keep my work e-mail separate from my private e-mail, it's not hard.
You can start by using your work email for all work-related purposes.
If someone on Wall Street refused to use work email -- which can be monitored by their employer -- for communicating with clients, it would stink to high heaven.
The disclosure that Hillary Clinton used a non-governmental e-mail address while she was Secretary of State originally came courtesy of “Guccifer,” the Romanian hacker now serving time in a Bucharest prison for his online attacks against scores of public figures.
As TSG first reported in March 2013, “Guccifer” illegally accessed the AOL e-mail account of Sidney Blumenthal, who worked as a senior White House adviser to President Bill Clinton, and later became a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.
When “Guccifer” (who was later identified as Marcel Lazar Lehel) breached Blumenthal’s account, he discovered an assortment of correspondence sent to Hillary Clinton at the e-mail address hdr22@clintonemail.com. The “clintonemail.com” domain was registered in 2009, shortly after her nomination to become Secretary of State.[1]
They host with MX Logic[2], some McAfee's enterprise-y mail service. At least it wasn't statedeptsugarycake22@gmail.com.
[1] http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/investigation/hillary...
[2] https://www.mxlogic.com/
It was unclear whom Clinton hired to set up or maintain her private email server, which the AP traced to a mysterious identity, Eric Hoteham. That name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records or Internet background searches. Hoteham was listed as the customer at Clinton's $1.7 million home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua in records registering the Internet address for her email server since August 2010.
The Hoteham personality also is associated with a separate email server, presidentclinton.com, and a non-functioning website, wjcoffice.com, all linked to the same residential Internet account as Mrs. Clinton's email server. The former president's full name is William Jefferson Clinton.
In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton's private email account was reconfigured to use Google's servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google's accusations in June 2011 that China's government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking.
Then, in July 2013, five months after she resigned as secretary of state, Clinton's private email server was reconfigured again to use a Denver-based commercial email provider, MX Logic, which is now owned by McAfee Inc., a top Internet security company.
I suppose the power elites are freaking out right now because neither of those bluebloods should be allowed anywhere near the white house.
Will status quo go out the window with the next president, or will we continue with the endless war, bailout, QE, and surveillance policies of the Clintons, Bushes, and Obama?
So what happens to these people during election season? Candidates are hidden from them, some candidates are given more time to speak during debates, and some major candidates aren't even discussed. Someone who doesn't pay attention to politics and is looking for a quick answer just simply will not get an honest view of the situation from the press.
Jon Stewart had a good piece about an example of this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtDJ6Ay4QMw
Also, that video was hilarious.
You can claim Reagan was that backlash, but he was just another big government guy. Tea party is interesting, but it seems like it has too many social conservative cranks to breakthrough.
I've never been one to say, "I'm only voting for this particular party." I simply don't understand that mentality. It makes zero sense to me.
Edit: As my original post indicated, I believe we are on a downward slope towards things becoming terrible. Just not there yet.
If you have acess to capital at 0% interest rates, you are doing fine.
To continue with your specific example, people I talk to seem largely unaware that the economy of the US has pretty much recovered from the crash. A lot of times this unawareness manifests in the thought that everything we've done since then and are still doing has been utterly and catastrophically wrong and we need to scrap it entirely and figure something else out. I don't think that's very useful. The other perspective is to say, that's great that the high level economic indicators have improved, but shouldn't we be seeing wage growth along with it? How can we tweak the system to see the gains spread more equitably? That is, it's not totally wrong, but it's not totally right either. What can we do to get closer to "totally right"? That's the sort of rhetoric I'd prefer to hear.
In nerdy terms, if there are N dimensions to public policy and individuals are represented as N dimensional vectors, the ideologies of our current parties do a terrible job of dimensional reduction.
Everything is terrible, because there is no other side. Neither party represents my interests adequately, and both parties are sclerotic and resistant to change because of symbiotic relationships with rent-seeking interest groups.
What should I do?
I don't know what you should do, but current my strategy (as you can see) is to call out what I see as unhelpfully hyperbolic rhetoric (both negative and positive, though that's rare these days) when I talk to people and point out good things about our society while not papering over things I'd like to see improved.
There are quite a few axes on which to measure how well things are going, and the adequate representation of your (and my) interests is just one of them. I totally agree the system doesn't do a great job of that, but it does a good job of lots of more important things.
If either Clinton or Bush win and get re-elected to a second term it would mean, ten years from now we would have had either a Clinton or Bush as President for 28 of the previous 36 years...and yet people will wonder why nothing ever changes.
So you mean to tell me that all of these are from a Gmail account?
So let's be clear about the root of the problem: government regulations demand that public officials have recordable conversations as part of their duties. This allows openness and inspection. (It also allows political shenanigans)
It's a very, very similar situation to where we are with government spying on the citizens. The government, for whatever reason, has decided it wants to record everything you do of type X. As a subject of the government, you are not given a choice. To record some information in some contexts might be reasonable, in other contexts it might not, but all we're given is blanket requirements.
What we're seeing with Hillary -- and probably with anybody else that has any common sense -- is just blowing off the law and "making things work" without regards to whether it is legal or not. For what it's worth, and I am a member of neither political party, I'd do the same thing.
You can try to make this into an election-year deal about Hillary, or stand on a soapbox and talk about government accountability, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. But the real issue here is that the freaking government is trying to collect too much information about everybody. It's not just limited to public servants. And the proper response to a government that refuses to act in a reasonable manner is non-violent non-participation.
Having said all of that, I fully expect that point to be completely lost by folks on both sides of this issue.
I couldn't agree more.
It seemingly has been in the past, but for some reason isn't now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance
But what do you think would happen if 100,000 people made a public commitment online to report their taxes but not pay them? What about 500K? A million? Remember: using the net, it would be possible not to disclose any of those people until all of them made the commitment.
Would the government throw all of those people out on the street? Put them all in jail?
Because this is where we're headed. I doubt you'll see mass protests about the NSA tracking cell phones, but at some point in the next 50 years the tax burden will become high enough that people will openly revolt. Future generations will protest the idea that the majority of their taxes are going for debt service on money borrowed by people who aren't even still alive. That's a great "taxation without representation" argument.
Non-participation is always a matter of degree. As the government closes its fist, more and more people will slip through, either openly or not.
It's a very, very similar situation to where we are with government spying on the citizens.
I don't find those cases to be similar at all. Government officials are public servants granted a public trust. While there are certainly circumstances and topics that require confidentiality for some period of time, those officials' conduct of government business has to be subject to oversight, whether by Congress or the public.
There's a case to be made that record-keeping requirements are overly onerous, and encourage difficult-to-monitor, potentially insecure side channels like this one. But that government communications of our top officials should be private? I don't think so.
The issue seems to be that she could of hid something in her personal emails by not turning everything over. But couldn't any official have just used their gov email for "official business" and use their personal email for stuff they want to hide? Doesn't every politician actually do this?
The fact that Clinton is letting personal correspondence mix with government correspondence indicates to me she has less to hide, not more.
The only issue that has the possibility of being legitimate in is the Benghazi stuff. Technically, it could have been a deliberate move to make emails related to Benghazi un-searchable during the investigation. Of course, this only actually matters if those emails contain anything significant/damning, and they probably don't.
That's circular logic.
1. It maintains an archive that can be used for accountability.
2. Anyone communicating with not-that-account can potentially flip to the watchdogs, making it harder to use unofficial communications.
I'm not so naive to think that those unofficial communications don't happen. I expect that most campaigns have used them for dirty laundry. It doesn't mean we get rid of the channels we can see.
"The State Department had not searched the email account of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton because she had maintained a private account, which shielded it from such searches, department officials acknowledged on Tuesday."
Are you saying that she setup a non-gov email so she could make benghazi emails un-searchable before benghazi even happend? CT much?
How about the release of proprietary and sensitive data into an unverified third-party system? Potentially traversing the Internet unencrypted in the process.
I've seen people dismissed from companies for that. Shouldn't Government be even more rigorous?
Everything with the Clintons is a scandal, even when it isn't. She's known this for the past 20+ years. She should have known better.
Refusing to use the email server that is under your employer's control is a giant red flag. Document retention, document deletion, FOIA requests, a zillion other compliance requirements: those all need to be handled by a dedicated compliance officer, not a Clinton aide.
- The exposure of Palin's email shenanigans
- A continuation of the Benghazi conspiracy
They want to keep Benghazi on the radar in case of a potential presidential run, and they're still mad about how easy it was to shatter Palin as a VP candidate, a mistake that is widely believed to have cost them the presidency and locked the U.S. in for 8 years of centrist non-ideologue successes that just happened to be accomplished by a half-black man with an informed global view.
As far as Benghazi, it's a legitimate issue for a Presidential candidate. They claimed a video sparked the attack. That was the official word despite evidence that Hillary knew almost immediately that a video had nothing to do with it. That false narrative whose water was carried by Susan Rice resulted in Rice getting promoted to UN Ambassador. All of this stuff is far more relevant than those stupid stories about Mitt Romney and his family dog.
Look! A squirrel. If Benghazi is a non issue, what was the need for the obfuscation of the truth? Why did the admin insist that YouTube caused the attack? Why not just play it straight? It isn't Benghazi that's the issue; it's the culture of corruption and deceit that voters don't seem to care about.
We should demand better.
Classified information security, for one thing. Exposing highly sensitive information via an infrastructure run by unknown persons, presumably without clearances, or acting against the conditions of their clearances if they have them.
One specific law about document retention is mentioned in connection with this case, but this is also a big security issue, with laws and regulations that apply, as well.
There are probably other ethics, regulatory, and legal issues once you get into who she was corresponding with on what topics and how those people used the information they obtained.
> Mrs. Clinton’s aides have said her use of private email was not out of the ordinary, pointing to the fact that former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a personal email account, before the current regulations went into effect. But since 2009, said Laura Diachenko, a National Archives and Records spokeswoman, federal regulations have stated that “agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.”
Given that retention of email was a scandal in 2007 [1], there is no way someone plugged into Washington was unaware of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controve...
Of course, it's also 2014, there is no reason a high-level official should be this ignorance, but it wouldn't hurt for aides to make sure they are using the correct email account.