Hillary Clinton is taking some heat for using her own private email account for her State Department email. I haven’t been following the story very closely, but I have a few random thoughts:
- I keep hearing that she turned over 55,000 pages of email. Pages? Who measures email in pages? People who use email either talk about the number of messages, or they talk about how many gigabytes it takes to store the messages. Nobody who actually uses email worries about the page count when it’s all printed out. Please don’t tell me she turned over actual printed pages…or a PDF.
- What about legal hold? If somebody sued the State Department or Hillary Clinton personally, could the server administrators lock down the messages so no one deleted them in case they needed to be produced in discovery? Would they have been produced in discovery? How about a Freedom of Information Act request? A Congressional inquiry? In cooperation with the State Department’s Inspector General?
- It’s entirely possible that Hillary’s private email server is every bit as secure as the State Department’s server. Remember that we’re talking about ordinary email — the kind that Hillary and the department’s staff could access from Blackberries, smartphones, or laptops. There’s a limit to how secure that kind of service can be, and it’s not hard to find the technical talent to set it up and run it right. The Clintons easily have the resources for this.
- The State Department’s important secret messages aren’t sent over the ordinary office email system. Secure traffic goes over some kind of secure network like SIPRnet or JWICS. And yet Chelsea Manning compromised both of those networks and leaked hundreds of thousands of messages to wikileaks. So I’m guessing the State Department’s non-secure email meets a very low security standard. It’s been hacked before. It’s possible Hillary’s private server was better secured.
- It’s also entirely possible that Hillary’s private email server has crap security. Maybe the Clintons got friends and political allies to setup the email system. (“They designed that cool campaign website, so they must know a lot about computers!”) In that case, 12-year-old script kiddies in Singapore could have been reading her email for years. The State Department’s email security may not be very good, but at least they probably have an IT auditing process.
- Since her email address appears in every email message she sends or receives, the identity of the server would not have been a secret. (Naming it ClintonEmail.com doesn’t help.) It would have been a target for hackers and intelligence agencies.
- Hillary says there were no security breaches. What she really means is that there were no security breaches discovered.
- Hillary’s explanation that she did it for convenience is plausible. I’m not sure, but it’s possible that the limited mobile email clients at the time could not connect to more than one email service, so using a single service for work and home email would be more convenient than carrying two devices.
- This sort of thing would be outrageous if done in a private corporation. Can you imagine trying to explain to a judge or a regulatory agency why all mail to and from the CEO uses a private server? Can you imagine trying to convince a judge or a regulatory agency that it was not done to keep some evidence hidden?
- Did no one tell her this was a bad idea?
- It’s not going to affect Hillary Clinton’s chances in the 2016 Presidential election. If you’re not mad at her for everything else she’s already done, then it’s unlikely that this will be the tipping point for you to turn against her. And if you already hate her, this just confirms everything you believe. Nobody will change their mind.
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