I’d tend to imagine there’s potential for outrage either way, though. Using a government account for non-official purposes could lead to attacks on a basis of frivolousness, or that the nature of the account lends some kind of official sheen to messages.
Still, that there’s only saved messages from both on one party seems like it could be an issue. I would hope that government accounts have some level of security higher than, say, gmail. And it isn’t as though it’s difficult - though I suppose I would assume if using a governmental email account was more onerous that extra burden had a purpose, which isn’t necessarily true. I would say that the result of outrage would be fairly predictable for not appreciable gain the other way, so on that basis it’s a fairly foolish thing to do. And purely on “transparency good” basis I’d be opposed.
I think this was pretty idiotic on her part. Did anyone vet her personal e-mail account to make sure it was secure, properly password protected, passwords changed frequently, and so on? I have to imagine that some of the stuff she was e-mailing about was pretty sensitive.
If nothing else, it opens her up to more conspiracy theorists. It will be a distraction from whatever presidential ambitions she has.
I understand that others in government do the same thing, and my mind is blown by that. I work for a private firm and all of our official correspondence has to be through our work e-mail (and our passwords have to be changed regularly, etc.).
It’s also surprising that foreign heads of state would believe e-mails coming from h-dawg@aol.com or hilz@prodigy.net, or whatever her private e-mail is.
Seems lazy. Obviously you do the normal stuff on your govt account, nice and above board and official, then the illegal/unethical shit on your personal one. I expect more from our leaders when covering their tracks.
If that is the case this sounds more and more like an attempt at setting a fishing expedition, specially when I hear about the point of “She opened herself to questions” when the ones saying that ignore the precedent.
I do think that this is a very common move now from the right, even if there is nothing that was reported so far as a reason to demand those emails, this does sound like wanting to have a fishing expedition (knowing past history the idea will be to keep this point up forever). The right wing has plenty of experience with what they did to scientists in recent days.
Established practice means nothing as to the wisdom or safety of an act other than other people did the same thing before. The lack of a specific allegation of harm doesn’t necessitate that no harm is possible.
Right. The fact that Powell and others did the same thing doesn’t mean it’s not a dumb idea. And it may well be that there has been harm we just don’t know about because people who compromise email servers don’t always announce that they have done so. There is also harm in that much of her correspondence is not available to the archives and historians. And, the Obama Admin was supposed to be more transparent than its predecessor, a goal not served by conducting business outside official channels.
It’s an unforced error. I think she should have put her faith in the government’s IT professionals to make her electronic communications secure and properly archived. This is something we should insist that all government officials do right. As an election issue, not so significant.
I don’t think she gave it a moment’s thought, and moreover, that it was eminently reasonable for her to not give it a moment’s thought. She was doing what had always been done; her mails within state.gov are archived for the benefit of historians anyway, and I cannot imagine that the Secretary of State conducted any significant business of state with foreign leaders over e-mail.
Perhaps she didn’t do business with foreign leaders over email, but I think in that position everything you do is potentially sensitive. Communications with her subordinates could be problematic if hacked, I think she owes it to her job to not go on her own and potentially get hacked.
Again, I don’t think the fault necessarily lies at Clinton’s feet, at least not in any way more than a general “the buck stops here” sort of way. Clearly some of her employees were aware of the rules regarding archiving records, because they pulled a bunch of her personal emails over and archived them. Since they were aware of the rules, they should have been aware of all the rules, and they should have known that what she was doing wasn’t 100% kosher. So either people know that, and they ignored the rules, or knew the rules and didn’t have the tools to follow them, or they didn’t know the rules. All of those are a problem. Maybe Clinton knew some of that and they had he blessing to ignore the rules, maybe she just figured everything was fine. But if we’re going to have these record transparency rules, and I think we should, the government needs to figure out how to follow them better.
As an aside, I’m wondering, just out of curiosity, if you expected the standard SDMB cadre of liberal posters to be the ones who would think this is an legitimate issue.
I think she gave it more than a moments thought. It’s SOP that new government employees get official email addresses. Not only didn’t she use hers, she didn’t HAVE one. Which of her underlings is going to tell the IT people, “Don’t bother, she won’t need one” without talking to her about it first?