An action can be an example of terrible judgment without being a crime. In this case, we will likely never know if her Blackberry was hacked or if sensitive documents were retrieved from her server. At most we might learn what sensitive documents were on the server, but probably not until they are declassified in a couple of decades.
It should be enough to know that she was specifically and individually advised that this was a gaping security flaw, she agreed that it was, but she continued to use her unsecured Blackberry to communicate using her badly secured server.
The only real counterargument available is to claim that the Secretary of State of the United States both doesn’t have any sensitive conversations outside secured areas, and never receives or sends sensitive information over email. While I concede that those are metaphysical possibilities, I think it requires a certain kind of special partisan faith to believe them.
What about this counterargument:
-Her communication via a private server does create a nontrivial security risk. However,
-Government communication protocols are (or were at the time) so cumbersome that rigid adherence to them would materially and adversely affect her ability to perform her job, and those adverse affects would also create a nontrivial security risk to our country.
-A secretary of state able to function in the most efficient manner available increases our nation’s security to a degree sufficient to outweigh concerns about leaky email systems.
I’m not sure I buy this argument, but I suspect it’s the one Clinton consciously or unconsciously relied on.
But the only people capable of intelligently evaluating the magnitude of the security risk posed by her IT practices had told her it was a big deal. She did not have the technological knowledge to evaluate that risk for herself. So any balancing of the risks she did was a blindfolded one, and therefore still quite reckless.
And I think it’s important to keep in mind that we aren’t just talking about leaky email. Equally important, in my view, is that she was warned that her unsecured Blackberry posed the risk of remote monitoring of her in-person conversations.
One upshot of this should be, even for the people who claim they “don’t care,” that we find the money to get the Secretary of State a secure mobile communication system. I would be very curious to know if people like Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden carry unsecured phones.
Are you suggesting she personally set up her email server? She has already confirmed an IT professional did the setup. How do know that person was not completely equipped to install sufficient security measures?
It’s REALLY hard for me to take this seriously. I’ve worked in IT for half my life, and even in this day and age I run into a large number of people who just have no clue when it comes to digital security. Regular, intelligent people who can’t seem to follow the simplest of rules, and you can talk to them until you’re blue in the face. ESPECIALLY executives. That doesn’t make them criminal, regardless of the Republicans and other anti-Clintonites who want to make this into the next great conspiracy.
You continue to speak of the Warning as if it had been the Burning Bush speaking to Moses. (And Moses ignoring the BB.)
But as several posting here have intimated, when you work for the government, you have people coming in all the time and telling you that you HAVE to do such-and-such. Some of these exhortations are contradictory. You have no real way of knowing who is a Burning Bush and who is just a self-important, officious bureaucrat.
It’s worth recalling, too, that in 2009 we did not possess all the knowledge that the intervening years have brought us, here in 2016.
Today we are hyper-aware of the power and reach of hacking. But the list of major hacking scandals that directly affected millions of consumers was notably shorter in 2009, and hacking was not established as so pervasive a part of normal life. The Target breach–perhaps the most widely-publicized at that time–didn’t make the news until late 2013. It was followed later by Adobe, Sony, Staples, Home Depot, Ashley Madison etc. Before 2009 hacking was in the news, but not in the 'not another one’ way we’ve come to consider “normal” in 2016.
How many secret memos addressed to her individually and exhorting her to stop a particular communications practice do you think she received and directly responded to?
In January 2009, WikiLeaks began publishing intercepted phone calls. Around that time, the British phone hacking scandal received widespread attention. Accordingly, she was individually and specifically warned of the vulnerabilities in her use of an unsecured Blackberry on March 6, 2009.
WikiLeaks started publishing stolen State Department documents in February 2010, and became world news in April 2010. For many months after that, her server still had remote access capabilities activated without use of a VPN and had no threat monitoring software installed, among other vulnerabilities.
I do not expect Hillary Clinton to have appreciated how insecure her setup was. I do expect her, and anyone in her position, to take seriously individualized warnings from people she receives on subjects she doesn’t know enough about to judge for herself. And I certainly expect that if she agrees with the security threat assessment that she will then change her behavior.
If you cannot expain the importance of security to someone in a way that they will take seriously then you shouldn’t be speaking to them about security. Let someone who can do it.
I’ve been in IT for along time and I have managed to convince every exec that balked at doing things the right way to actually do things in the right way. It took some persuasion, and in one case a threat to go to the state government about it, but in the end they always complied.
Clinton was told by experts that this was a bad idea and did it anyway. That shows either astoundingly bad judgement or a don’t give a fuck attitude.
Given that Clinton wants to hold one of the most powerful positions on the planet, why would anyone think she would listen to experts in other fields? And the President has to listen to experts in all kinds of areas to be able to govern well.
When a government employee puts their convenience ahead of everything else, there is a serious problem.
Based on what I have seen so far, and the fact that the investigation so far is an FBI review of the security of the data, it is clear that the IT also noticed how “stupid” the setup was and while there was criticism of what Clinton was doing I also think that there were IT workers that also did agree with what Clinton was doing or did not see what the big deal was.
I would not be surprised that some of those experts did mess up. They were not supposed to be there and those are the ones that I think will suffer the consecuences the most.
Well, that’s an interesting way of denigrating both my abilities and Hillary’s. Thanks for that. But since you know pretty much nothing of the circumstances surrounding either nor exactly what those abilities are, I suggest maybe you should stick to doing your own job.
Oh yeah and I’d love to see you threaten the Secretary of State. Good luck with that.
:dubious: I don’t know who these people are who don’t see what the big deal is.
I work in IT for the government, so I’m imagining myself in that situation. Clinton wants to check her private email from a government BB; I can (and would) say no to that. Clinton doesn’t want to carry 2 BBs so she says she doesn’t even want a government email account then; great, I can’t force her to use one. Clinton wants to check her email at work (in the SCIF) though, so she needs to bring her BB inside. I can say hell no to that. Clinton wants to configure a desktop (unclassified) computer inside the SCIF to connect to her IMAP server; I can sell Jesus Christ no way to that. Clinton then (according to this latest round of emails) proposes the absurd solution of bringing a dedicated computer into the SCIF and connecting it to the outside world via a separate (commercial?) line, so she can connect to her email server. I throw my hands up in the air and wonder what planet I’m on while I say no and walk away.
But that’s all I can do. I can say no, no, no, to every stupid workaround she proposes for the situation she’s put herself in by refusing to carry 2 Blackberries, but I can’t actually dictate which email address all of her contacts use to email her.
I’ve gone on record here saying that I think the classified email info is overblown, but I can’t stress enough just how dumb it was to insist on using her own private server despite all the annoyances it must have caused. I think Richard Parker is right, at some point with all the IT people saying no, no, no, it should have clicked that it was just a bad idea.
But there is trouble with that affirmation, you do not know how many did say no, or that there were other conversations made in other channels that told her to go ahead, I have the hunch (yes it is a guess too, but I do think it fits the information given so far) that this is the main reason why the FBI is not considering this a criminal investigation, we should not forget that even early it was pointed out that what Clinton did was not illegal regarding her server, unless we want to become a nation that will base their rules on post hock laws.
Of course I do think that those IT minions were in turn shown to be wrong later. I also have experience in IT, and this looks like a case of minions letting it go for convenience too and finding later that no, they should not had let go, but it is too late now; the FBI is left to figure out if information was indeed looked at by enemies and how to prevent this issue from happening again. And because it is not likely to happen again and it is so unlikely that she could be indicted for this, this is mostly useful now to see who’s Republicans get blamed for using a bazooka to get the Clinton fly…
And missing still, I expect to see more Republicans get in trouble by the angry citizens that got promises that they would see Hillary going to jail for this.
That would be far more convincing if those details told us anything we didn’t already know. Even if you hadn’t already guessed that, I can’t see how it’s supposedly something that would take someone on one side to the other side.
Nor do I see a point when you admit she didn’t do it nefariously, which gets rid of the real problem. She’s just like every other person in the world, who puts convenience above security.
I only fault the system for allowing her to do it in the first place, instead of forcing her to set up a secure server.
I don’t care what your abilities are unless you start claiming that your inability to do your job should be the standard everyone is held to in the field.
If some one is asking an IT person (actually anyone, the field doesn’t really matter) to do things that are highly questionable and/or possibly illegal, the only response is to educate them on the proper method
If the person refuses then the two options are to a) quit or b) go to the proper authority. If, in the case of Clinton, the proper authority is the boss, then you go to the press. If the person is in a position of great importance, then the proper response should be a and b if the person will not budge.
I would have had no problem telling Clinton that what she was doing was insanely stupid. Might have been fired but there are other jobs and there wouldn’t be the whole grilled by the F.B.I. thing.
I have told a multiple billionaires no during my career. The guy who I threatened with going to the state board was a billionaire who could have fired my ass on the spot since he owned the business.
One of the problems is that too many people kowtow to people like Clinton. Instead of making a stand on what is right too many people get all impressed with titles and do things that they know they shouldn’t.
And Clinton knows this. Clinton also knows that lying works. So instead of doing things the right way she has (and will continue) to do things her way regardless of how stupid it is. This will go on until there are real consequences for her actions.
I don’t know how this applies to the specific case of Clinton, but I disagree as a general rule. Meaning, there are a lot of areas where you do one thing “by the book” but as a practical matter things are just not done that way. (Of course, this applies to a whole lot of other political (& business) scandals, and many of the people who are vehemently defending Clinton don’t take that same approach when it’s a politician (or business executive) who they dislike.) But as a practical matter, if you’re some low-level guy with expertise in a certain area, it’s very difficult to try to force senior people in your organization to keep things by the book, especially if these are these are things that are widely disregarded by many other senior leaders.
On what date was the March 6, 2009 memo, and her response to it, first reported? This was the first article in which I saw those details, among others.
In my view, that memo and her response is one of the biggest things that makes this a scandal. She wasn’t just violating some generic protocol, in a way she didn’t fully appreciate, and in a way lots of her predecessors did. Instead, she was contradicting specific advice given individually to her, with lengthy explanation and justification warning her of a specific threat, which she agreed with and then continued to ignore.
She isn’t just like every other person in the world. She was the Secretary of State of the United States of America. She was easily in the top five targets of foreign intelligence surveillance. Her deciding to put convenience above security is quite different in character from the low-level DOD employee who backs stuff up to Dropbox instead of using his secured USB drive.
I don’t know by what mechanism you imagine “the system” could force her to use better security. The way “the system” does that is to send her a strongly-worded memo telling her that her actions risk national security. I suppose they also take it over her head and talk to POTUS if need be. But that assumes they knew she continued to use the unsecured phone after she told them she had gotten the message.