Comment by drakefire
9 years ago
This story just keeps getting better. There is either a grand nefarious plot, or worse, horrific incompetence. I just can't find a third possibility.
9 years ago
This story just keeps getting better. There is either a grand nefarious plot, or worse, horrific incompetence. I just can't find a third possibility.
No nefarious plot. My understanding is that it went roughly like this. Back in 2009 Clinton requested a secure smartphone from the NSA. It's a custom made device (security by obscurity?). Anyway, the president gets one. As the secretary of state she has to travel a lot, and not being able to do email on the road is highly impractical. So she thought she should get one too.
The NSA denied her request for a secure smartphone and gave her some nonsense excuse. She tried a few more times to get one, and then Clinton gave up and ordered somebody to set her up with a private email server. She used this unsecure email server for years. She used it to communicate with top level officials (including the president). That she had this server was common knowledge in the administration. She knew it wasn't secure and she's been very careful not to discuss any classified information over email at all. In a handful of cases she slipped up and some classified information ended up on email anyway.
This is the best case version (for her), and what her camp wants people to believe. Its hard to see that it's true though. The IG report is pretty clear that she willfully violated recommendations and warnings about security.
I'm inclined to believe accounts like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9149363
Perhaps she wasn't furtively planning to take over the world, but the evidence points to more than her just wanting to use a Blackberry - it really seems (to me) like she took significant measures to avoid keeping records.
So she wanted the NSA to stonewall because that would give her the excuse she needed to set up a private email server? And the rest of the administration played along?
The simpler explanation is that Clinton got really annoyed with the NSA for denying her requests so she disregarded the rules and did her own thing.
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You're acting like the NSA told her she couldn't have any smartphone, which isn't the story. The story is that the NSA said she couldn't have that smartphone.
Second, it seems to be your argument that she didn't get the IT support she wanted and so it's reasonable she did her own thing. This seems perfectly reasonable if you're trying desperately to give her the benefit of the doubt. Heck, we've all dealt with annoying IT departments!
Except, it's not like that. She was our top diplomat and 4th in line of succession to the presidency. It's a fact that classified information was discussed on the system.
I just can't believe that the best defense is "well, she didn't like the UI of Windows CE and she wanted a Blackberry, and it's not her fault the NSA wouldn't give her one -- so, she did what any of us would do -- she co-opted her husband's private server and paid a State Department employee under the table to manage it outside of the government infrastructure. She also made sure to order her subordinates to keep the email address out of the official State Dept. email registry because she didn't want to risk being forced to disclose anything. And, it's perfectly OK that when her email correspondence was subpoenaed during a FOIA lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, the State Dept. didn't know to look on this server, and as such they didn't turn over all of the relevant materials until years later, when the private email address was made public and she felt it was OK to release hard copies of 30k emails (promising that among the 32k she deleted were only personal emails about yoga, Chelsea's wedding, etc.).
But, isn't that what we all do when the IT department is unreasonable?"
And those slipups should open her to prosecution under the Espionage Act.
A number of security professionals (I mean security in the government, Information Assurance sense) have told me that if they or I were to do anything like what Secretary Clinton did, we would be liable to be prosecuted.
The irony of Clinton having possibly violated the same law that she has used to (wrongly) advocate for the prosecution of whistleblowers is maddening, and moreover, the fact that she will likely escape prosecution is a horrible indictment of our democracy.
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This is very true. But you aren't the Secretary of State. I'm sure there are people at a high enough level at wherever you work now that the normal rules don't apply to them. That's the nature of any organization. C-level executives, military generals and high level politicians can all decide not to follow certain rules if they choose, especially when it comes to IT policy. I'm not saying that what Clinton did was right or good, but this kind of thing does happen at a large number of organizations. It should not be surprising that an internationally famous figure would be treated differently than a mid level employee.
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Well, why aren't they? Somehow I don't believe she sat there and edited her sendmail.cf by hand. She delegates the task, it gets done crapily, then it works so why change it.
I'm currently working with a major health care center - top of the line everything - and they hand me my upcoming appointment schedule printed from "myfreecalendars.com" because their IT people haven't gotten printing working in their new scheduling program, and frankly they just need to get shit done. I'm sure it's a HIPPA violation, but frankly I'm not going to complain because I need to get shit done too.
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This narrative doesn't address the fact that Clinton was actively opposed to FOIA requests and had sought means to keep her public work private as much as possible.
Following common sense here, her decision to ignore State Department regulations (which she lied about) and participate in classified communications (which she also lied about) on a private server immediately after she had made efforts to minimize public access to her communications, leads to the obvious conclusion that she put secrecy above transparency. If her narrative in private testimony matches the public one, then she likely perjured herself as well on the point of whether the State Department authorized the server, since they now say they did not (which again, she lied about).
Not only actively opposed to FOIA requests -- unresponsive to subpoenas, including the Judicial Watch lawsuit's subpoena which requested all emails related to Benghazi and Libya.
Judicial Watch didn't get her emails about Libya with Sid Blumenthal until after the Guccifer hack made the email address public knowledge.
If it weren't for the Guccifer hack (of Sid Blumenthal's email), we wouldn't even know about the server, and she would have ignored that subpoena forever.
Forgive me, but I have only casually followed this. Perjury requires she falsify her testimony under oath, has there actually been a formal deposition from Clinton under oath?
I'll admit, I'd love to see nothing more than for her to go to prison (and I am expecting downvotes for this) - but I don't think it's going to be for perjury unless I missed something.
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Do you have any sources for that?
The story I keep hearing is that she had this set up to make FOIA requests more difficult/impossible to fulfil.
The really out there stuff is that this was to hide any cash-for-favors exchanges that happened with relation to The Clinton Foundation.
The "wanting the NSA phone, being refused, and continuing to do what she'd always done" thing is the real story. Her staff were dumb not to make a stand at some point.
Quotes:
Mills wondered whether the department could get her an encrypted device like the one from the NSA that Obama used.
“If so, how can we get her one?” Mills wrote the group on Saturday evening, Jan. 24. ...
A request for a secure device from the NSA was rebuffed at the outset: “The current state of the art is not too user friendly, has no infrastructure at State, and is very expensive,” Reid, the security official, wrote in an email on Feb. 13, adding that “each time we asked the question ‘What was the solution for POTUS?’ we were politely told to shut up and color.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-clintons-e...
Never underestimate the attraction of convenience.
I can't prove some of the more out-there theories aren't true, but they just don't make sense to me.
Given the sheer volume of email she sent from her blackberry (lunch meetings, when to get up, where to go, can you print this, happy birthday, etc) it's pretty clear it's her primary way of communication. So that explains her refusing to take no for an answer from the NSA.
If her motivation was to block FOIA requests, then why did she do literally all important and confidential communication on paper, which falls under FOIA? Then why did the entire administration accept her use of a private email server if she didn't have an obvious reason why she needed one? If her real motivation was to dodge FOIA, then why was the NSA stonewalling? The FOIA hypothesis raises far more questions than it answers.
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If the latter was the case why not just use the .gov email for state dept. business and the clintonemail.com email for international cash for favors?
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Wouldn't both sides need to be outside of FOIA for it to be worthwhile? It seems most of her emails are to staff with .gov email addresses, so surely everything is still recorded, be it in Inbox or Sent?
>>> The really out there stuff is that this was to hide any cash-for-favors exchanges that happened with relation to The Clinton Foundation.
It would've been a good plan if she had actually secured the server properly and had encrypted all of her stuff.
Unfortunately, there's plenty of evidence of shady stuff the foundation was doing without additional support in her private emails.
Who is the one telling that story, and what is there evidence that that was the purpose?
I just don't believe that Hillary Clinton could not get an email account on a government email server and that somehow having exchange at her house with no controls was the last option she had. I can't think of a scenario where a server at her house is better than almost any other option.
It's not according to the parent that she couldn't get an email account, but rather that she couldn't get a "secure smartphone"
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http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/nsa-re...
I never really understood why the NSA couldn't have provided her with some sort of handheld digital device that wasn't that Windows CE PDA. I also don't understand why Clinton didn't just opt to use it. Having used the WinCE devices before, they're not all that bad to do email on. They're not good, but how much worse would it have been compared to a BB? I used a UT Starcomm PP6700 (or something like that) and I even kinda liked the keypad.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/this-i...
I mean, according to the deposition of one of her aides that was released today she didn't know "how" to use email on anything but her BB and wasn't comfortable with something different - which is a copout of all copouts, I'm not HAPPY that I'm still deploying .Net applications on Windows at work (which isn't going to change unless Laserfiche and IBM start supporting .Net core or my team suddenly decides to switch to Java), but it's my job and I deal with the limitations imposed on me as a result of my employment.
That's the most believable version I've heard so far by a long shot.
Somewhere in between, just based on experience from spending 1.5 years to get Rahm's phone records. I've received one week so far and now I'm working on getting as much of a sample of his phone records as possible without them invoking their usual "unduly burdensome" rejection [0]. (Hoping to have something published within the next two months or so. Crazy story.)
The level of misinterpretation of FOIA among FOIA officers, lack of domain knowledge, intentional delays and reject-if-possible mentality makes these things very difficult. Total incompetence.
Though, if you find yourself close to something juicy, you can bet your ass a lawyer will swoop in and find something technically wrong to prevent information from being released. Chicago did that to me eight months in by saying "We don't use VoIP, so your request is void." after the state's attorney general's office told Chicago to give me the info. I'd consider this mildly nefarious.
[0] As far as I'm concerned, "unduly burdensome" is just another way of saying "we're not clever enough to get that information, so you're going to have to come up with a clever way on your own, with 1% of the information we have".
"Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory." -Bernard Ingham
Seems similar to Hanlon's Razor:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Thank you, I'd been trying to remember what this was called.
It's both. The security aspect is incompetence. The idea of having it external is deliberate to avoid FOIA.
Obvious throwaway account for obvious reasons. I worked at a well known international "activism" type organization. If our data practices ever came to light, the organization wouldn't exist anymore. I promise.
Never underestimate the incompetence even by the largest of organizations.
Depends if you class lobbying as a grand nefarious plot or not. I suspect there's likely to be financial reasons for the private email server in this case.
It is neither. It is just standard 'incompetence'; this is really '65 year old doesn't understand computers' ; details @ 11
It is "65 years old wants to skirt the rules and no in her entourage had the skills to do it properly or the balls to tell her it is a bad idea".
In a sense I am sympathetic with her - this is the type of hacking the system we at HN tend to admire. Clinton is "Uber for Email" before it was cool - dislike the rules and current infrastructure - build your own.
It almost sounds like a farce: Clinton gets indicted or loses face due to incompetence relating to the e-mail server scandal, and in her place is elected The Donald, a man who has committed worse transgressions and has the potential to do even worse things when given power.
Frankly, she doesn't sound any more incompetent than even a typical old company c. 2010: think Target, Sony, etc. It would be sad, given that her opponent will likely be Trump, if this scandal sinks her candidacy.
While I care for neither she is the bigger danger because the anti-war left will be silent with her as will many other good activist groups like they are currently silent. A complicit and complacent press and Congress is the reason we have drones killing American's abroad, Manning in jail, Snowden in Russia, Libya in disarray, and a general mess in the Middle East to say the least about increased racial issues in the states. Identity based politics is poison and it shuts down too many groups.
Donald won't catch a break from ANYONE, it will be good to have nearly every group riding the Administrations ass every single day. Let alone he really isn't bound to one party or another and likely will go down the middle and get more things fixed than a party centric politician.
tl;dr the real threat Clinton poses over Trump is that press, Congress, and activist, will be silent against her.
Are you sure Trump wouldn't catch a break from anyone ? Have you seen how most republicans are now supporting him ? Do you think they won't support him if he wins ? why ?
> The Donald, a man who has committed worse transgressions and has the potential to do even worse things when given power.
You are overestimating Trump and underestimating Hillary.
She has no one to blame but herself.
You really believe this garbage?
Worry not. Any democrat candidate on the ballet will beat trump. You can't win an election on the rich, white, male vote.
Donald is a test as to whether or not you can win an election on white votes. The rich, white, male votes are probably the one cohort of whites he's least likely to get.
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It's a vast right wing conspiracy. All the scandals...over her 30 year public career. Nothing to see here. /sarc