Comment by merpnderp
9 years ago
I've almost entirely given up on conversations in HN threads, but the recent State Dept Inspector General's report concludes that after the server was found to be compromised, the staffers who found the issue were told to never speak of it again.
This wasn't just poor IT security, this was willful ignorance of the consequences of state secrets being in the open. It is incredibly likely she was targeted by foreign intelligence. And perhaps Russia found it useful that no one was talking about their impending invasion of Ukraine or Iran learned how desperate the administration was to cut a deal? There were a thousand ways this could have undercut US foreign policy, which has recently been disastrous (Like when Hillary hung up the phone on her Russian counterpart in 2012 when Russia was trying to negotiate a peaceful conclusion in Syria - according to the Wikileaks embassy cables).
> This wasn't just poor IT security, this was willful ignorance of the consequences of state secrets being in the open.
To be clear, this was unclassified email. Classified email is on a separate network.
Certainly having access to the Secretary of State's unclassified emails could yield valuable intelligence insights but these are not emails that are going to contain "secrets" per se.
That's absolutely not clear at all. Content from SIPRNet and JWICS both ended up in 1,340 of the emails on Hillary's server. The CIA has reviewed the emails and said that several of them contain partial content from their highly sensitive intelligence on human intelligence.
We won't know for sure until the FBI investigation is complete, but it is looking like this wasn't an accident but a cavalier attitude towards handling sensitive intelligence.
But given how no one seems to care how she handled Syria, Iraq, and N. Africa, it's obvious it doesn't much matter how she handled secret information.
Right, but State Department has Classnet for classified materials, this is not a case of Clinton plugging into Classnet with a private server.
The fact that other people sent information to her Opennet email address that contained information derived from classified documents is not necessarily damning for Clinton. If someone from DoD or any of the intelligence agencies pulled information from a classified document and sent it to a public email address, that spillage would be on the sender.
If Clinton realized that classified info came into her inbox then she would be responsible for getting that information off an unclassified machine. But if someone pasted an excerpt from a classified source into an unclassified email, the recipient of that email may not know that it was in fact classified information. Certain types of information should ring alarm bells for the recipient, but the classification of other types of information are not always going to be apparent if the information is not marked (secret, top secret, sbu, etc).
To date there doesn't seem to be anyone claiming there was intentional spillage on Clinton's part, or that she personally took classified information and put it on an unclassified system. There may yet be more revealed but right now it doesn't look like she did anything meriting prosecution.