Comment by rootusrootus
7 months ago
This is why when I worked in a secure area (and not even a real SCIF) that something as simple as bringing in an electronic device would have gotten a non-trivial amount of punishment. Beginning with losing access to the area, potentially escalating to a loss of clearance and even jail time. I hope the silos and all related infrastructure have significantly better policies already in place.
On the one hand, what you say is correct.
On the other, we don't just have Snowden and Manning circumventing systems for noble purposes, we also have people getting Stuxnet onto isolated networks, and other people leaking that virus off that supposedly isolated network, and Hillary Clinton famously had her own inappropriate email server.
(Not on topic, but from the other side of the Atlantic, how on earth did the US go from "her emails/lock her up" being a rallying cry to electing the guy who stacked piles of classified documents in his bathroom?)
> (Not on topic, but from the other side of the Atlantic, how on earth did the US go from "her emails/lock her up" being a rallying cry to electing the guy who stacked piles of classified documents in his bathroom?)
The private email server in question was set up for the purpose of circumventing records retention/access laws (the example, whoever handles answering FOIA requests won't be able to scan it). It wasn't primarily about keeping things after she should have lost access to them, it was about hiding those things from review.
The classified docs in the other example were mixed in with other documents in the same boxes (which says something about how well organized the office being packed up was); not actually in the bathroom from that leaked photo that got attached to all the news articles; and taken while the guy who ended up with them had the power to declassify things.
That's spinning it pretty nicely. The problem with what he did is that 1) having the power to declassify something doesn't just make it declassified, there is actually a process, 2) he did not declassify with that process when he had the power to do so, just declared later that keeping the docs was allowed as a result, and 3) he was asked a couple times for the classified documents and refused. If he had just let the national archives come take a peek, or the FBI after that, it would have been a non-issue. Just like every POTUS before him.
> Not on topic, but from the other side of the Atlantic, how on earth did the US go from "her emails/lock her up" being a rallying cry to electing the guy who stacked piles of classified documents in his bathroom?
The same way football (any kind) fans boo every call against their team and cheer every call that goes in their teams' favor. American politics has been almost completely turned into a sport.