Thursday, March 05, 2015

Hillary Clinton's Email Problem

I have been working in the high-tech business for nearly 20 years. When you sign up, you are told in no uncertain terms that company business is to be conducted only on the company's email system. You are not to send or receive work-related email on your personal account.

I've also noticed that I can't send email directly to my various Congresscritters. I have to use a form on each Senator or Representative's web site, and those sites are in the senate.gov and house.gov domains.

So color me aghast that nobody in Hillary Clinton's circle of advisors told her that she shouldn't conduct business for the Department of State from her personal email domain.  And equally aghast that nobody at the Department of State told her this.

People. I can't tell you how unlikely it is that her ISP or system administrator had sufficient security in place to provide adequate protection for email coming from the Secretary of State.

Yes, that is the sound of me banging my head against the nearest wall, especially when I read the crap coming out of the mouths of people defending her. IMO, this amounted to a security breech on the part of the Secretary of State. The Secretary's work email belongs on mail servers owned, supervised, and supported by the Federal government.

2 comments:

Philip Amos said...

But it is not indefensible. Until the new regulations of 2014 making it mandatory to use only the Department's email system for official business, communication with other officials had customarily been conducted via personal email. So it was with her predecessors during the email era. And she may still be criticized, but not she alone, nor either Democrat or Republican appointees alone.

Aleksei said...

Philip,

The U.S. State Department has a robust email infrastructure that is presumably vetted by the Homeland Security Department, the CIA and other relevant agencies. So why does Hillary Clinton, on the eve of her becoming secretary of state, secretly set up her own private email system that is administered by unknown parties and that provides an unknown level of security against cyber-attacks, and commence to use this system for all of her official email traffic during her four years in office?

What was the motivation?

If she felt that the department’s email system was problematic, it was her responsibility to ensure that the problems were researched, identified and fixed. More importantly, this rogue email operation must have been discovered early on by Homeland Security and made known to the White House. If so, why would the White House tolerate such an egregious breach of protocol, let alone common sense?

These revelations call into serious question not only Clinton’s judgment and management skills, but also, and more importantly, her basic ethics and ability to follow standard government protocols. A person of such profile has no business seeking the presidency. Hopefully the details of this whole affair will be fully explored by the relevant agencies and that the American press will not abdicate its responsibilities to the American people in this regard.