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Search Hillary Clinton’s Emails

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241 pointsfrostmatthew149 comments

The banality of it all is what strikes me.

A personal favorite: http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/#/?d...

Been there, Hil :)

Imagine if linkedin had captured her phone contacts through one of their scummy links - might be some interesting people there.

Exactly! Like that scene in Doctor Strangelove when the President calls the Prime Minister of Russia to deliver the bad news that a errant US bomber with a nuke is heading towards Russia and the Russian Prime Minister complains that he only calls them when he has bad news.

All the interesting stuff has been [ ].

Plus a lot of stuff that's probably not very interesting.

Exactly. If anyone were to think that hillarys email server was not wiped with cloth prior to any of this BS - they'd be a full on idiot.

Well, every email exists in at least one other email account as well.

What striking to me, however certainly expected, is all the sycophantic drivel heaped onto a powerful person. "You looked fabulous", "we were discussing how incredible you are".

Perhaps aides think somehow they are being supportive, but if I were that powerful person, I believe I would rather just a few people I trust to tell me when I'm effing up - than everyone telling me how fantastic I am.

I work with some colleagues who use this kind of conversation. Full disclosure: I am a female, they are also female. They wouldn't talk to you like that -- it's a female-female communication style with a lot of subtext, common in parts of corporate America as well.

The majority (by far!) of my colleagues are male, and part of the subtext and context of this type of conversation is (1) to comment on things guys "can't" comment on, like "did I wear the appropriate jewelry or footwear for this event to project the social and intellectual persona that I'm trying to project", and (2) to combat the everyday little degradations you encounter, like someone at the registration table not registering you because they figured you're a girlfriend not a real participant. Women who are trying to maintain and accumulate power know that they can support each other in maintaining a stance of confidence rather than acceptance. Being primarily socialized into a stance of acceptance due to my historically all-male and socially inept professional circles, I was way confused when I got a female boss who started saying nice things about/to me. It is true that I do good things at work, although I don't manage to find the right shoes to project being corporate -- but I've never had anyone say anything about either of those things! Ever!

It's a reasonable management tool in some ways. My male bosses asked me (forced me?) to do my job and also take care of "women things" (recruitment and retention of women and minorities) without ever saying anything nice or giving me any credit, so I quit doing most of that. Altruism has limits that are often reached at the bank account. But now I have a boss who views outreach as a positive and actually says nice things ("you're incredible! I'm amazed at how much you do!" etc) so yep, I'm more likely to do it. And it is good for my organization.

Interesting perspective. Personally, I would find effusive praise of that kind profoundly weird, and uncomfortable, because it doesn't fit into the framework of mostly male-male communication I'm used to(relatively traditional, tinged with some ex-military vibes). In large part, the sign of doing a good job is the absence of criticism. Since you could almost always improve on your performance, there tends to always be some level of criticism.

Maybe I'm weird, but external validation doesn't really push any of my buttons. If you think I really did a great job, give me a bonus, or an extra day or two of vacation. Otherwise, I've got work to do.

I would have said the same until I had a boss who was very openly and naturally complimentary. It does wonders for impostor syndrome and definitely kept me motivated through the hard times. It only worked because it came off as very natural and sincere, though.

Edit: I guess for context I should add we're both male.

I got somewhat comfortable with that (mostly) male-male framework through engineering college and math school. My experience was exactly yours: the sign of a good job is the absence of criticism, and you could always do better. I'm overall fine with that when I know that's the context, but your 2nd-to-last line is the kicker: give me the bonus or vacation if I did something!

Now I'm working with some folks from a more corporate background, and it is a different culture. Very different. I'm still getting used to it myself.

Finding what people think is a suitable reward is really difficult.

Doing a good job != standing out

"Recognise and reward" should be a tenet of good management, and you don't reward people for doing what they should be doing anyway.

One good reward is seeing if there are any conferences in the person's specialist field. But so they know it's not a holiday, have them to a brief presentation about what they learned upon their return.

The State Department is a slow organization with internal careers. I feel like you see the same in a lot of other career, conservative, small number at the top, higher payoff if you get there fields (legal, medical, academia, finance).

The amount of effort required to be sycophantic is minor in relation to the past 10+ years of work that your superior could torpedo on a whim.

Except that most of the people communicating directly with Secretary Clinton would have been political appointees who would have joined the organization from the outside.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a hierarchical, traditional organization.

Political appointees' careers are even more dependent on the whin of their superiors than career civil servants.

In lieu of actual achievement and hard work, ass-kissing such as this is what political connection selects for, so it is hardly surprising to me that these emails are littered with such "sycophantic drivel."

There's a strong gendered component to this, one which men used to working for male bosses may be unfamiliar with: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/11/hilla...

> Perhaps aides think somehow they are being supportive, but if I were that powerful person, I believe I would rather just a few people I trust to tell me when I'm effing up - than everyone telling me how fantastic I am.

And if you were powerful, and wanted to, you would likely be able to find ways to surround yourself with such people. But I think often enough, the people who want power don't want it because they're very well-centered, and I think it's fair to assume that politicians and other people mostly select the nature (which can mean what those really think and/or what they claim they think) of their "underlings" by the signals they send, the incentives they give, by whom they hire or fire. In other words, the dog is probably wagging the tail, not the other way around.

I could be wrong, I don't know this woman and don't follow US politics that closely, but just from random things like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dY77j6uBHI I would call it a somewhat educated guess. Some people don't want to know the truth about themselves, that's the exact opposite of their mission in life. By which I don't mean to bash Clinton in particular, the list of big time politicians I wouldn't suspect this about would be very short and hard to come up with.

Apply this to all her email:

https://sense2vec.spacy.io/

only mean to point out sycophancy and groupthink - no disrespect towards HRC intended

Chelsea's email to B & H about her experience in Haiti is an informative read.

I had assumed our disaster mitigation/rescue NGOs were a lot more effective than they actually are. They sound pretty awful, reading that email.

Here's a direct link to the email, to save anyone else having to search for it:

http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/pdfs...

I never really had an opinion about Chelsea Clinton, one way or another, but after reading that email I respect her.

It was incredibly well-written. Much respect to her.

You can tell that she is the kind of person that demands action and hates any kind of BS. Very business like.

This is also why you should always write emails assuming they're public record. Because one day... They just might be!

It was quite 'over-written', if that's even a term. The sentences were very dense with long compound sentences. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I feel like it's a failure on her part to drown the reader in text with a low readability score that isn't even jargon.

In fairness to her, her preamble explicitly stated that it was written hastily and without revision, and she did explicitly ask that, if it was to be shared, her name not be attached to it.

> As is often said, if I had more time - and less emotion - I would have written a shorter letter.

The longer emails, like this and many others, feel seeded for history. They give me the impression they are written knowing they will be made public down the track. As though they're trying to establish a good record/history for future political work. E.g. Happy to be the invisible soldier type lines.

Maybe I'm just jaded with the politicians of today...

I figured she just drafted that email while sitting in her hotel room after a particularly trying day, or on the flight home.

It's easy for me to get into a flow when I've got an uninterrupted stretch of time. Maybe she's the same way.

Chelsea vs. George P Bush 2024.

Go American democracy! What a joke...

Yeah, NPR/Propublica published a massive exposé about this a while back: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...

They used $500,000,000 to build six houses. No, that's not a typo.

The other interesting piece of information is the incredible amount of access Chelsea gets given her experience level. Obviously, her connections have helped her.

In her defense though, she seems to be living up to it.

Wouldn't it be more shocking if her daughter didn't have access to her own mother?

I didn't mean her mother, I meant the other people she was traveling with.

You mean the offspring of powerful people has undue influence? Call the press.

'Undue' as defined how?

Unwarranted or unjustifiable.

By that I meant not "what is the definition of undue", but rather, why is the "offspring of powerful people having [extra] influence" undue? By what metric do you define the level of influence that is appropriate to any one person? And separately, how are we to determine whether the child of a powerful person doesn't have just the right amount of influence per that metric, and it's just a coincidence that their parent is powerful in their own right?

Any influence granted through parental connections rather than one forged on your own are undue.

Such a terrible mess.

All is logistics, and no one except armies recognize that.

Yeah. Someone I know who briefly worked at the UN had some interesting stories about incompetence and politics where factional lines were drawn by nationality.

I got sat next to a CIDA worker at a wedding. She talked about her duties ensuring that a Canadian agency head was provided with adequate and hygienic toilets in Haiti. Reports included trips to various places and pictures of each possible crapper along the way. Tax dollars at work...

Can you imagine being the lead team on that? The existential ennui alone about the pointlessness of it all.

edit:forgot to mention that it was Haiti, acronym is CIDA, not CANAID

The late Michael Hastings' The Operators was a good read if you find the sausage making process interesting.

He has a strong viewpoint, but stories of Gen McChrystal throwing out ISAF functionaries from plush offices and closing officer bars at the Kabul ISAF headquarters were fairly humorous.

There were overriding politics between superiors, but the irony is that McChrystal, any infeasible strategy aside, got thrown out for showing distain for the same wasteful, corrupt system that everyone else gripes about.

> McChrystal ... got thrown out for showing distain for the same wasteful, corrupt system that everyone else gripes about.

OT: IIRC he resigned after he and his staff openly mocked to a journalist the President, VP and others in the chain of command, and their comments were published in Rolling Stone. That's not an effort to end corruption, it's insubordination, apparently widespread in his staff under his leadership, which itself is a form of corruption.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

From the article (which is partially reproduced and fleshed out with additional chapters in the book) a lot of the mocking seemed to concern involvement:

"Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. 'It was a 10-minute photo op,' says an adviser to McChrystal. 'Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss [McChrystal] was pretty disappointed.'"

And for what it's worth, when you're dealing with things like this:

"In February, the day before the doomed offensive in Marja, McChrystal even drove over to the president's palace to get him to sign off on what would be the largest military operation of the year. Karzai's staff, however, insisted that the president was sleeping off a cold and could not be disturbed. After several hours of haggling, McChrystal finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan's defense minister, who persuaded Karzai's people to wake the president from his nap."

Then I'd probably be in a less than charitable mood concerning the entire enterprise. To repeat, they had to argue with the staff of the president of the country whose insurgency we were fighting that being involved in starting a long-planned and massive offensive was more important than a nap. (And that's not getting into the comments about drug use)

Biden was exactly right, the entire thing was a cluster%^@# and a terrible idea to invest more in. But in the absence of a resolute US president who tells the military "No, you can't send in more troops"? Well, the military's going to do what it does: fight. And press for more fighting.

PS: The amount of backstabbing between different military cliques, Congress, different cliques in the State Department, and the Executive staff was also mind boggling.

> I'd probably be in a less than charitable mood concerning the entire enterprise.

I don't blame him for his mood but I do for his actions. He's a general running a major operation; millions of lives and the welfare of nations depend on him; those are the responsibilities and stakes. He can't undermine the enterprise because he feels like complaining to a reporter.

I assume you think that's a bad thing? If I had someone planning where I was going to stay I would tell them, put me anywhere that has a quiet comfortable bed and a clean private comfortable toilet. Maybe there's more to this story?

Careful, your privilege is showing.

edit: Seriously on the downvotes? If your job is to travel to another country to render aid because of conditions caused by your own country sending troops to facilitate a coup, and then you send your underlings to make sure you have golden toilets on your visit, then something is messed up. If you can't see that and you're downvoting me for it, congrats, you are the problem.

> If your job is to travel to another country to render aid because of conditions caused by your own country sending troops to facilitate a coup...

One of these days we'll hold the Canadians accountable for their wanton coup-facilitation and unreasonable toilet-related demands.

This email epitomizes what all organizations tend to become. As they grow, they need to find ways to grow themselves bigger - and they CANNOT do that if they are solving the problem. Thus organizations develop many ways to justify their growth without doing anything - for example - use more words and do less work. As result T-shirts and latrines do not get delivered and lengthy emails clog the bandwidth.

http://www.povertyinc.org/

You’ll never look at poverty and the Third World the same again. — Michael Moore, Filmmaker

Moving. I confess there were parts where I cried. — Russ Roberts, EconTalk

You made me so proud to be an African woman.  Thank you for the brutal but necessary and empowering truth. — Dany Masado, Health Professional | Cameroon

Hi, I'm one of the developers of this interactive graphic. If our search isn't doing it for you, why not download all the emails yourself? Check out our code to build a SQLite full-text database https://github.com/wsjdata/clinton-email-cruncher

If someone does this, and wants to use a full-text search-as-a-service to power the search, I'll provide a free Searchify account for it (I'm the founder). For example code, see our Enron email search demo: http://gosearchify.herokuapp.com/

Thank you for offering this to any takers. I personally don't have the know-how to do this but if somebody out there does, it would be great if you could donate your time.

Thank you! It's amazing how painful they make this, when they could just release the &*^%$ text files.

It's almost a wonder they don't send the docs to you in hardcopy, printed in 4-point font like Lavabit.

They redacted Sidney Blumenthal's email domain, but they did not redact the email headers from this email:

http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/pdfs...

Looks like he had an @aol.com address, which matches up with the length of the redacted bit and you can even see the top of the 'l' in some cases.

Search for wikileaks, you'll see how concerned they are with it. They get a periodic update of how worldwide media are covering wikileaks.

Neat, but the search interface needs some work. You can choose a sender/recipient but you can't specify whether they are the sender or receiver. I was trying to sort by all emails sent by H, but you don't seem to be able to do that. Still very cool.

Favorite headline so far: H: HIGHLY IMPORTANT! COMPREHENSIVE INTEL REPORT ON LIBYA. AND DRINK 8 GLASSES OF WATER. SID

P.S. search for 'mini' to get granular breakdowns of H's schedule.

Hopefully wikileaks will mirror it, their search is decent

Can someone explain why this is happening for us non-Americans (or possibly just me if I missed some major news event)?

When Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, she used a private email server that was stored at her home and later in hosting facility not cleared for classified information (supposedly in a bathroom).

Initially, she claimed there was no classified information on the server at any time. Further, when she was required to turn over records to comply with archival rules, she had her staff delete the personal messages and pass the rest along.

In the current investigation, they've discovered classified emails - some classified after the fact, some not - which included KH-designated intelligence (aka detailed satellite images). In addition, when she delivered the data to the State Department, she gave a copy of all of it to her lawyer, who didn't have clearance for the classified data.. which shouldn't have been there anyway.

Yes, previous Cabinet-level staff had used private servers but the National Archives explicitly recommended against it in 2006 (a recommendation, not law) and then President Obama signed an Executive Order making it the law in 2009. Secretary Clinton continued doing it until she left the State Department in 2013.

At minimum, it was disregard for the recommendations and eventual law. At worse, it was flagrant disregard for protecting the means and methods - that includes people - who collected and needed that information.

> In the current investigation, they've discovered classified emails - some classified after the fact, some not

"some not"? If you are implying that Clinton's server held messages marked as classified when sent, could you provide some evidence to this effect? The Clinton campaign is quite adamant that this is not true.

This is a red herring. It doesn't matter if it was marked or not. It is up to the sender to take the precaution. That there are now thousands of emails marked after the fact as classified, wouldn't that tell you the assumption should have been made to err on the side of caution, and assume most everything you are discussing has high probability to be classified information?

And using your own insecure personal server for these emails essentially guarantees that it's been hacked by.. China, Russia, take your pick.

In fact there is a term called "born-classified" which applies to information about foreign governments provided by foreign sources. Here's some evidence:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-email...

There's a fundamental misunderstanding about classified material, which is that it becomes de-classified once it is public. Not true.

For example, take the Wikileaks information dump, which came from a huge cache of State Dept. cables and has now been covered in hundreds of public newspaper articles. If one of her friends forwarded one of those articles to Clinton, boom, she now has classified information in her email. Why? Because those cables, despite being leaked, were never de-classified.

Another example: a lot of the stuff revealed by Snowden was classified at a very high level. It still is today, even though it is widely available public information. Can you see how this could cause problems for someone who is a government official, but has friends/family/contacts who wish to discuss these news articles?

The press is a well-known vector that leads to a lot of government staff having classified information in their unclassified email systems. Typically investigations are rare and prosecutions rarer, because it's basically impossible to prevent and does no practical damage (since the info is already out there).

This is why the mere fact of having classified material on an email server does not necessarily imply incompetence or malice.

I did not imply anything, I said it quite clearly: some of the emails contained information that was classified at the time she sent/received them.

According to CNN:

> Two government agencies flagged emails on Clinton's server as containing classified information, the inspector general said, including some on "special access programs," which are a subset of the highest "Top Secret" level of classification, but are under subject to more stringent control rules than even other Top Secret information."

Ref: http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/19/politics/hillary-clinton-email...

> some of the emails contained information that was classified at the time she sent/received them.

As far as I can tell, the article to which you refer says nothing of the sort. It says that the email contains information which was classified after the fact. The article is based on the Inspector General's letter (http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2016/images/01/20/2016.01.14.-....), which says the same thing. Do you have evidence that the information was classified at the time it was mailed to her server? Her campaign says it was not.

Well as long as the campaign is your source, you should definitely believe them. They're much better informed than the FBI, State Department, and Senate Select Intelligence Committee investigators.

What is classified after the fact? It's pretty straight forward in that letter. The emails contained info derived from classified info. Info derived from classified info is itself classified. There is no classified after the fact. It was all classified from the get go.

Classified after the fact means marked classified after the fact.

This matters because a lot of publicly available information--stuff we all know, stuff you can read in the paper today, or can be easily found on Wikipedia--is nevertheless considered classified information. There is no possible way that a single person can keep it all straight in their head, which is why State staff (and others) rely on the markings on documents (digital or otherwise) to know how to treat them.

If what the campaign says is true, then it sounds to me like a technicality. It seems to me implausible that 22 emails containing intel of the most secret sort had that intel classified after the fact (http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/20/hillary-clint...).

----------------

FROM: Important Official TO: Hillary Clinton

MESSAGE: Info you requested - JFK is still alive. He wants to meet you soon. Also, aliens. Lots of them.

----------------

In that ridiculous example, it seems like the Sec of State isn't thinking to herself, "I hope they don't classify this info later."

It's the official's responsibility to know what is and what isn't classified whether it is "marked". As a lawyer (and a Clinton!), she would certainly be parsing her words carefully.

Side note: I've read a few articles in which previous State employees have characterized State Department IT infrastructure as... less than functional.

Given that this is the federal government, an older and large department, and pre-USDS/18F, I consider that at least a somewhat plausible scenario.

Would be curious if anyone closer could lend a technical opinion on whether those claims have merit or are spin. (Given how bad signal:noise is on this issue)

Less than functional or not, it is the duty of people with access to classified information to protect it. You sign tons of paperwork to that effect.

Honest mistakes happen all the time. If you're lucky, your hand is slapped and people move along. But it is possible to have your clearance revoked - like Sandy Berger - or even serve prison time for purposeful malfeasance or disregard for the rules.

And this isn't a new thing... remember how when Obama took office everyone talked about securing his Blackberry - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/us/politics/23berry.html?_... ?

> While lawyers and the Secret Service balked at Mr. Obama’s initial requests to allow him to keep his BlackBerry, they acquiesced as long as the president — and those corresponding with him — agreed to strict rules. And he had to agree to use a specially made device, which must be approved by national security officials.

Which works when you're the President and can have a custom device made. But what about when you're Secretary of State? Or even, god forbid, some poor functionary down at the bottom end of State? Or the Department of Indian Affairs?

I absolutely agree that protecting classified information by whatever rules are in place is of primary importance.

However, we've all seen dysfunctional organizations. So I'm also sympathetic to someone trying to get work done and ignoring soft guidelines in favor of an institutionally accepted interpretation that's conducive to accomplishing the job. And unsympathetic to telling someone at the time "we really should do that, but everyone does this" and than raking them over the coals from a future armchair that we were shocked (!) that they didn't following all guidelines.

Show me a successful, highly-productive individual's records and I'll show you somewhere they forgot to cross a t.

> ignoring soft guidelines

Except we're not talking about "soft guidelines" or simple recommendations but actual laws:

* Executive Order 13526 - https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-...

* 18 U.S. Code § 793 - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793

* The 2009 Federal Records Act

* (probably) The Freedom of Information Act

in addition to a classified information non-disclosure agreement:

* https://foia.state.gov/searchapp/DOCUMENTS/HRC_NDAS/1/DOC_0C...

When >25% of government workers respond that private emails were used at least some of the time, that's an institutional problem.

http://www.govexec.com/insights/state-internal-workplace-com...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clintons-experience-...

You don't use custom devices, of course; in fact, your phone stays at the front. I've never known of anyone to be able to move IT equipment in and out of classified environments. I'm assuming that they make exceptions just for these top leaders so that they can move about and interface with the world while still keeping connected to classified information.

So, if it's some poor functionary at the bottom of state, his ass is out on the street if his phone comes into the classified area. Some spillage can sometimes be met with a slap on the wrist, but there's very little chance that you'll get off easy after bringing a microphone/GPS/camera/networked/mass storage device in to secure areas.

Most of the NSA people are free to buy Huawei Nexus 6p (although I'll bet there's some statistically significant disinclination) because their phones should never be interfacing with any of the information they use in their work.

I once had my two-way pager destroyed because I forgot to check it in one day. I had to pay for the new one myself. :(

So, as another outside observer looking in, the use of the private email doesn't seem to be relevant to the document release itself, right? That's just the result of a FOI request, because public official's emails are subject to FOI, regardless of where they're stored.

So what I wonder is, do we see this with every candidate? Is there a similar archive of Jeb Bush's emails from his time as Governor of Florida? Or do the States not tend to have the same kind of FOI transparency as the Federal Government?

> the use of the private email doesn't seem to be relevant to the document release itself, right? That's just the result of a FOI request, because public official's emails are subject to FOI, regardless of where they're stored.

I think probably someone would have tried to obtain her emails, whether the server issue came up or not. But as it happened, IIRC the sequence of events leading to the release began when the server issue came up.

Also relevant is that because Clinton controlled the server, she originally controlled which emails were deleted as 'personal' and which were released to the public.

> do the States not tend to have the same kind of FOI transparency as the Federal Government?

Some states, at least, have open records laws. Also, I've seen many governmental organizations adopt the policy of deleting all email after, e.g., 30 days, to reduce 'liability' (transparency).

> Is there a similar archive of Jeb Bush's emails from his time as Governor of Florida?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jeb+bush+emails+site%3Anytimes.com

To the best of my knowledge, governors would rarely have access to classified information other than law enforcement or potentially terrorism matters, so the laws and rules would be different than a Cabinet Secretary.

I can't speak about Florida or any State specifically, my background is purely at the Federal level.

State laws vary, but jeb bush has been pretty transparent - iirc he actually released a book of his emails as governor.

It should be pointed out that the book contained only emails sent and received from his official account, but nothing barred him (or Hillary) from using additional email accounts.

As it should be. The problem is when you start blending the two.. conducting official business from personal accounts.

That's opening the door to trouble as we're seeing.

Hillary Clinton used her on personal email server and address to conduct official business while serving as Secretary of State for the US (she's not the first to do this, Sarah Palin - former Governer of Alaska had similar problems I believe).

Two problems (at least):

- that is not permitted especially when handling Confidential/TopSecret material. You have to use their services/devices/etc so that they maintain control and accountability.

- all communication with public officials is archived and made public (once vetted/redacted as appropriate I'd assume), and is part of public record. If using private services, those communications will also be made public.

> all communication with public officials is archived and made public

Is that all communication period, or only communication with them while they're acting in their capacity as a public official?

How do public officials keep their legitimately personal business private? (E.g., having an affair). Can their personal email accounts be opened up and made public at any time? I'm curious.

All government work related emails are archived. They're available to the public through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests - basically, you make a request to the federal government for certain types of information and they are required to provide it to you, subject to limitations for relevance, confidentiality, etc.

Purely personal emails aren't archived. Government officials and employees use personal email accounts all the time, and their contents aren't turned over to the government PROVIDED that they relate purely to prsonal matters.

But in Hillary Clinton's case, she used a personal email account (stored on her personal server) exclusively to conduct government business. She said she turned over government-related emails to the State Department (as is required by law) and permanently deleted the rest. She also says she never sent confidential info or received information marked as confidential through this personal email address.

There are several investigations going on right now into her email practices. The focus primarily is on whether she mishandled confidential/top secret information. In response to FOIA and other legal requests, the State Department has been releasing her emails to the public. But the State Department has been withholding some documents on the basis that they contained confidential/top secret information after all.

Clinton says the agencies are retroactively applying an overly broad definition of confidnetiality to her emails, but her detractors are saying that the confidentiality designations show that she mishandled government secrets in violation of the law. Hence the political firestorm.

No matter how this turns out, using a homebrew personal email server to conduct state business was an incredibly foolish thing to do. I can't believe Clinton did this. I don't care if Palin or Jeb Bush or other people used personal servers too - she was the Secretary of State with presidential ambitions, and she's had a big red target on her since 1992. This reinforces the worst stereotypes that people have about her and the Clintons in general, that they are secretive, paranoid, conspiratorial, and completely willing to operate in the grey areas of the law.

It seems like we could learn more about Clinton's emails by asking under FOIA for emails sent by a wide variety of other public officials to/from her? Do you know if this has or is already being done?

The latter. You can still use personal accounts for personal matters.

http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/toolkit/pdf/ID317.pdf

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/04/02/396823...

Pretty sure only when they are acting. I believe they can have personal email accounts/phones, but they cannot use them for official business. Of course, we all know how nearly impossible that is to pull of. For which, you'll have courts and analysts just like this, sitting there sifting the wheat from the chaff if it makes it this far.

> How do public officials keep their legitimately personal business private? (E.g., having an affair)

If there's any grains of truth in House of Cards, I assume burner phones

Also, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, while he was Milwaukee County Executive.

If it was a two star general who did this, he'd be in jail.

Not a four star though: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/petra...

I think it's safe to say that if Petraeus had done what Hillary apparently did, he would be incarcerated.

If conversations in social settings with former colleagues in the IC / DoD are indicative of sentiment throughout these communities, there will be a tremendous amount of discontent if she is not prosecuted for her decision to conduct official communications as one of the most senior members of the USG over an unsecured personal email server starting in 2009.

Strongly disagree. Petraeus was far worse; he intentionally and knowingly gave classified information to someone not authorized to see it. He pled guilty.

It's unclear (IMHO unlikely) that Hillary did anything illegal. She has not been charged with a crime. She has not, so far as we know, been investigated for any crime. And there's no evidence any classified information was leaked, intentionally or not.

Broadwell had a TS clearance and was a reserve military intelligence officer, so....no.

> "court papers filed with the plea deal stated Petraeus in 2011 unlawfully gave Broadwell the black books of classified information including identities of covert officers, code word information, war strategy, intelligence capabilities, diplomatic talks and information from high-level White House National Security Council meetings."

> "Petraeus then lied to the FBI about it, the court papers said."

source: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/former-cia-director-petr...

Clinton choosing to use a private email server was a big mistake, but Petraeus' actions are MUCH worse. Not even in the same category. He's lucky he did not end up in jail.

> Clinton choosing to use a private email server was a big mistake, but Petraeus' actions are MUCH worse. Not even in the same category.

Always great to hear from people who know how open investigations will be resolved.

To be clear: HRC is accused not only of conducting official business in a manner that was completely unauthorized from an infosec perspective and in direct violation of both IC standards and a Presidential Executive Order; she also apparently ordered a subordinate who needed to send her classified materials to "turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure" [0]. To me this sounds like her giving a direct order to mishandle classified information.

It sounds like you're on Team Hillary and that's fine, we all have our political opinions. I do not think that your characterization of Petraeus' actions as "MUCH worse" than HRC's is accurate, either in terms of a reasonable-person evaluation of the severity of each respective (alleged in HRC's case) infraction or in terms of how the IC punishes these kinds of transgressions. They are normally merciless when it comes to people intentionally violating the integrity of classified information systems. Merciless.

[0]: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-department-releases-more-c...

> HRC is accused not only of....

No accusations have been leveled at Clinton, except in the press. That is, she has not been indicted, arrested, or charged.

That's not a "Team Hillary" thing, that is the literal truth of the legal situation.

Petraeus was charged and convicted.

That's your definition of "accusation"? By that standard, O.J. Simpson has no remaining accusations of homicide.

Her server setup at the time was legal and authorized. Most of your info above is incorrect.

Hillary is the subject of an open investigation? News to me. Do you have a source?

> If it was a two star general who did this, he'd be in jail.

You go to jail if you anger someone powerful and/or are disloyal, e.g., by leaking something without authorization or whistleblowing. Everyone else gets a slap on the wrist at most, afaict. General and CIA Director Petraeus gave classified information to his mistress; CIA Director John Deutch kept classified information unsecured on his home computer. Neither received significant punishment.

You see similar things in the military as a tension between enlisted service members and officers. It's a common belief that officers can get away with murder while the enlisted are given severe punishments for minor infractions. There's plenty of truth to it, but also a less visible component; it's far easier to get rid of officers than enlisted because enlistment confers rights, whereas officers serve at the pleasure of the President. So while officers aren't being made to stand in front of everyone while being berated for showing up late, I've known officers to be kicked out for things as minor as poorly-timed kidney stones (right before they were supposed to start a school.)

Anyway, all that is to say that the underlings are subjected to the rules, but up at the top it's more a matter of shuffling people away, often with minimal fanfare.

Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice also did the same thing.

Powell and Rice did not operate their own private email servers.

That seems somewhat worse, they used private email on servers they did not control?

A rare lapse in following procedure, likely accidental, is not even on the same planet as setting up a private email server to avoid oversight.

Those emails would still be safer on gmail than in some small IT firm's bathroom closet.

You are asserting that she did this to avoid oversight. If that were truly the case, wouldn't she have had a drastic hard drive failure and unreliable backups? That model has worked for IT departments for years.

Isn't it far more likely that she instructed someone on her staff to instruct someone in the back office to instruct some underpaid admin to just "make crap work so I can stop using dialup?"

I know we cannot prove a negative, but I'd bet $100 she couldn't edit an /etc/sendmail.cf without bricking it. (I know that's not your point, I just find it an amusing thought.)

Edit: parent was edited and my reply appears nonsensical. The parent stated that the server was set up to avoid oversight, which I do not believe has been established as true.

> parent was edited and my reply appears nonsensical. The parent stated that the server was set up to avoid oversight

Still does.

> I do not believe has been established as true

The only reason for someone in her position to set up a private email server is to avoid oversight - it's bizarre that anyone could think otherwise - the burden of proof is on her at this point.

But not in AOL servers, or yahoo. Private servers can be set up pretty freaking well for security. Not sure how hers were setup though.

The extremely low physical security of Hillary's server probably outweighs all of this.

It was just sitting in an office. A single person could have literally kicked in the door and waltzed off with a huge cache of state secrets, and we probably wouldn't even have a video tape of the theft.

The server was not secure enough to be storing state secrets. There's no arguing against this.

It wasn't accidental at all, they all knew they weren't on government email servers.

... when it was perfectly legal. It wasn't made illegal until 2009, by Obama's own hand.

Most government officials use the federal government's email system servers to classify emails.

From time to time someone uses a private email server that they pay for hosting instead of federal government ones. It sort of complicates things when that happens because it is not seen as much secure as a government one. We have laws about classified emails and rules to follow.

Hillary claimed there was no classified email on her server, and that she turned over all emails. The email of the private served was deleted, but now is being recovered. There is an FBI investigation into it that recovers emails.

The Republicans have attacked Hillary over private email use, but Sarah Palin and other Republicans also used private email servers.

I am sure in non-US nations this is no big deal, and you are wondering why it is being investigated. In the USA we want our government to be transparent and accountable for their documents and emails. Have have a freedom of information act that we can request documents and emails from the government on certain issues like Benghazi and the Embassy attacks. But if the email is deleted, how can we see it?

Anyway it has become a political issue that Republicans are using against Hillary Clinton right now.

Hillary, illegally, maintained a private email server for official correspondence and transmitted classified materials over it. The email server was hacked and the contents stolen and later published.

She is currently under investigation by the FBI for this.

There's no evidence that the email server was ever hacked. The contents were not stolen and later published. They were released to the FBI by Clinton (after she deleted some "personal" emails), and now released to the public under a FOIA request.

While there is no evidence that her email server was hacked, she did have correspondence with Sydney Blumenthal, who's account WAS hacked, and emails from that account were published.[1] This, combined with the fact that Clinton's server didn't boast the best security (allegedly), and it's not a stretch to imagine that her server was hacked.

[1] https://pando.com/2015/03/20/exclusive-interview-jailed-hack...

While it doesn't excuse Clinton, I think it's a lead pipe cinch that every single politician since Jimmy Carter has used some sort of off-the-books email service.

ObamaLeaks

http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/pdfs...

I can't shake the feeling that this was all part of the plan.

We all learn of the true value and humanity of The Hillary by reading her true, uncensored, selfless self. Now we know who She Really Is(TM).

Plans within plans within plans ...

The content seems very banal and will only serve to humanize her in the coming primaries. Super Tuesday is March 1st.

The timing is uncanny.

"Today, in 2011, I'm giving Secretary Hillary Clinton the nod as the Obama Administration's improbable MVP in the technology realm. "

http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/pdfs...

It's fun to search for "Syria" then go the second last page and read a curious e-mail from Sept. 2009 about "the first known case of a successful social media campaign in Syria".. Then a few pages later, June 2010 - "Bay Area execs seek to open doors with Syria" about a trip that Hillary's staff took part in including the infamous Jared Cohen whom Julian Assange talked about in one of his rants (https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/).

One could weave a compelling conspiracy theory if one were so inclined.

Interesting to note that searching using terms to probe her connections to the financial industry brings back a bunch of heavily redacted emails.

There's one with the subject "Koch" that is completely blanked out.

I searched by Susan rice and I'm (not) surprised that much of it is redacted, i.e. the people releasing this do not think it's suitable for release to the public.

In the end you can't be the most effective Secretary of state (Kissinger's words) in decades and not be emailing top secret material

I'm not sure how well the search actually works. I searched for "fart" in the "Search email text" field, and it returns 2 emails as results, but they don't contain the word "fart" as far as I can tell.

Can anyone else confirm this? And does anyone have any idea why this would happen? Some kind of partial text match?

One of the 2 results definitely doesn't contain the substring "fart" anywhere: "will be available in 10 minutes, per ops. They will connect you as soon as she calls in. "

The OCR is flaky. The first email has "Release in Part" and the 'Part' is coming up as 'Fart' after OCR. And in the second email the word "fact" is coming up as "fart".

If you download the PDFs you can search by text and it matches on your search term.

I have to say that I am sad no one actually said "fart".

Search works fine for me. Do a select all/copy on the document text and paste into a text editor - you'll see that in both cases the OCR has misinterpreted other words as "fart" due to overlapping with redaction boxes.

I tried searching for middle-east-related keywords, and got tons of hits. Then I tried searching for Central American and South American topics, and got very little.

It's a shame that the Mexican drug cartels, the murders in Central America, and the economic rise of Brazil/Argentina are not given more priority by our government. These are both the greatest threats to and the largest opportunities for the US.

Why are they scanned pdfs of printed copies of the original e-mails?

It's clear in several of these e-mails there are hyperlinks, which are completely lost.

Frequently when the government is forced to release documents by FOIA requests, they do in the most deliberately inconvenient way possible.

Previous example: https://www.propublica.org/blog/item/a-readers-guide-to-the-...

> The emails, which presumably could fit on a few discs, now fit in six boxes and weigh 250 pounds per set. Journalists have trekked to Juneau to pick up them up. (Mother Jones notes that the state is helpfully lending journalists “hand trucks” for hauling the boxes out.)

Per her request, the emails didn't leave her server in digital form. They were printed out, 55,000 pages of them.

It's akin to something like paying your property tax in pennies. Probably served as a nice "fuck you" to have them delivered as such. It also makes any sort of meaningful forensic auditing impossible.

The different email addresses seem to contain interesting classification. HRC16, HDR22 and HRC17 are some that jumped out. HRC1 & HRC2 must of been some particularly lofty circles.

Does anyone doubt a grand that a Grand Jury would indict based on this evidence alone? I would like to see a Judge or Jury hear evidence and render a verdict here.

If that were to happen before January, Obama would just issue a final-day pardon to quash it.

Given these are email, why the heck is the government providing PDFs of printouts? Why aren't they providing a text version?

One reason (of probably a few that add up), is that it's safer to redact a printed copy than a digital copy that might have metadata hidden to reveal the original pre-redacted information.

I don't get it. She used a personal account for official business. That's against policy, I get that part. But why are we punishing her by releasing all of those e-mails to the general public? That sounds like a very unorthodox punishment.

It's the result of Freedom of Information Act requests. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...

So I still don't get why we can open private communications to everyone, or what purpose that serves but to (1) humiliate her and (2) expose her to identity theft risk, neither of which are usual forms of punishment. Why not just fine her, ban her from working for the government, or some other similar punishment?

Also, what about the fact that I write SO many e-mails using special language, inside jokes that only the other party would know, PGP, foreign languages, self-modified languages, and so on? What if in my communications with a particular friend, red meant blue, blue meant red, building meant banana, and foreign meant domestic? What if she encoded deeper meaning into what is seemingly innocuous English text? If I knew that I was at risk of being victimized by such a system and having my e-mails exposed, you can be sure that I would use language like that. Or simply avoid using English, use a smattering of 20 different obscure tribal languages, and write my e-mails in a form with hidden meanings that I would agree in advance with the receiving party. Just to make it hard for everyone who really shouldn't be reading my e-mails. And then use PGP on top of that, although PGP is probably ineffective against this [0], but the smattering of tribal languages and English language mappings would at least make it deliberately hard and annoying.

Why is it that "being secretary of state" all of a sudden means that you have no right to the same level of privacy, identity protection, and security that everyone else has in the country?

[0] https://xkcd.com/538/

Wonder what's classified related to Price Waterhouse

Read "Flowers"

hmmm. no hits for "Lewinski."

All politicians have personal email servers before they're elected and after they are un-elected. It's human nature that there is a transition time between pre-election and post-election in which personal email will continue to be used. Rarely do analysis pieces mention this fact. If our government really cared about that, they would have dedicated IT staff to onboarding new officials with systems that actually work.

Oh cool, top secret files in a searchable index :|

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