Comment by poof131 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by poof131 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The government issues government accounts for different levels of classification. You get a normal .gov or .mil for unclassified, another one for secret, and another one for top secret. All the communication is done on separate networks: nipr, sipr, etc. Around 2008, the military got hacked so bad that you couldn’t even put a thumb drive in a non-secure computer. If you did, you had to talk to a General/Admiral and could expect punishment. Secret, Top Secret, and SAP were a totally different matter. Cell phones and electronic devices don’t go in secure areas at all. Red lights flash when non-cleared people enter areas. Hillary wanted a Top Secret blackberry which no one except the president had from reading the articles. She wanted to avoid FOIA so she avoided using any government email addresses. This is totally non-standard and I imagine was only permitted because she was the boss. It isn’t remotely similar to what Powell did and while I agree that the government classifies too much shit, that isn’t the case here either. She went against protocol because she wanted to and she could, and she should own the consequences. I don’t blame incompetence at State here. If she’d used her government accounts and followed normal procedures this would have been a non issue.

You're just re-iterating what happened, but the question is why are things this way?

It's worth remembering that Obama was also told no at first when he asked for a secure Blackberry. He only got one a few months later after making it clear as CIC he would get one or else.

So they made him one. Well why can't they make two? Or 20?

One answer might be bureaucracy. The NSA reports to the President, not State, so maybe they won't do as much for State. Turf-fighting is pretty common among federal agencies, especially those with overlapping jurisdictions.

Another reason might be that information collection is prized much more highly right now in the federal government that information assurance. Even if the NSA helps out State IA, will they get much credit for it? No. And will they get punished if they fail to help State IA? Obviously not.

Simply put, federal IT is very sick right now. The Clinton email saga is a tiny symptom of that. Snowden and the OPM breach are much larger and more consequential results of this pervasive problem.

they made him one because he is the president of the united states and he demanded one directly as you say.

they didn't make her one because she was not the president of the united states, she asked repeatedly for the same thing the president had and was told no.

most likely she was told 'no' by the NSA because, they know very well what is in their range of capabilities and so know what is probably in the range of capability of nation states.

It's worth noting that Clinton was offered an alternative device AND told explicitly not to use her Blackberry. Not sure why parent comment believes otherwise.

When told not to do what she was doing she said she "got it," and continued to do it anyways.

Wait. She wanted to avoid FOIA? Is that allowed? If that is true, how the hell is she still running?

(Non us citizen here btw)

this is editorializing on his part. the rest of the post seems to be fact and not opinion, so i wish that sentence had been left out.

Yes, this is the big elephant in the room. The only sane reason to have such an arrangement is to avoid oversight and accountability. The large number of deleted emails should also be a red flag as to what the real motive was.

From the outside, that is what it seems like. To avoid accountability.

If, as the above poster said, it's a rule/law shouldn't they be disallowed from running for president? By breaking a law that is.

Edit: (can't reply to dogma thread too long?).

Damn. I can sort of understand why, but how isn't this sort of law breaking being pushed by everyone else running for president. I would be pointing it out!

There are no restrictions that prevent convicted felons from running to president.

A small pro tip if you can't reply, click reply to any comment and just edit the post id to the one of the comment you want to reply too in the URL.

The Republicans have been attacking her over it, but they're largely focused on the primaries and Donald Trump right now.

Bernie decided not to attack her over the issue at the first Democratic Party debate last year. It was honestly a smart move on his part. He wants to win the primary, but he wants his side to win even if he does not. In the general election campaign, Hillary will now be more convincing when she says it's just a Republican witch hunt (see "vast right-wing conspiracy" from her time as FLOTUS).

In the unlikely scenario that she's actually indicted for a crime, she'd probably be politically forced to drop out of the race, but who knows.

I would totally try to avoid an official record if I wanted to facilitate a coup in Latin America. I guess the real wtf is why she didn't get better opsec advice from some private former-cia-or-other-agency people, if she wanted to play at clandestine geopolitics.

The biggest issue is not FOIA is that the server violates the Federal Records Act[0] including the amendments signed under the Obama administration.

Any record created by any government official has to be kept and recorded this isn't some game if something happens there needs to be a clear trail of all records for accountability.

If a person can run their own records and communications they can do what ever they want and never be hold accountable because no one else knows those records even exist.

On a more comedic note Hilary could send a drunken email to Putin and cause WW3 and no one would be the wiser to why this has happened.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Records_Act

And this is the part which annoys me that the "left" ignores I love Bill Maher but he continuously brings this up and makes it look like there is a witch hunt against Hilary she violated a federal law her emails don't contain cookie recipes and links to cat videos and while they probably also do not contain nuclear launch codes they do contain information that could potentially be volatile (as it shows opinions which are held by public officials and individuals of note) as well as official statements/positions by the secretary of state and the administration at large (and any email from the secretary of state could even count as an "order" to some extent) as when you assume a public office there is little to no "unofficial" communications one can make especially when they are communicating with public sector executives, think tanks, and other elected officials.

Well, if you want to be technical it doesn't appear that she was told NOT to use her personal BlackBerry and email server in any official way. This article mentions a memo that said "Any unclassified Blackberry is highly vulnerable in any setting to remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving e-mails, and exploiting calendars." This isn't the same thing as an official policy.

I know this seems like nitpicking, but you said "She went against protocol because she wanted to and she could, and she should own the consequences". The fact is that she did not go against protocol. If the president or congress wanted to prohibit the use of certain communication devices, they would have. Just like if someone's supervisor didn't want them to use a blackberry, they wouldn't write a memo pointing out problems with the device. They would just say "Don't use a blackberry."

The issue is did she break any laws or policies regarding the handling of classified information. That's for the courts to decide. But if there was any evidence I'd imagine they would have brought an indictment by now.

> The issue is did she break any laws or policies regarding the handling of classified information. That's for the courts to decide.

That's mentioned in the article around this point,

> Under Title 18, Section 2071, it is a misdemeanor to take federal records without authorization, something that is sometimes referred to as the “alienation” of records. The law is rarely enforced, but a conviction can carry a fine or imprisonment.

Agreed it is for the courts to decide. It would be quite a farce if this didn't see the light of a court room.

> But if there was any evidence I'd imagine they would have brought an indictment by now.

It takes time to build a proper case. Note that the guy who set up the email server was just given immunity in exchange for his cooperation earlier this month. I imagine the DOJ only gives immunity when they are working towards something.

It's going to be a farce.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com