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Comment by sebular | Hacker News Reader

You're right, politicians are held to a different standard-- a much more strict one. Clinton had her own private email server set up. I'm sure that many people on this forum can back me up on this one, it's quite legal to set up an SMTP host on your own domain.

The issue is that she was apparently told to use the .gov email address provided to her by her work, and she did this instead.

People have accused her of doing this for various reasons, but personally I don't believe there's evidence to show that she did this for any other reason than wanting to stand out and look special by sending mail from hillary@clintonemail.com, and so that she could use her own BlackBerry.

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Nobody has suggesting that setting up an SMTP server is a crime. Heck, nobody has said she shouldn't be using clintonemail or w/e for her personal communications (inc. Clinton Foundation business).

The issue was and is only with her use of a privately run SMTP server for her government job. There's three key problems, first off it avoids FOIA requests, secondly it can avoid other legal discovery, and lastly information was sent through it of a sensitive nature.

And before someone replies with "nothing was sensitive!" if that were true then why has the government redacted and withheld emails from the public? And retroactive classification is largely a myth, things inherit classifications from their source.

So for example if you attend a classified meeting and you or your staff take notes on that meeting, those notes are classified at the second pen touched paper. It doesn't matter than it lacks a classification marking.

If I told my employer that I refused to use a company email address, they would absolutely be suspicious.

And that's for a lowly developer job dealing with absolutely no classified information.

That's not the right analogy. It would be more like if you were a famous business person brought in to be CEO, and wanted to keep using your personal email.

You'd probably still catch some flak but you might have enough power/influence to actually do it whereas if you're employee #42593 of a big company there's no way in hell you're gonna get your way.

Oh, I agree that a CEO might get away with it. That doesn't make it right.

Similarly, Clinton will probably get away with it. That doesn't excuse her behavior though. Might does not make right.

You're absolutely right. I think a lot of people who get to the top in politics or business have an extremely high level of confidence and determination, but sometimes that turns into arrogance and a disdain for rules. Clinton is one of those people that I think has an attitude of 'rules are for little people'.

Hopefully she'll keep that character flaw in check as president, but I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't.

> I don't believe there's evidence to show that she did this for any other reason than wanting to stand out and look special by sending mail from hillary@clintonemail.com

Personally, I think secretary-of@state.gov would be a much better vanity email address than <myname>email.com.

Even if the only reason was to have a custom domain, I'm sure the State Department's IT team could point the MX records to a government-managed mail server.

I'm sure a lot of people here own their own domains but kinda don't host and maintain the server themselves. You can be a spoiled politician and use your own device with your own domain without hosting your own server.

Stop speculating. Just ask yourself why are all the emails missing from her IT admins account? I used to own a blackberry. I could use more than one email account on it at a time.

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