Hacker News Reader

Comment by setgree | Hacker News Reader

A friend who works for the FBI flagged this long ago as the origin story for Clinton's "but her emails!" woes. It's distinctly possible that if the NSA had just secured her Blackberry, there would never have been a president Trump. Funny how small things spiral out.

You might draw many possible lessons from this story, though. One is the lesson you draw, which is that the NSA should have secured her damn Blackberry. The second is that this was really about egos, and Clinton couldn't accept that she was less important, and deserved a less important phone, than Obama, so she went ahead anyway. A third is that if you want to be president someday, you can't cut corners, and you need to use whatever clunky tech the government gives you -- so that one day, you can be the boss, summon the head of the NSA into your office, and humiliate and then fire him in front of his peers. But Clinton didn't have that kind of patience: she had emails to send.

View on HN

> One is the lesson you draw, which is that the NSA should have secured her damn Blackberry. The second is that this was really about egos, and Clinton couldn't accept that she was less important, and deserved a less important phone, than Obama, so she went ahead anyway.

It could be ego. It could just be the hold of the crackberry. I didn't know many people that were full on in thrall to the Temple of Blackberry, but those few were willing to do what it takes to keep using them (until eventually they gave in and accepted the inevitable loss and usually moved to iPhone)

I had to spend about a week to figure out how to get a Blackberry to send DKIM compliant email before I could turn on DKIM. One of the acceptable alternatives for the CEO was just enabling anyone with a blackberry to send email from our domain.

The President and Secretary of State have less power than you think; they aren't corporate CXOs. They are subject to the laws, and NSA must follow laws made by Congress. That's intentional - the division of power is that Congress makes the rules and the executive branch implements them.

The Secretary of State should have a secure mobile communication device, as should most everyone else in national security positions (and other jobs). It's absurd that they didn't. Just think of the productivity hit and the capability hit - imagine how it interferes with responses to crises.

Who here would tolerate it at their workplace?

> The President and Secretary of State have less power than you think; they aren't corporate CXOs. They are subject to the laws, and NSA must follow laws made by Congress. That's intentional - the division of power is that Congress makes the rules and the executive branch implements them.

Indeed indeed... but sadly, as we're seeing (especially, but not just) with DOGE this keeps on eroding.

And that NSA ever followed the law is news to me.

A similar thing seems responsible for signalgate. The NSA needs better tech tbh

> It's distinctly possible that if the NSA had just secured her Blackberry, there would never have been a president Trump. Funny how small things spiral out.

She was a neocon warhawk who was shrill and unlikable. There were a lot of reasons she lost. The blackberry was the smallest part of it.

It's also distinctly possible that if the government had enacted appropriate oversight over it's cabinet level secretaries that the illegal configuration would have been detected and remediated before it became an embarrassment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com