Was the server actually at her house or was the domain name just registered with that as an address? Neither option seems even slightly damning.
Similar to the trend of government setting rules for everyone that they conveniently exempt themselves from.
For the most part people use a 2+ factor authentication and their smart cards have private keys. EX: http://www.cac.mil/common-access-card/
After it's set up Outlook then let's people encrypt with a simple click. The recipient then needs their card + PIN to decrypt.
PS: This is one of those cases where the US Government seems to be significantly ahead of the private sector in terms of actual adoption and use.
But I'm a bit confused. If government officials have the ability to easily encrypt their messages asymmetrically, AND they're supposed to store all of their messages in some kind of database, that sort of defeats the purpose of the encryption in the first place. Also, having a central store of all that information seems really risky and inherently less secure than a message encrypted asymmetrically.
And, for that matter, if they are supposed to encrypt messages with a private key, that means they're not using asymmetric encryption for private communication. I'm not a security expert, but that seems like a bad move.
Also, the government wants a back door. So, they keep a copy of the private key's and assign them to an employee. The goal is to prevent interception and or data breeches on a lost laptop, not to hide the information from everyone.
The same backdoor exits with full disk encryption so internal IT can help users who forgot their password etc.
E-Mail is universal in both business and government. Using TLS, it is sufficiently secure for most communications. For the rest, I'm sure the CIA and NSA know how to use PGP.
And yes, TLS will securely transmit your message securely from your client (whether it's Outlook or a web browser) to your e-mail server. But you don't have any guarantee that the various relays which transport your message will use TLS.
"And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton’s home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking."
[1] http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/hillary-clinton-email-...
more: The press comments about the location of the server sure do sound a lot more like misunderstanding than they do careful research.
http://thedailybanter.com/2015/03/aps-bombshell-hillary-clin...
The initial AP article wasn't specific about the server location, but various media outlets omitted that sentence.
Later updates to the AP article do state that a business record related to the server has been traced to her home, but the various republished editions of the AP story swamp search, so it is difficult to find any actual analysis of the technical details.
A discussion here on HN is the best I've found:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9148730
The records for the mail server do point to an ip address from a provider in the area of her home. But there is no further evidence.
> Hoteham was listed as the customer at Clinton's $1.7 million home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua in records registering the Internet address for her email server since August 2010.
Does that sound like the information you get from running whois on an IP address or on a domain name?
> Clinton's private email server was reconfigured again to use a Denver-based commercial email provider, MX Logic
How the fuck would anybody know how her private server was reconfigured unless they're talking about mx records?
I took "Internet Records" to mean MX record for her domain. I'm assuming there are people keeping track of DNS changes publicly that one can view somewhere. Someone will probably respond to this post with a link.