Classified emails don't even touch the public internet. Is it concerning that a third party sucked up these presumably sensitive but unclassified emails? Yes. But the title is wrong.
> A former senior State Department official who served before the Obama administration said that although it was hard to be certain, it seemed unlikely that classified information could be kept out of the more than 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton’s staff identified as involving government business.
There's a hallucination that classification is still used in the way it was intended. System administrators, like Snowden, have to demonstrate the airgaps in their SIPR systems, meanwhile, plenty of traffic is intentionally not classified, so as to avoid dealing with SIPR. The current intelligence systems classify the front page of the New York Times, yet the humans can type whatever they're gonna type into whichever keyboard.
And this happens all the time outside computers too. Some congress-critter goes on a submarine ride and accidentally spills the depth of the dive, which up to that point had been a state secret for 30 years. Who's to blame? Is there blame?
Classification is a government sanctioned land-grab and you've got everyone from the President to 18 year old kids grabbing the land. If we obeyed this law in its strictest sense, and applied it as broadly as possible, government would be in vapor lock.
We have mechanisms for machines to trust each other, and perhaps for people to trust machines, and machines to trust people, but you can't code a human to trust another human. At some point it's a judgement call.
Thus far, we have a small number of people at the top of the intelligence community using computing trust to prevent their people from using resources the intel higher-ups don't trust. But that
1) prevents people from using resources, so they're weakening their own people, and
2) effectively encourages the people who are trying to do their best, to not tell the boss what they're doing. They just do it and hope no one bothers to do anything about it.
I hope I'm not the only one who sees how these two effects ultimately weaken the whole enterprise.
Secretary Clinton did not have a classified email system. She had multiple other ways of communicating in a classified manner, including assistants or staff members printing classified documents for her, secure phone calls, or secure video conferences.[1]
I'm surprised. Seems like it would pretty useful in that role.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/03/10/us/politics/11...
The entire selling point of email is its instantaneous nature and its immediacy. If connecting up to retrieve your emails becomes too arduous it stops being a useful tool and other things take its place. Such as printing documents, secure phone calls or video conferencing...