The Hillary Email Kerfluffle

[TheHuckster]

The issue is that the two situations require a different response. if Clinton was unusual in breaching information security procedures, then the appropriate response would be the end of her career in any form of executive role.However, since most politicians do it, the appropriate response is to tighten up enforcement of information security procedures.

As Secretary of State, her roles were different than the average politician's, though. If she had done this when she was a senator or in a less privileged position, I'd agree that she should be held to the same standards as a "regular politician." And I do think if we held politicians to a standard of not committing perjury, perhaps we'd have less of this crap going on.

But, regarding the email issue itself (besides the lying), she does have far more access to classified information than your run-of-the-mill politician, and that requires better responsibility and accountability for your actions with the information you possess. So, I'm not surprised they singled her out.

[EricKei]

but I hope she understands how dangerous it can be if she showed similar carelessness as POTUS.

Indeed. I think that's a significant part of *why* she's being held to a higher standard (along with the fact that she was SoS at the time). The suspicion is that she might very well have done the same thing as POTUS, especially if, as she apparently hoped in this case, she could get out of it simply by lying. Maybe she's been hanging around with Slick Willy a bit too long -- his history of being less than honest(/faithful) goes back to at least the 80s.

I agree with the general sentiment about politicians' in general and their lack of honesty. I don't know that Bernie or any of the others would be any better when under similar pressure.

Hell, I grew up in Louisiana, where we simply assume that anyone who makes it into public office is on the take I never wondered IF our poli's were corrupt; I wondered what their lifetime take would be when it came to unmarked bills in plain brown envelopes.

Sad though it may be, it was simply accepted as "normal." e.g. When the former Governor, E.W. Edwards was about to be sent up the river some years back for blatant and egregious malfeasance in office, local news stations went around asking people "Do you think he did the things he was accused of?" and "Should he go to jail for it?" -- Invariably, the man-on-the-street's responses were "Yes" and "No, why?", respectively.

[mjr]

Eric, you bring up a good point.

I've seen it stated recently that Hillary "misstated key facts".

How does one differentiate between "misstating" or "misspeaking" and "lying"? And in the case of HRC, did she indeed "misstate key facts" or did she actually "lie"?

[Daskinor]

Meh this crap been driving me bonkers for a while now.

So the situation is that while Hillary Clinton was SoS she used her private email to send messages between herself and others. This included emails that could be construed as "Official Business."

Why did she do this? Because the email system the State Dept. used for public email correspondence was GroupWise. All of the IT people in the audience just bashed their heads against the nearest hard surface. The government moves at a glacial speed when it comes to improving infrastructure. Also email is somewhat of a problem child for the government as a whole.

So why didn't Hillary use it? Due to the limitations of the platform. She simply needed to be at her desk to use it. There was no way to easily get her email remotely. Also she did not have a computer at her desk. Hillary wanted blackberry email, and she had the authority to say that is what she was going to use.

But isn't that against policy? Two things going on here. First it is against policy unless the SoS grants an exception then they need to follow the procedure. Second during Hillary's tenure as SoS the rules did end up changing. And the private servers became against Federal policy as a whole. However the rule changes went in effect for new appointees, so Hillary never needed to abide by them. So the answer is No.

But the Classified Data?!?!- First off most federal agencies that handle classified data have completely different classified and non classified systems. I highly doubt that any classified data on her email server is explicitly classified. Like says a PDF that is clearly a scan of a classified document.

Before we get any deeper everyone needs to understand that how the government handles and tags classified is beyond confusing, convoluted and conflicting. I once got in trouble for not writing 'un-class' on a post it note I had on some media that had 'unclassified' written on it. When I moved it from a classified area. That post it note was considered to be classified because I did not write on it that it was not. I write this because it is very easy to end up with something that is technically classified, even if by any stretch it shouldn't be.

There is also a difference between redacted and being classified. Allot of emails being passed around are redacted. In many of the cases, its not because it's classified, but some kind of protected data. This is especially true of emails that were surrendered but do not belong in the public recorded, something we will get into later.

Out of all the emails we are getting a number of somewhere between 2-10 emails that have classified info in them. Nothing is official and it is normally reported by a confidential source. We have no idea if it is a serious case of data leakage, intentional breach or a case of it being classified later because reasons. Things that are classified later because of 'reasons' could be simple as "I met so and so at someplace." And later someone decided they don't want that person’s location at that time to be known.

And lastly there is a level of rank and opinion here. So there can be a level of disagreement between groups on what is or is not considered classified. Hillary with her authority as SoS can say this is not classified, but a person behind her or higher up (that’s only one person) can change it.

So the TLR is; Hillary's claim could be 100% correct that it was classified later during review for reasons. And the release stuff that has redacted stuff is probably not classified at all but has some sort of PII in it.

So what is the procedure for email anyway? Ok this is going to sound really stupid, and this is why the government has such a huge issue with email as a whole. You save what is important, print it out, put it in a binder and send it out to be archived. Yep you heard it right, you print out your emails to be archive. Why is this, because there is no cheap or easy way to digitally store email. Why do you think IRS had old email on people’s computers in a PST file. They did not have a place to store it. Seems kind of strange, but think of all the email that is produced in a day. It needs to be stored somewhere, needs to be constantly scaled and upgraded. Everything goes in and nothing is ever pruned, and 90% of it is USELESS. Then you need constantly have funds available to maintain and upgrade, or everything falls apart.

So how did all this start?
Hillary was asked to voluntarily supply the data files for her emails sent and received during her tenure as SoS. So they could add them to the digital archive system that just came available. She said OK, and had someone run through them to pull out the digital versions of ones she had already submitted hard copies of. Remember that all the former SoS where asked for this data, she’s the only one that had it available.

Once this was reported in became a right wing attack almost immediately. Because; “OMG there had to be SECRETS in those emails.” After the storm begun she voluntarily released the raw data on what she said she had on hand. This started kind of a witch hunt of sorts where groups begun to comb through released emails looking for something uncouth.

She admitted that some of the emails had been deleted. This added fire to conspiracy theorists that she was hiding something. That is a possibility, but also keep in mind she may have had deleted them because they were no longer needed and/or conserve server space. In theory she would have been producing hard copies of important emails and would no longer need soft copies.

Eventually a GOP congress did set up a committee to investigate the emails, this is where most of the subpoenas for the backup data and people hired to maintain the server come from. The FBI is reviewing the emails because they were asked to and it’s within the agency’s scope. However I doubt it is criminal in nature. Despite all the “the indictment is coming down any day now” articles we have been seeing for the last year. Also I doubt more than 2 junior agents are assigned to this task. Reality is, it takes a terrorist attack to get more then 2-4 FBI agents to work on anything. So hence the glacial pace the FBI is moving at. My personal opinion is that they are just keeping congress happy so they won’t bother them.

What about the report that was just released? It’s really just 40 pages of all the SoS bad, IT good. Its really a government agency CYA report. They say that the last 5 SoS did things wrong, it was against policy, they would of said no if asked, etc…. If they had more money they could stop it from happening. Then they burry at the end, that the SoS had the authority to grant exceptions to policy. And they did it because they could not provide the resources they asked for. And most importantly they did not do anything wrong. Just did not do things the way the IT people would have wanted.

[TheHuckster]

So what is the procedure for email anyway? Ok this is going to sound really stupid, and this is why the government has such a huge issue with email as a whole. You save what is important, print it out, put it in a binder and send it out to be archived. Yep you heard it right, you print out your emails to be archive. Why is this, because there is no cheap or easy way to digitally store email. Why do you think IRS had old email on people’s computers in a PST file. They did not have a place to store it. Seems kind of strange, but think of all the email that is produced in a day. It needs to be stored somewhere, needs to be constantly scaled and upgraded. Everything goes in and nothing is ever pruned, and 90% of it is USELESS. Then you need constantly have funds available to maintain and upgrade, or everything falls apart.

It costs more in paper and file cabinets to do that rather than store them digitally. A 1 Tb drive in 2009 cost about $300 and by the end of her tenure in 2013 was down to maybe $150, which can store millions of emails. Contrast that to the a million pieces of paper, roughly 2,000 reams, which would cost over $50,000, and that also doesn't count printer ink and maintenance costs, nor does it account for the fact that many emails span multiple pages.

So, yeah, digital storage of emails is cheap and easy. I mean, hell, it's already on a digital medium. I get that the government is behind on the times with a lot of technology, but that's their own fault for spending money in all the wrong places.

[Daskinor]

It costs more in paper and file cabinets to do that rather than store them digitally. A 1 Tb drive in 2009 cost about $300 and by the end of her tenure in 2013 was down to maybe $150, which can store millions of emails. Contrast that to the a million pieces of paper, roughly 2,000 reams, which would cost over $50,000, and that also doesn't count printer ink and maintenance costs, nor does it account for the fact that many emails span multiple pages.

So, yeah, digital storage of emails is cheap and easy. I mean, hell, it's already on a digital medium. I get that the government is behind on the times with a lot of technology, but that's their own fault for spending money in all the wrong places.

First off its not stored in file cabinets, its generally boxed and stored in whatever the local repository is for the location it was produced and its type.

A 1TB Server Grade SAS drive in 2009 was quite pricey. And even if it was brand new in 2009 would of been appropriated in 2007. Think back to a simailr project I did in 2008. The 1TB drives we purchased for a cold storage solution was roughly $800 each. We were more concerned with reliability than any other feature. Also they would be in a raid configuration of some sort, hot spares, and other redundancy features. So lets say, 8 1 TB drives in raid 5E, about 6TB usable. You can store 80 million emails and the industry average of 75k each.

So 80 million emails for roughly 6.4k dollars. Not including the actual enclosure and software for the SAN, the server to run the necessary server. That 6.4k then blossoms into 12k for just the hardware easy.

If you want all of the emails that the civilian portion of the federal government you will need 5 of those SANS per year. Congress critters will increase that to 6 and military to 11. That's assuming if you get EVERY agency to play nice and use the same system for maximum efficiency. And in the entire union I think only the state Maryland has been able to pull off that magic trick.

So all government email, is 11 SANS per year. But you need redundancy and backups. so at a minimum 22 SANS per year. I could not even guess how much bandwidth that would require. And the reality is there is no way even 2 sites could process that much information and replicate it at the same time. But lets keep at 22 a year even though this is an absolute minimum. Even though the equipment will get cheaper as time goes on, the amount of emails will increase to outpace that.

So if we keep with 22 a year in 5 years we will need 110 SANS. Then from that point on we will need 44 a year. The older SANS will need to replaced. in 2018 we will be up to 66 a year.

And as I said before this is a best case.

And there are so many more costs associated with the system, bandwidth, software, IT personnel, servers, switches, routers, air conditioning, etc...



Or you can print out whats important and store it in a box in you nearest leftover chalk, salt, or marble mine. For a very long time.

[Estil]

Not to mention that you can make backups of those digital files. Think back for example that National Archives fire in the 70s when lots of valuable irreplaceable data/info was destroyed. Considering how cheap TB's worth of storage are now there's no excuse now to back that shit up.

[Daskinor]

Not to mention that you can make backups of those digital files. Think back for example that National Archives fire in the 70s when lots of valuable irreplaceable data/info was destroyed. Considering how cheap TB's worth of storage are now there's no excuse now to back that shit up.

There were estimates made no to long ago on what it would take to make digital copies of the more important archives. It was never even considered because of how much storage you would need for that many image files.

[mjr]

Like it or not, part of the reason this blew up is that the Clintons have a certain reputation in a lot of the public's eye.

That "certain reputation" is not a good one, and it's a reputation that people believe is nefarious (even amongst some in the Democratic party), so the Clintons are up to no good.

[s_stabeler]

that, and when you have politicians more interested in finding any little detail that can e slanted to make the other side look bad...(to use an example. Republicans claimed that the closure of the National Parks during the government shutdown was unnecessary because it cost more to shut them down than to keep them open. (oh, and that things were shut down deliberately to make the situation seem worse than it was) However, the thing is, that is a deliberate distortion of what happens in the case of a government shutdown. the Federal Government is not allowed to spend money not appropiated by an Act Of Congress. To cut a long story short, in 1981, the Attorney general gave an opinion that unless an agency shuts down completely- with exceptions only for the protection of life or property- the head of the agency is in breach of the law, and can be prosecuted. Therefore, paying for national parks to be barricaded is fine, but paying staff to keep them open would mean violating the shutdown and allow Republicans to claim Obama was violating the law. ( i have other issues with how the Republicasn acted- they more or less tried to claim any adverse effects of the shutdown were due to the President deliberately making the shutdown worse than necessary, not them refusing to let him pay the bills. While a Government Shutdown is a legitimate tactic to keep an out-of-control Executive in check, the ones causing the shutdown should man up, explain that they know the shutdown will cause disruption, but that for X, Y and Z reasons, they think that such a step is justified.

[EricKei]

How does one differentiate between "misstating" or "misspeaking" and "lying"?

Both cases involve the conveyance of inaccurate information. I would posit that one major distinction is that one is lying when they know that what they're saying is untrue; misspeaking, on the other hand, lacks the conscious attempt to convey the inaccurate info. What people are accusing her of is lying, while she is claiming that she misspoke. Granted, any intelligent person would defend themselves that way when faced with such an accusation, so even I can't really blame her for that. The second she comes out and says, "I knew what I was doing and I lied about it" -- which ain't gonna happen until she's POTUS, if at all -- she's confessed to lying. I don't see her getting away with the whole "That depends on what the definition of 'is' is" bullshit -- To put it quite bluntly, she used Charisma as a dump stat, while her hubby min-maxed the hell out of it.

The point of the investigation, I suppose, is whether she *should have* known that what she was doing was inappropriate, and whether she (specifically) lied about it; inaccurate info was conveyed, either way. IMHO, on the former: In her position, yes, she should have known, even if that meant asking someone on her staff to quietly look up the relevant regulations and report back with the results. I find it hard to believe that someone that far up the political food chain would have difficulty getting a hold of such regulatory info, especially seeing as how it would be public record and likely not classified in any way. On the latter: I have no way of knowing. While I don't trust her in the slightest, I'm willing to sit back and let the investigators do their jobs.

That "certain reputation" is not a good one

Yup. While it may be a bit unfair, Hillary does "inherit" some distrust for "guilt by association" with Bill, she has had plenty of chances to make her own distinct reputation over the years. From what I've seen, she hasn't done that great of a a job.

[Jetfire]

Not to mention that you can make backups of those digital files. Think back for example that National Archives fire in the 70s when lots of valuable irreplaceable data/info was destroyed. Considering how cheap TB's worth of storage are now there's no excuse now to back that shit up.

You can back them up; but technology marches onward and unlike paper/hardcopies (which can all be read and/or translated with Eyeball Mark1, Cerebrum Mk1 and Hand Mk1), digital stuff needs technology that can become outdated.

We also don't have a firm idea of how durable these technologies are. How long a Hard drive can stick around unpowered before it begins to degrade. How long will the computers that that hard drive can hook up to last before they need replacing? A hard drive from the 90's can't just be plugged into a 2016 computer and be expected to work. Even if you have the hardware up to date, the OS may have trouble interpretting it.

If your archives go digital, and you copy everything and have them stored in say 5 locations across the country, then great. Now, 20 years down the road, you need to start recopying everything to the latest Digital Archive mechanism since the old ones are out of date and the hardware that runs/reads them is no longer being made. Oh and you still need to make the copies of everything that you're generating now.

Vernor Vinge saw what this could lead to 25years ago in A Fire Upon the Deeps (and I'm sure others saw it before that.) He pointed out how digital archives eventually can end up being layers upon layers of data + translators to access the older data, and instructions to make the tools to access the older stuff and so forth. Digital Archiving is an ever growing challenge that we still haven't figured out how to do properly yet.

[Daskinor]

You can back them up; but technology marches onward and unlike paper/hardcopies (which can all be read and/or translated with Eyeball Mark1, Cerebrum Mk1 and Hand Mk1), digital stuff needs technology that can become outdated.

We also don't have a firm idea of how durable these technologies are. How long a Hard drive can stick around unpowered before it begins to degrade. How long will the computers that that hard drive can hook up to last before they need replacing? A hard drive from the 90's can't just be plugged into a 2016 computer and be expected to work. Even if you have the hardware up to date, the OS may have trouble interpretting it.

If your archives go digital, and you copy everything and have them stored in say 5 locations across the country, then great. Now, 20 years down the road, you need to start recopying everything to the latest Digital Archive mechanism since the old ones are out of date and the hardware that runs/reads them is no longer being made. Oh and you still need to make the copies of everything that you're generating now.

Vernor Vinge saw what this could lead to 25years ago in A Fire Upon the Deeps (and I'm sure others saw it before that.) He pointed out how digital archives eventually can end up being layers upon layers of data + translators to access the older data, and instructions to make the tools to access the older stuff and so forth. Digital Archiving is an ever growing challenge that we still haven't figured out how to do properly yet.

I have a real life example. One agency needs to transfer information to another in a digital format because "congress is stupid" reasons. To perform this task the agency prints from their mainframe to greenbar. That greenbar is then immediately fed into a scanner, still as whole un-separated greenbar. The unit scans the information and does a OCR translation on it. Then that digital file is then transferred to a another server that reformat the OCR data into the form the receiving agency needs it to be in.

[EricKei]

A hard drive from the 90's can't just be plugged into a 2016 computer and be expected to work.

I wouldn't try to boot up Windows or anything else from one, but as far as storage drives go, at least... *dusts off his hardware knowledge*

- They will last a LOT longer sitting there, unconnected, than they will plugged in, *provided that* they are in a safe environment (minimal to no moisture & magnetism), and they remain still and undamaged; even better, if the drive was locked before removal (prevents the heads from moving). How long that is, we probably don't know -- but drives in use have MTBF (mean time between failures) measured in multiples of 10,00 hours, last I checked, so...

- If the OS is of the same family, the drive should be readable. While this may be sketchy for earlier versions of Windows (for instance), XP and later should be able to handle any standard variant of windows-readable FAT or NTFS, IIRC

- The last PATA interface (broad, thin "ribbon" cables, often grey) uses the same form factor as they did back in the late 80's. If the drive was used under Windows 3.1 or later, chances are it was on something from this line, and the interfaces are all backwards-compatible. A SCSI drive would be another matter entirely. They were faster, but also much more expensive, and they put off a lot of heat; not all that popular outside of servers and enthusiast machines.

- Worst case scenario, there are companies out there that can recover data from drives that have been sitting in salt water for months or years (experiments such as this have actually been conducted), or even partially warped. The places that really are that good mostly already work for the government anyway, and I wanna say their prices start in the $3 grand and up region, even to make an attempt.

As for the government in particular -- There are still agencies (such as the guys who are in control of the nukes) who use 8 inch floppies on text-based DOS systems. They must have some way to have those communicate with modern systems, even if only via sneakernet. It would not surprise me if the gov't still has plenty of data on those old Wargames-type tape-on-reel drives.

[BlaqueKatt]

IMHO, on the former: In her position, yes, she should have known, even if that meant asking someone on her staff to quietly look up the relevant regulations and report back with the results. I find it hard to believe that someone that far up the political food chain would have difficulty getting a hold of such regulatory info, especially seeing as how it would be public record and likely not classified in any way.

refer back to the article I linked on page one(here it is again). SIXTEEN VOLUMES, and the rules say "exceptions can be made to use private servers"-yes the policies are THAT VAGUE.