The Hillary Email Kerfluffle

[Daskinor]

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.

Yep its really that bad. And don't forget that IT polices are made by people that have no idea how stop their VCR from flashing '12:00'.

[mjr]

Politifact says: "False"...

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-me...her-email-pra/

[Daskinor]

I have to disagree with politifact in this regard.

The report was never strictly about Clinton, her activities contributed greatly to its creation. So instead of details of what exactly happened. You can see the focus of the report on the disconnect between OIG, OotS and S/ES-IRM.

The conclusion said as much. Focusing on how the disconnects were framed does not point exactly who is to blame.

From the report its clear that OIG said either "its not allowed," or "She needs to work with us to insure compliance" Then S/ES-IRM said "its fine, shut up." From a strict "I thought it was allowed" point of view their is still enough ambiguity there.


Still it would worry me if I haven't dealt with how the government is stupid at IT. If I did not deal with this crap on a daily basis, so its become a straight ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I doubt there is any explicit classified info on the email. And I seriously doubt she could even keep work and personal emails separate, because people. I can not even keep my coworkers from using my personal email.




The conclusion from the report;

CONCLUSION
Longstanding, systemic weaknesses related to electronic records and communications have existed within the Office of the Secretary that go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State. OIG recognizes that technology and Department policy have evolved considerably since Secretary Albright’s tenure began in 1997. Nevertheless, the Department generally and the Office of the Secretary in particular have been slow to recognize and to manage effectively the
legal requirements and cybersecurity risks associated with electronic data communications, particularly as those risks pertain to its most senior leadership. OIG expects that its recommendations will move the Department steps closer to meaningfully addressing these risks.

[mjr]

I worked for a company once who sent me onsite to a major defense contractor. BEFORE my co-workers and I could do ANY kind of work, we had to go through training. I do recall specifically going through ITAR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intern...ms_Regulations), though I'm quite sure we went through other training that involved reporting certain things to the State Department.

If I, as a civilian working for a private company, had to go through training like that, then I'd wager that the actual Secretary of State would.

[s_stabeler]

I think the point people are making is that the issue is more a cultural issue- that Secretaries of State have routinely given themselves exemptions from Information Security policies- than one with Hillary specifically. that is important, because it means Hilary wasn't notably worse than her predecessors.

It's even possible she was told, when she assumed office, that Secretaries of State always used private email addresses, not their official government ones, by an aide, and so set things up.

Further, it's notable that this is technically only an issue because she willingly co-operated with the investigation- give her some credit for not trying to hide things (this isn't, for example, anything like Watergate, which I think is what the Republicans are trying to make it seem like the equivalent of )

basically, Hilary shouldn't have done it, but there's an undercurrent in how it's reported that Hilary was arrogantly ignoring government policy due to feeling it shouldn't apply to her. that is not true.

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

basically, Hilary shouldn't have done it, but there's an undercurrent in how it's reported that Hilary was arrogantly ignoring government policy due to feeling it shouldn't apply to her. that is not true.

The thing is, reporting it that way sells in the same way Trump gets massive amounts of free advertising by antagonizing the media. Sanders peeps and conservatives tend to share these articles with each other and harp on them because it feeds their confirmation bias about her (I'm stealing from Scott Adams on Bill Maher's show as he basically described her media narrative in persuasion terms). It's not that it's objective truth, it's that it fulfills media organizations profit motive AND makes people happy to think what they already think. Win/Win - unless you care about the truth or past ones current political interests. In reality, dystopian fiction has been written with less.

[Canarr]

An interesting article that I just came across. It does put the Hillary-email-thing in a different perspective.

Quote:

Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?”

[Gravekeeper]

I was gonna say, didn't the RNC itself run a farking private email server for the whole Bush admin? Specifically to hide the shit they were up too?

Nevermind that Rice and Powell both used private emails as well.

[s_stabeler]

That's sort of my point- yes, Hillary used a private email server, and yes, that is unacceptable, however, the Republicans don't get to say that it's different from when they did it.(and, incidentally, in an earlier thread on this, someone on this very forum argued that Hilary was subject to a different standard.(this was in reply to a comment I made that Hillary may have done it because there was a culture that the secretary of state used a private server, and that it was basically the equivalent of that guy who is slow to adapt when policies change.)