ruffdove wrote:Keirador wrote:ruffdove wrote:Hillary Clinton belongs in prison. That's where thousands of non-celebrity-first-lady-American civil servants with security clearances would be right now if they had put classified information on the open internet for their own convenience - especially under the current administration which has doggedly punished such people whether they were being careless or were whistle blowers.
Well, one of the points Clinton supporters are making is that what Clinton did--[url]what she
actually did[/url], not the wildly distorted summary you just gave--while unwise and a violation of at least the SPIRIT of government regulations, presented neither a security threat nor an actual crime, and the only reason this is a big deal is BECAUSE she's a celebrity First Lady.
I tend to concur here. The woman has enemies. If an actual specific security threat had emerged from the email hullabaloo, I'm pretty sure that that's all we would have been hearing about for the past year.
Um... no. Not even close. I mean yeah, I get that Clinton supporters are trying to make the point that what she did was just a foolish but honest mistake, and you can choose to believe them if you like, but all the evidence indicates that she deliberately took classification markings (and ordered her subordinates to remove classification markings) from classified information and then put it on the Internet. I find it impossible to believe--after all her years in Washington--that she was ignorant of the fact that such actions were illegal. And if you think worker bees wouldn't be prosecuted for that, then you haven't been paying much attention.
The only assumption I'm making is when I give her the benefit of the doubt that she did it out of an arrogant sense of entitlement to convenience and not as a deliberate attempt to make classified information available to those unauthorized to see it.
Ruffdove it's fairly clear we're not working from the same understanding of the facts, or perhaps we're working with different "facts" entirely. I don't understand what you mean when you say she "put [classified information] on the Internet." Quite apart from an argument about what constitutes "classified information," I don't understand what you mean by "put it on the Internet." If anything the opposite is true: Clinton's emails were being stored and handled by a private server that she had installed in her home in 2008. The primary objection is not that her emails were insufficiently secure, but rather they were
too secure: Clinton herself controlled ultimate access to her emails, and this violates at least the spirit if not the letter of the law regarding government record-keeping. You can't edit what records you pass on to the government and what you keep to yourself. If her emails had been handled by the State Department through a .gov server, she would not have had exclusive access to her own records. Now the Clinton camp has contended that they
eventually turned all e-mails over to the State Department, the exact truth of that we shall likely never know, but the fact that she had unusually exclusive control over her own records is indisputable.
It's also, in my opinion, very clear that this was a "mistake." How would that even work? "Whoops, I accidentally had a private server installed in my basement, haha, crazy things can happen!" But what's not at all clear is what law this would be breaking. It does violate State Department protocol and record-keeping requirements, AT LEAST in spirit if not a technical violation of the language of the requirement. Part of what's at issue here is that Clinton's camp did eventually comply with these requirements by turning over the emails in question. . . but again, my understanding is that we basically have to take the Clinton camp's word that they turned over everything necessary. Even if they held something back, however, this would be a violation of
protocol but not a criminal act nor even necessarily a technical breach of regulation. It would be NOW: in 2014, Congress amended the Federal Records Act to require that government business performed on private email accounts MUST be turned over to an official account within 20 days of the transmission of the communication. But Hillary Clinton was a private citizen by 2014.
As for managing classified information, so far every email found to contain classified information has been classified retroactively, meaning the information was not classified at the time it was sent, or not marked as classified. There've been around 2,100 of those. Colin Powell himself and members of Condi Rice's staff with high security clearances are all also "guilty" of using personal emails that contained information that was later determined to be classified, or should have been marked classified but was not at the time. Still waiting to find a single Clinton email that was marked as classified at the time it was sent. If one is found, that will be a big deal and a clear violation of policy. That is what the FBI is investigating now.
It's also been alleged, primarily by Clinton's political enemies, that her system was far less secure than a government server would have been. Maybe so. To date there has been no evidence, however, that her system was ever successfully hacked into. The one confirmed instance of hacking Clinton communications, in this case an email sent from her to Sidney Blumenthal, was hacked from Blumenthal's side, meaning it would have made no difference if Clinton were using a government email account because it was the recipient who got hacked, not her.
TL;DR, it's pretty clear that Hillary Clinton's use of private email was highly unusual and didn't comport with established practices, would have been a violation of the Federal Records Act if it had occurred after the 2014 amendment, and went right to the edge of what was technically allowed under regulations that existed at the time. As far as security is concerned, to date there is no evidence that any unauthorized person was able to access information from Clinton's private server.
If your understanding of the facts diverges from my understanding, please point out where and how, with evidence.