3 ms·

This is a red herring. It doesn't matter if it was marked or not. It is up to the sender to take the precaution. That there are now thousands of emails marked a

by PKop 11y ago

This is a red herring. It doesn't matter if it was marked or not. It is up to the sender to take the precaution. That there are now thousands of emails marked after the fact as classified, wouldn't that tell you the assumption should have been made to err on the side of caution, and assume most everything you are discussing has high probability to be classified information? And using your own insecure personal server for these emails essentially guarantees that it's been hacked by.. China, Russia, take your pick. In fact there is a term called "born-classified" which applies to information about foreign governments provided by foreign sources. Here's some evidence: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-emails-idUSKCN0QQ0BW20150821 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-email...

snowwrestler 11y ago
There's a fundamental misunderstanding about classified material, which is that it becomes de-classified once it is public. Not true. For example, take the Wikileaks information dump, which came from a huge cache of State Dept. cables and has now been covered in hundreds of public newspaper articles. If one of her friends forwarded one of those articles to Clinton, boom, she now has classified information in her email. Why? Because those cables, despite being leaked, were never de-classified. Another example: a lot of the stuff revealed by Snowden was classified at a very high level. It still is today, even though it is widely available public information. Can you see how this could cause problems for someone who is a government official, but has friends/family/contacts who wish to discuss these news articles? The press is a well-known vector that leads to a lot of government staff having classified information in their unclassified email systems. Typically investigations are rare and prosecutions rarer, because it's basically impossible to prevent and does no practical damage (since the info is already out there). This is why the mere fact of having classified material on an email server does not necessarily imply incompetence or malice.

by PKop 11y ago

snowwrestler 11y ago

There's a fundamental misunderstanding about classified material, which is that it becomes de-classified once it is public. Not true. For example, take the Wikileaks information dump, which came from a huge cache of State Dept. cables and has now been covered in hundreds of public newspaper articles. If one of her friends forwarded one of those articles to Clinton, boom, she now has classified information in her email. Why? Because those cables, despite being leaked, were never de-classified. Another example: a lot of the stuff revealed by Snowden was classified at a very high level. It still is today, even though it is widely available public information. Can you see how this could cause problems for someone who is a government official, but has friends/family/contacts who wish to discuss these news articles? The press is a well-known vector that leads to a lot of government staff having classified information in their unclassified email systems. Typically investigations are rare and prosecutions rarer, because it's basically impossible to prevent and does no practical damage (since the info is already out there). This is why the mere fact of having classified material on an email server does not necessarily imply incompetence or malice.