5 ms·

So exactly who is to blame for the US state department having the worst opsec imaginable? I dislike Hilary but even if I think the absolute worst of her behavio

• mattnewton 11y ago
  I got the impression, but perhaps this was tainted by the media, that Hillary did it her way over the objection of the state department's policy. http://mashable.com/2016/03/17/clinton-nsa-blackberry/#IoWUNxrk3aqy http://mashable.com/2016/03/17/clinton-nsa-blackberry/#IoWUN...
  • dogma1138 11y ago
    Doesn't matter why she did it, she broke at least one federal law by doing it.
• saboot 11y ago
  After the OPM information leak disaster, it's pretty clear that there exists a serious disconnect between the extremely technical areas of govt (NSA) and others. The BlackBerry part is interesting. At civilian sites (Natl labs) you can easily get an encrypted blackberry, and even take it into classified areas. You are just required to power it off before viewing or discussing any material. Apparently the Dept of State can't even manage what we already do throughout the country.
  • ghshephard 11y ago
    Any modifications required to the Blackberry before being taken into classified areas - such as removal/destruction of microphones and/or any cameras? I can't imagine, "Just power it off" as a security mechanism, and can only imagine that compliance is somewhat less than 100%. Also - I can imagine there are different levels of classification, and that the Secretary of State may be in places where the rules might be somewhat more strict.
    • saboot 11y ago
      The blackberries are provided by the national lab, so not personal ones. Though you would likely also be able to check personal emails also. For laptops they do remove cameras / microphones as a policy. I wouldn't be surprised if a camera was disabled (obviously not a microphone for a phone) but I'm not sure.
  • mter 11y ago
    Are your civilian labs SCIFs?
    • saboot 11y ago
      There are SCIF areas.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• apalmer 11y ago
  i dont really know the story other than this article... but seems she was given a awkward but approved secure email methodology. she was repeatedly told that what she was doing was insecure. she more or less just chose to take this approach because it was more convenient... at least according to this article. just seemed like she had really bad communication discipline and didnt believe it was that big a deal. did get the impression that there really wasnt anyone who really wanted to step up and forbid her to do certain things not sure if there is a role who has authority to do that
  • jacobolus 11y ago
    It seems to me like their procedures and systems were established in an era of telephones, paper memos, and (barely) desktop computers, and that workflow was horribly painful for someone with several years experience doing all communications on a Blackberry. I can understand where Clinton is coming from. If I took a new job and they told me I had to use the ed editor to write code, and could only send patches by fax, I would either demand to keep using my networked laptop, a version control system, and preferred editor, or quit on the spot. It’s ridiculous that the NSA, the White House, and the State Department couldn’t work out some kind of secure mobile device solution for Clinton.
    • x0x0 11y ago
      To reiterate harryh's point, the sitting US secretary of state couldn't get a working email solution out of the nsa or state dept internal IT. Simply amazing. And where did everyone who fucking emailed her the entire duration of her employment think emails addressed to HDR22@clintonemail.com were going, exactly?
      • Natsu 11y ago
        She was told she could use a secure laptop or desktop. She was not without secure e-mail, she was without secure e-mail on a device she preferred. The new spins on this story continue to amaze me. There was a lot of discussion some time ago when essentially the same story hit Slashdot: https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/03/17/2242233/emails-show-nsa-rejected-hillary-clintons-request-for-secure-smartphone https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/03/17/2242233/emails-show... EDIT: Lest I forget, this also happened after she'd set up the home email server...
• julie1 11y ago
  US intelligence by the means of agencies and external consultancies is using directly 1 millions IT workers with Top secret clearance. 1 out 100 of the working population. They could not find one to set hillary's mail correctly? Or they did not wished to? Or did Hillary refused to have an email set up by the government to protect her MI6/DGSE leaks? And when you read the story of snowden's, he was able to trigger all alarms and get away with it. And now NSA discover that too much data is a problem because informational entropy is growing so much it is hard to find the relevant data, even though informational entropy is a basic concept? (not to speak of false positive (innocent tagged terrorists) and false negative (missing the boston terrorist)). ELECTINT is living its last years at my opinion. And I am okay with it. It has created a growing gap of perception between governments and the people they govern. Sometimes failure are okay for me. To err is human, to persevere is evil, and no machine can notice when it errs. Relying to much on ELECTINT is the first part of incompetence here.
• poof131 11y ago
  The government issues government accounts for different levels of classification. You get a normal .gov or .mil for unclassified, another one for secret, and another one for top secret. All the communication is done on separate networks: nipr, sipr, etc. Around 2008, the military got hacked so bad that you couldn’t even put a thumb drive in a non-secure computer. If you did, you had to talk to a General/Admiral and could expect punishment. Secret, Top Secret, and SAP were a totally different matter. Cell phones and electronic devices don’t go in secure areas at all. Red lights flash when non-cleared people enter areas. Hillary wanted a Top Secret blackberry which no one except the president had from reading the articles. She wanted to avoid FOIA so she avoided using any government email addresses. This is totally non-standard and I imagine was only permitted because she was the boss. It isn’t remotely similar to what Powell did and while I agree that the government classifies too much shit, that isn’t the case here either. She went against protocol because she wanted to and she could, and she should own the consequences. I don’t blame incompetence at State here. If she’d used her government accounts and followed normal procedures this would have been a non issue.
  • marak830 11y ago
    Wait. She wanted to avoid FOIA? Is that allowed? If that is true, how the hell is she still running? (Non us citizen here btw)
    • apalmer 11y ago
      this is editorializing on his part. the rest of the post seems to be fact and not opinion, so i wish that sentence had been left out.
    • marcoperaza 11y ago
      Yes, this is the big elephant in the room. The only sane reason to have such an arrangement is to avoid oversight and accountability. The large number of deleted emails should also be a red flag as to what the real motive was.
      • marak830 11y ago
• cm2187 11y ago
  It's also a symptom that people in power are usually older generations and that we only start to see coming a generation of people who even use computers and emails. I guess previous Secretary of States must have used pen and paper. It's not exactly a vote of confidence that smartphones are so unsecure that the intelligence services will not even allow them within the walls of a secure building. Shouldn't that be the first problem on the list here?
  • DanBC 11y ago
    >It's not exactly a vote of confidence that smartphones are so unsecure that the intelligence services will not even allow them within the walls of a secure building. Shouldn't that be the first problem on the list here? It's not just that smartphones are insecure enough to allow external attackers. Smartphones would also make it easier for another Snowden to exfiltrate material. And some of this is abundance of precaution - GCHQ and NSA banned Furbies because they weren't sure what would or wouldn't be recorded. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/254094.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/254094.stm
    • cm2187 11y ago
      That must be heartbreaking for NSA employees not to be able to bring their Furbies at work
• mtgx 11y ago
  > She's not a technology security expert Which makes setting up her own server all the worse. > They can't provide her with a secure device. They did, but it wasn't a BlackBerry one. BlackBerry or Windows Mobile, I don't think either were that secure anyway. I agree with the general sentiment that digital security in the government is between catastrophic and terrible. It's now going towards just "terrible", so there' some progress, I suppose.
  • cyphar 11y ago
    > > She's not a technology security expert > Which makes setting up her own server all the worse. Obviously she didn't set up the server. She probably got one of her technical aids to do it. Probably not good either way, though. It's almost certainly unpatched. > > They can't provide her with a secure device. > They did, but it wasn't a BlackBerry one. BlackBerry or Windows Mobile, I don't think either were that secure anyway. > I agree with the general sentiment that digital security in the government is between catastrophic and terrible. It's now going towards just "terrible", so there' some progress, I suppose.
• basch 11y ago
  there are potentially two other possibilities, neither of which i necessarily believe 1) this exposes that Secretary of State is a figurehead to placate world leaders, a tool for diplomacy, but not highly respected or valued by the intelligence community. The position exists on the outskirts of what they care about locking down. 2) they left her to her own devices on purpose. it was a trap she fell right into. they knew she would make a bad decision and let her hoping it would lead her to her own demise.
• ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  I think you're stepping over the fact that during Bill Clinton's tenure as President, he was demonized and frankly slandered in a very hard-to-understand way. Last I checked, entire media empires were built on stories then that were simply made up out of whole cloth. Since Hillary Clinton was long expected to be a candidate in this years election, it's not too much trouble to use that as an explanation.
  • jazzyk 11y ago
    Explanation, perhaps - justification, no. Interesting how people forget that our government is to serve its people, not its own career interests. Hillary Clinton chose to sacrifice the country's interests (major security lapse) in order to cover her ass and hide potentially unethical (perhaps even illegal) activity. All business conducted on behalf of the country should be made public as soon as it is safe to do so (no more than 5 years for classified material).
    • ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      The "career interest" I see in this thread are of the Computer Security Industrial Complex, which seem to have quite the bullet as a means of generating income these days. I have objection to this. They're dedicated professionals but sometimes they have big feet. IMO there is but one mode for computer security - lock and key, perhaps barbed wire, perhaps armed guards. And certainly no connection to the larger internet. That's me reading Bruce Scheiner. Probably badly - computer security bores me no end ( because I know of the one way to do it, you see... ) Bluntly, those who do not serve their own career interests simply won't be in government. The Anthropic Principle - it's not just for physicists. And that's rather beside the point. I'm by no means up on the details here, but it begins to look like there was no available solution that met requirements. This is straight up Dilbert "Mordac, Preventer of Information Services" nonsense. Was having email available optional for her? Probably not. And frankly, the entire narrative is that of imagined threats. I realize that's the mode de jour now but I still have the habits of looking for evidence not made up in the pursuit of political power. After seeing the Clinton-bashing effort outed completely ( but the rotting zombie corpse of it still in use as a political device - inexplicably ) I'm just not inclined to hold any other opinion. MY conspiracy has been proven and completely outed. I have little use for either of the Clintons, but there can be no explanation for the furor surrounding the American Spectator in that time except this one. Even when Neocon hit pieces were done on films like "The Power of Nightmares" they conveniently left out reference to the Clinton hit pieces, preferring to shore up the Neocon's evidence and other more tractable things. I simply find use of The Big Lie patently and irrevocably offensive.