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Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

186 points by SuperKlaus 12y ago

nodata 12y ago
Interesting timing of this revelation.
- hessenwolf 12y ago
  Is the idea to attack her early so it burns out early, or is this genuinely to attack her? These articles really read like an episode of House of Cards.
  - fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
    I expect to see these kinds of things released/rehashed periodically until the conclusion of the race, or until Hillary drops out. That goes for the R's candidates as well.
  - saalweachter 12y ago
    Honestly I don't think the haters are capable of exercising restraint when it comes to attacking Clinton. But if you want to be an optimist about humanity, you could assume that the timing of or level of attention given to this reveal is unrelated to election cycles and merely the natural pace of a crime being revealed and prosecuted.
- shaftoe 12y ago
  Yeah, after the personal email she used for state business was hacked. How did she possibly discuss classified materials?
- Shivetya 12y ago
  Regardless if it is to stile a political run or to get the damage over and done with this is the type of behavior by top officials that needs to stop. Is Kerry doing similar? Who else is? There seems to be a concerted effort by the Administration and/or those in it to hide communication from the official record, being Hillary Clinton or Lois Lerner. What happens to her because of this obvious effort to conceal is the most important aspect of the case. Will she get the wrist slap like Pretraeis and other friends of Washington get? Likely. Whereas everyday citizens are hounded to death by AGs and the like. To be honest, government officials taking actions like this need to be treated like the criminals they are, they are purposefully betraying the public trust and hiding behind the power of their office and names to do it. The real one percent in Washington
  - DangerousPie 12y ago
    > Is Kerry doing similar? The article says "Secretary of State John Kerry uses a government email account, and his correspondence is preserved as part of the department’s record-keeping system."
    - pc86 12y ago
      Wouldn't any similar article from two weeks ago say the same thing about Hillary?
    - tvon 12y ago
      From a Washington Post[1] article: > Clinton was not the first secretary of state to use a private account. The State Department said Clinton’s successor as top diplomat, John F. Kerry, is the first secretary to use a standard government e-mail address ending in “state.gov.” [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-used-private-e-mail-for-government-business-at-state-dept/2015/03/02/275d13d8-c156-11e4-9271-610273846239_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-used-...
      - danielweber 12y ago
        If you read the article linked here, the law was changed in 2009, partly as a consequence of the 2007 scandal in which some Bush emails weren't preserved because they were run off of a server managed by the RNC. The agency must make sure that emails are being retained according to law. In any private enterprise that must retain records, there is exactly one way to do this: you use your employer's email server, which has a long audit trail and dedicated compliance officers.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
jeremyt 12y ago
What difference, at this point, does it make?
- Shivetya 12y ago
  pretty much her words about Benghazi and people got killed for our screw up there. The point it makes is, this is not acceptable, should never be acceptable, and just because you weren't caught when you were in office is no excuse for not going after you.
  - jeremyt 12y ago
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka0_nz53CcM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka0_nz53CcM
  - neverartful 12y ago
    Well, I think it depends on what the definition of 'is' is. But I feel your pain.
mootothemax 12y ago
Hilary Clinton's not the first nor only politician guilty of doing this, NY Daily News just put together five other notables: - Sarah Palin - Mitt Romney - Karl Rove - Andrew Cuomo - Chris Christie aide Bridget Anne Kelly http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/5-examples-lawmakers-email-lawbreakers-article-1.2135674 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/5-examples-lawmaker... It definitely seems less than ideal for these rules to be abused like this. The problem is, how do you stop it? It's unreasonable to expect all private communications to be on public record, and if you write a note to your babysitter during office hours, why should the wider world have to know about it? It's a difficult balance.
- uptown 12y ago
  Clinton ran an email server from a home under-guard by the Secret Service.
  - escapologybb 12y ago
    That sounds really interesting, have you got a source?
    - uptown 12y ago
      "The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press." [...] "Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton's home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking." Source: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b78ba433af3a45209668f745158d994c/clinton-ran-homebrew-computer-system-official-emails http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b78ba433af3a45209668f745158d9...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
blfr 12y ago
The whole disclosure stems from hacking of another e-mail account, apparently. The disclosure that Hillary Clinton used a non-governmental e-mail address while she was Secretary of State originally came courtesy of “Guccifer,” the Romanian hacker now serving time in a Bucharest prison for his online attacks against scores of public figures. As TSG first reported in March 2013, “Guccifer” illegally accessed the AOL e-mail account of Sidney Blumenthal, who worked as a senior White House adviser to President Bill Clinton, and later became a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. When “Guccifer” (who was later identified as Marcel Lazar Lehel) breached Blumenthal’s account, he discovered an assortment of correspondence sent to Hillary Clinton at the e-mail address hdr22@clintonemail.com. The “clintonemail.com” domain was registered in 2009, shortly after her nomination to become Secretary of State.[1] They host with MX Logic[2], some McAfee's enterprise-y mail service. At least it wasn't statedeptsugarycake22@gmail.com. [1] http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/investigation/hillary-clinton-private-e-mail-account-897531 http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/investigation/hillary... [2] https://www.mxlogic.com/ https://www.mxlogic.com/
- 001sky 12y ago
  The story seems a bit more complicated on how it was setup. It was unclear whom Clinton hired to set up or maintain her private email server, which the AP traced to a mysterious identity, Eric Hoteham. That name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records or Internet background searches. Hoteham was listed as the customer at Clinton's $1.7 million home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua in records registering the Internet address for her email server since August 2010. The Hoteham personality also is associated with a separate email server, presidentclinton.com, and a non-functioning website, wjcoffice.com, all linked to the same residential Internet account as Mrs. Clinton's email server. The former president's full name is William Jefferson Clinton. In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton's private email account was reconfigured to use Google's servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google's accusations in June 2011 that China's government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking. Then, in July 2013, five months after she resigned as secretary of state, Clinton's private email server was reconfigured again to use a Denver-based commercial email provider, MX Logic, which is now owned by McAfee Inc., a top Internet security company.
yincrash 12y ago
Why is this news now? Wouldn't everyone she would have corresponded with have known it isn't a government email and raised a flag?
- loumf 12y ago
  The IT dept would also know that she gets no official email. Normal auditing software alerts on counts to make sure the backup is working.
  - superuser2 12y ago
    Yeah, but is some low-level IT guy going to throw away his government career by confronting the United States Secretary of State with an accusation of wrongdoing?
- Varcht 12y ago
  Fox guarding the henhouse.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
EdSharkey 12y ago
Hillary is the front-runner in the democratic field. And the republicans are putting Jeb Bush forward as "most electable", whatever the hell that means. I suppose the power elites are freaking out right now because neither of those bluebloods should be allowed anywhere near the white house. Will status quo go out the window with the next president, or will we continue with the endless war, bailout, QE, and surveillance policies of the Clintons, Bushes, and Obama?
- JustSomeNobody 12y ago
  Oh, definitely more of the same. Until this nation's citizens stop the my party is better than your party BS and actually start paying attention to what these people are doing to our country, we'll never have change.
  - shortoncash 12y ago
    I don't blame the public for this. I blame the media. Elections aren't won on the votes of principled liberals or conservatives. They're won based on the easy-votes of people who haven't dedicated the time to investigating whether there's substance behind any of the marketing claims of the two major parties. So what happens to these people during election season? Candidates are hidden from them, some candidates are given more time to speak during debates, and some major candidates aren't even discussed. Someone who doesn't pay attention to politics and is looking for a quick answer just simply will not get an honest view of the situation from the press. Jon Stewart had a good piece about an example of this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtDJ6Ay4QMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtDJ6Ay4QMw
    - JustSomeNobody 12y ago
      While I certainly agree the media has an agenda and feeds us what they want, the public has to take responsibility as well. Each of us is responsible for our own actions (in this case, votes). Also, that video was hilarious.
      - 12y ago
circa 12y ago
http://textsfromhillary.com/ http://textsfromhillary.com/ http://textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com/ http://textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com/ So you mean to tell me that all of these are from a Gmail account?
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
I'm voting this one up although I have concerns the article could end up in some kind of partisan BS here. So let's be clear about the root of the problem: government regulations demand that public officials have recordable conversations as part of their duties. This allows openness and inspection. (It also allows political shenanigans) It's a very, very similar situation to where we are with government spying on the citizens. The government, for whatever reason, has decided it wants to record everything you do of type X. As a subject of the government, you are not given a choice. To record some information in some contexts might be reasonable, in other contexts it might not, but all we're given is blanket requirements. What we're seeing with Hillary -- and probably with anybody else that has any common sense -- is just blowing off the law and "making things work" without regards to whether it is legal or not. For what it's worth, and I am a member of neither political party, I'd do the same thing. You can try to make this into an election-year deal about Hillary, or stand on a soapbox and talk about government accountability, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. But the real issue here is that the freaking government is trying to collect too much information about everybody. It's not just limited to public servants. And the proper response to a government that refuses to act in a reasonable manner is non-violent non-participation. Having said all of that, I fully expect that point to be completely lost by folks on both sides of this issue.
- jes 12y ago
  > And the proper response to a government that refuses to act in a reasonable manner is non-violent non-participation. I couldn't agree more.
  - fche 12y ago
    Try "non-participating" by not paying taxes....
    - msandford 12y ago
      It's really too bad that not paying your taxes isn't thought of as a valid way to voice your opposition to what's going on in Washington. I realize why it's that way, but it's a real bummer to me. Not because I'm a greedy bastard who doesn't want to pay a dime, but because elections aren't that great of a feedback mechanism now that career politicians and parties and etc have developed into neigh unstoppable powers that put people into office. It seemingly has been in the past, but for some reason isn't now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance
Wissmania 12y ago
How is this supposed to be a scandal exactly? The issue seems to be that she could of hid something in her personal emails by not turning everything over. But couldn't any official have just used their gov email for "official business" and use their personal email for stuff they want to hide? Doesn't every politician actually do this? The fact that Clinton is letting personal correspondence mix with government correspondence indicates to me she has less to hide, not more. The only issue that has the possibility of being legitimate in is the Benghazi stuff. Technically, it could have been a deliberate move to make emails related to Benghazi un-searchable during the investigation. Of course, this only actually matters if those emails contain anything significant/damning, and they probably don't.
- dingaling 12y ago
  > How is this supposed to be a scandal exactly? How about the release of proprietary and sensitive data into an unverified third-party system? Potentially traversing the Internet unencrypted in the process. I've seen people dismissed from companies for that. Shouldn't Government be even more rigorous?
- sigzero 12y ago
  You really don't get why? Read some of the comments on here and catch a clue.
- revelation 12y ago
  Well yes, if we are discussing why it's illegal to use personal email for this kind of communication, you can't make the assumption that it's legal to use the personal email for hiding stuff and arrive at the conclusion there is no scandal. That's circular logic.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    This "it could have been worse" is weird. The point of requirements to use official channels is two-fold: 1. It maintains an archive that can be used for accountability. 2. Anyone communicating with not-that-account can potentially flip to the watchdogs, making it harder to use unofficial communications. I'm not so naive to think that those unofficial communications don't happen. I expect that most campaigns have used them for dirty laundry. It doesn't mean we get rid of the channels we can see.
snissn 12y ago
I don't understand this story -- according to the smoking gun report, there's only evidence that this one guy sent her emails to her person account ( possibly by an autocomplete or address book oversight? ) and not any evidence that she sent any emails of replies back. If she wasn't sending emails from the account, and just one person was using her person address as the recipient, it seems just like a one off minor oversight from one of her advisors.
- jeremyt 12y ago
  It appears Clinton's staff has provided 50,000 pages of correspondence from the account in question since it was discovered.
- uxp 12y ago
  Clinton is also accused of not just using a personal email account for some stuff, but rather didn't have a .gov account at all.
joshstrange 12y ago
From what I understand she is not the first secretary of state to do this (All her predecessors did as well) and the laws that require them to keep emails and/or use provided email were passed AFTER she held the position. I'll agree it's a bad practice but can we fault her for doing that same thing as the people before her when there was no law/rule/regulation to do otherwise?
- Bedon292 12y ago
  This of course should not have been the case, but does seem to be. All of her predecessors appear to have used their personal emails as well. Kerry is the first one to use an official email. She left office at the beginning of 2013, while the official policy banning personal email went into effect at the end of 2013. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/03/hillary-email-scandal-not-so-fast.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/03/hillary-ema...
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Careful when you say "the policy of banning personal email went into effect in 2013," because it might suggest to the casual reader that there weren't other requirements being violated. Such as the 2009 law that required the State Department to ensure that, regardless of which email system employees were using, that all emails were being retained properly.
- danielweber 12y ago
  From the linked article: > Mrs. Clinton’s aides have said her use of private email was not out of the ordinary, pointing to the fact that former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a personal email account, before the current regulations went into effect. But since 2009, said Laura Diachenko, a National Archives and Records spokeswoman, federal regulations have stated that “agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.” Given that retention of email was a scandal in 2007 [1], there is no way someone plugged into Washington was unaware of this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controve...
dodyg 12y ago
Yawn.
jacquesm 12y ago
Simple solution suggestion: if you use your private account for government business it converts into a government account. If you don't want that to happen don't use it that way.
pertinhower 12y ago
This is an unusually political post to have risen so high on Hacker News. Is that because of the significance of email to the story? The use of email in this case is not very technically interesting. Or is there some other attraction?
- TillE 12y ago
  Honestly, I expect it's because the HN audience probably doesn't like Hillary Clinton. It really has zero relevance here.
- joshuaheard 12y ago
  A hacker discovers a secret email account and server being run in violation of the law that could bring down the leading Democratic presidential candidate? That's Hacker News.
- _delirium 12y ago
  It's kind of a well-known phenomenon that if you give it any opening, sites will fill up with American-presidential-race news for about 1 out of every 4 years, regardless of the nominal subject of the site. Seems to have expanded to 1.5 now? Requires active efforts from the management to keep the flood out, and most sites don't.
- gluejar 12y ago
  The HN discussion is useful because the news media accounts skip all the tech detail. For example, what provider was used, and what are their security procedures?
higherpurpose 12y ago
Private as in not public, as a government employee's email should be, not necessarily a secure email.
navait 12y ago
Given the sheer number of officials doing thing this, I can only assume this is done mostly out of ignorance about how email works. If I knew nothing about email, I could see myself assuming IT has a magic way to archive this. Remember when Sarah Palin's account got hacked? She probably never thought about how the security questions could easily be looked up once she was in the public spotlight. Once your email account is set up, I imagine most people don't really think about it. Of course, it's also 2014, there is no reason a high-level official should be this ignorance, but it wouldn't hurt for aides to make sure they are using the correct email account.
- Varcht 12y ago
  C'mon, she hired someone to set up a mail server just for this position, she knew what she was doing.
Borogravia 12y ago
Because nobody else in politics ever did this.
- jazzyk 12y ago
  Does not make it right. It is time to clean the house.
StylusEater 12y ago
GASP ... another politician gaming the system.
spenrose 12y ago
Ezra Klein is good on this: http://www.vox.com/2015/3/4/8146295/hillary-clinton-emails-transparency http://www.vox.com/2015/3/4/8146295/hillary-clinton-emails-t...
sandstrom 12y ago
It's interesting that [at least some members of] the same administration that denies privacy for citizens still want it themselves.

186 points by SuperKlaus 12y ago

nodata 12y ago

Interesting timing of this revelation.

hessenwolf 12y ago
Is the idea to attack her early so it burns out early, or is this genuinely to attack her? These articles really read like an episode of House of Cards.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  I expect to see these kinds of things released/rehashed periodically until the conclusion of the race, or until Hillary drops out. That goes for the R's candidates as well.
- saalweachter 12y ago
  Honestly I don't think the haters are capable of exercising restraint when it comes to attacking Clinton. But if you want to be an optimist about humanity, you could assume that the timing of or level of attention given to this reveal is unrelated to election cycles and merely the natural pace of a crime being revealed and prosecuted.
shaftoe 12y ago
Yeah, after the personal email she used for state business was hacked. How did she possibly discuss classified materials?
Shivetya 12y ago
Regardless if it is to stile a political run or to get the damage over and done with this is the type of behavior by top officials that needs to stop. Is Kerry doing similar? Who else is? There seems to be a concerted effort by the Administration and/or those in it to hide communication from the official record, being Hillary Clinton or Lois Lerner. What happens to her because of this obvious effort to conceal is the most important aspect of the case. Will she get the wrist slap like Pretraeis and other friends of Washington get? Likely. Whereas everyday citizens are hounded to death by AGs and the like. To be honest, government officials taking actions like this need to be treated like the criminals they are, they are purposefully betraying the public trust and hiding behind the power of their office and names to do it. The real one percent in Washington
- DangerousPie 12y ago
  > Is Kerry doing similar? The article says "Secretary of State John Kerry uses a government email account, and his correspondence is preserved as part of the department’s record-keeping system."
  - pc86 12y ago
    Wouldn't any similar article from two weeks ago say the same thing about Hillary?
  - tvon 12y ago
    From a Washington Post[1] article: > Clinton was not the first secretary of state to use a private account. The State Department said Clinton’s successor as top diplomat, John F. Kerry, is the first secretary to use a standard government e-mail address ending in “state.gov.” [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-used-private-e-mail-for-government-business-at-state-dept/2015/03/02/275d13d8-c156-11e4-9271-610273846239_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-used-...
    - danielweber 12y ago
      If you read the article linked here, the law was changed in 2009, partly as a consequence of the 2007 scandal in which some Bush emails weren't preserved because they were run off of a server managed by the RNC. The agency must make sure that emails are being retained according to law. In any private enterprise that must retain records, there is exactly one way to do this: you use your employer's email server, which has a long audit trail and dedicated compliance officers.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

jeremyt 12y ago

What difference, at this point, does it make?

Shivetya 12y ago
pretty much her words about Benghazi and people got killed for our screw up there. The point it makes is, this is not acceptable, should never be acceptable, and just because you weren't caught when you were in office is no excuse for not going after you.
- jeremyt 12y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka0_nz53CcM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka0_nz53CcM
- neverartful 12y ago
  Well, I think it depends on what the definition of 'is' is. But I feel your pain.

mootothemax 12y ago

Hilary Clinton's not the first nor only politician guilty of doing this, NY Daily News just put together five other notables: - Sarah Palin - Mitt Romney - Karl Rove - Andrew Cuomo - Chris Christie aide Bridget Anne Kelly http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/5-examples-lawmakers-email-lawbreakers-article-1.2135674 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/5-examples-lawmaker... It definitely seems less than ideal for these rules to be abused like this. The problem is, how do you stop it? It's unreasonable to expect all private communications to be on public record, and if you write a note to your babysitter during office hours, why should the wider world have to know about it? It's a difficult balance.

uptown 12y ago
Clinton ran an email server from a home under-guard by the Secret Service.
- escapologybb 12y ago
  That sounds really interesting, have you got a source?
  - uptown 12y ago
    "The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press." [...] "Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton's home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking." Source: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b78ba433af3a45209668f745158d994c/clinton-ran-homebrew-computer-system-official-emails http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b78ba433af3a45209668f745158d9...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

blfr 12y ago

The whole disclosure stems from hacking of another e-mail account, apparently. The disclosure that Hillary Clinton used a non-governmental e-mail address while she was Secretary of State originally came courtesy of “Guccifer,” the Romanian hacker now serving time in a Bucharest prison for his online attacks against scores of public figures. As TSG first reported in March 2013, “Guccifer” illegally accessed the AOL e-mail account of Sidney Blumenthal, who worked as a senior White House adviser to President Bill Clinton, and later became a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. When “Guccifer” (who was later identified as Marcel Lazar Lehel) breached Blumenthal’s account, he discovered an assortment of correspondence sent to Hillary Clinton at the e-mail address hdr22@clintonemail.com. The “clintonemail.com” domain was registered in 2009, shortly after her nomination to become Secretary of State.[1] They host with MX Logic[2], some McAfee's enterprise-y mail service. At least it wasn't statedeptsugarycake22@gmail.com. [1] http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/investigation/hillary-clinton-private-e-mail-account-897531 http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/investigation/hillary... [2] https://www.mxlogic.com/ https://www.mxlogic.com/

001sky 12y ago
The story seems a bit more complicated on how it was setup. It was unclear whom Clinton hired to set up or maintain her private email server, which the AP traced to a mysterious identity, Eric Hoteham. That name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records or Internet background searches. Hoteham was listed as the customer at Clinton's $1.7 million home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua in records registering the Internet address for her email server since August 2010. The Hoteham personality also is associated with a separate email server, presidentclinton.com, and a non-functioning website, wjcoffice.com, all linked to the same residential Internet account as Mrs. Clinton's email server. The former president's full name is William Jefferson Clinton. In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton's private email account was reconfigured to use Google's servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google's accusations in June 2011 that China's government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking. Then, in July 2013, five months after she resigned as secretary of state, Clinton's private email server was reconfigured again to use a Denver-based commercial email provider, MX Logic, which is now owned by McAfee Inc., a top Internet security company.

yincrash 12y ago

Why is this news now? Wouldn't everyone she would have corresponded with have known it isn't a government email and raised a flag?

loumf 12y ago
The IT dept would also know that she gets no official email. Normal auditing software alerts on counts to make sure the backup is working.
- superuser2 12y ago
  Yeah, but is some low-level IT guy going to throw away his government career by confronting the United States Secretary of State with an accusation of wrongdoing?
Varcht 12y ago
Fox guarding the henhouse.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

EdSharkey 12y ago

Hillary is the front-runner in the democratic field. And the republicans are putting Jeb Bush forward as "most electable", whatever the hell that means. I suppose the power elites are freaking out right now because neither of those bluebloods should be allowed anywhere near the white house. Will status quo go out the window with the next president, or will we continue with the endless war, bailout, QE, and surveillance policies of the Clintons, Bushes, and Obama?

JustSomeNobody 12y ago
Oh, definitely more of the same. Until this nation's citizens stop the my party is better than your party BS and actually start paying attention to what these people are doing to our country, we'll never have change.
- shortoncash 12y ago
  I don't blame the public for this. I blame the media. Elections aren't won on the votes of principled liberals or conservatives. They're won based on the easy-votes of people who haven't dedicated the time to investigating whether there's substance behind any of the marketing claims of the two major parties. So what happens to these people during election season? Candidates are hidden from them, some candidates are given more time to speak during debates, and some major candidates aren't even discussed. Someone who doesn't pay attention to politics and is looking for a quick answer just simply will not get an honest view of the situation from the press. Jon Stewart had a good piece about an example of this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtDJ6Ay4QMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtDJ6Ay4QMw
  - JustSomeNobody 12y ago
    While I certainly agree the media has an agenda and feeds us what they want, the public has to take responsibility as well. Each of us is responsible for our own actions (in this case, votes). Also, that video was hilarious.
    - 12y ago

circa 12y ago

http://textsfromhillary.com/ http://textsfromhillary.com/ http://textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com/ http://textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com/ So you mean to tell me that all of these are from a Gmail account?

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

I'm voting this one up although I have concerns the article could end up in some kind of partisan BS here. So let's be clear about the root of the problem: government regulations demand that public officials have recordable conversations as part of their duties. This allows openness and inspection. (It also allows political shenanigans) It's a very, very similar situation to where we are with government spying on the citizens. The government, for whatever reason, has decided it wants to record everything you do of type X. As a subject of the government, you are not given a choice. To record some information in some contexts might be reasonable, in other contexts it might not, but all we're given is blanket requirements. What we're seeing with Hillary -- and probably with anybody else that has any common sense -- is just blowing off the law and "making things work" without regards to whether it is legal or not. For what it's worth, and I am a member of neither political party, I'd do the same thing. You can try to make this into an election-year deal about Hillary, or stand on a soapbox and talk about government accountability, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. But the real issue here is that the freaking government is trying to collect too much information about everybody. It's not just limited to public servants. And the proper response to a government that refuses to act in a reasonable manner is non-violent non-participation. Having said all of that, I fully expect that point to be completely lost by folks on both sides of this issue.

jes 12y ago
> And the proper response to a government that refuses to act in a reasonable manner is non-violent non-participation. I couldn't agree more.
- fche 12y ago
  Try "non-participating" by not paying taxes....
  - msandford 12y ago
    It's really too bad that not paying your taxes isn't thought of as a valid way to voice your opposition to what's going on in Washington. I realize why it's that way, but it's a real bummer to me. Not because I'm a greedy bastard who doesn't want to pay a dime, but because elections aren't that great of a feedback mechanism now that career politicians and parties and etc have developed into neigh unstoppable powers that put people into office. It seemingly has been in the past, but for some reason isn't now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance

Wissmania 12y ago

How is this supposed to be a scandal exactly? The issue seems to be that she could of hid something in her personal emails by not turning everything over. But couldn't any official have just used their gov email for "official business" and use their personal email for stuff they want to hide? Doesn't every politician actually do this? The fact that Clinton is letting personal correspondence mix with government correspondence indicates to me she has less to hide, not more. The only issue that has the possibility of being legitimate in is the Benghazi stuff. Technically, it could have been a deliberate move to make emails related to Benghazi un-searchable during the investigation. Of course, this only actually matters if those emails contain anything significant/damning, and they probably don't.

dingaling 12y ago
> How is this supposed to be a scandal exactly? How about the release of proprietary and sensitive data into an unverified third-party system? Potentially traversing the Internet unencrypted in the process. I've seen people dismissed from companies for that. Shouldn't Government be even more rigorous?
sigzero 12y ago
You really don't get why? Read some of the comments on here and catch a clue.
revelation 12y ago
Well yes, if we are discussing why it's illegal to use personal email for this kind of communication, you can't make the assumption that it's legal to use the personal email for hiding stuff and arrive at the conclusion there is no scandal. That's circular logic.
- danielweber 12y ago
  This "it could have been worse" is weird. The point of requirements to use official channels is two-fold: 1. It maintains an archive that can be used for accountability. 2. Anyone communicating with not-that-account can potentially flip to the watchdogs, making it harder to use unofficial communications. I'm not so naive to think that those unofficial communications don't happen. I expect that most campaigns have used them for dirty laundry. It doesn't mean we get rid of the channels we can see.

snissn 12y ago

I don't understand this story -- according to the smoking gun report, there's only evidence that this one guy sent her emails to her person account ( possibly by an autocomplete or address book oversight? ) and not any evidence that she sent any emails of replies back. If she wasn't sending emails from the account, and just one person was using her person address as the recipient, it seems just like a one off minor oversight from one of her advisors.

jeremyt 12y ago
It appears Clinton's staff has provided 50,000 pages of correspondence from the account in question since it was discovered.
uxp 12y ago
Clinton is also accused of not just using a personal email account for some stuff, but rather didn't have a .gov account at all.

joshstrange 12y ago

From what I understand she is not the first secretary of state to do this (All her predecessors did as well) and the laws that require them to keep emails and/or use provided email were passed AFTER she held the position. I'll agree it's a bad practice but can we fault her for doing that same thing as the people before her when there was no law/rule/regulation to do otherwise?

Bedon292 12y ago
This of course should not have been the case, but does seem to be. All of her predecessors appear to have used their personal emails as well. Kerry is the first one to use an official email. She left office at the beginning of 2013, while the official policy banning personal email went into effect at the end of 2013. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/03/hillary-email-scandal-not-so-fast.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/03/hillary-ema...
- danielweber 12y ago
  Careful when you say "the policy of banning personal email went into effect in 2013," because it might suggest to the casual reader that there weren't other requirements being violated. Such as the 2009 law that required the State Department to ensure that, regardless of which email system employees were using, that all emails were being retained properly.
danielweber 12y ago
From the linked article: > Mrs. Clinton’s aides have said her use of private email was not out of the ordinary, pointing to the fact that former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a personal email account, before the current regulations went into effect. But since 2009, said Laura Diachenko, a National Archives and Records spokeswoman, federal regulations have stated that “agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.” Given that retention of email was a scandal in 2007 [1], there is no way someone plugged into Washington was unaware of this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controve...

dodyg 12y ago

Yawn.

jacquesm 12y ago

Simple solution suggestion: if you use your private account for government business it converts into a government account. If you don't want that to happen don't use it that way.

pertinhower 12y ago

This is an unusually political post to have risen so high on Hacker News. Is that because of the significance of email to the story? The use of email in this case is not very technically interesting. Or is there some other attraction?

TillE 12y ago
Honestly, I expect it's because the HN audience probably doesn't like Hillary Clinton. It really has zero relevance here.
joshuaheard 12y ago
A hacker discovers a secret email account and server being run in violation of the law that could bring down the leading Democratic presidential candidate? That's Hacker News.
_delirium 12y ago
It's kind of a well-known phenomenon that if you give it any opening, sites will fill up with American-presidential-race news for about 1 out of every 4 years, regardless of the nominal subject of the site. Seems to have expanded to 1.5 now? Requires active efforts from the management to keep the flood out, and most sites don't.
gluejar 12y ago
The HN discussion is useful because the news media accounts skip all the tech detail. For example, what provider was used, and what are their security procedures?

higherpurpose 12y ago

Private as in not public, as a government employee's email should be, not necessarily a secure email.

navait 12y ago

Given the sheer number of officials doing thing this, I can only assume this is done mostly out of ignorance about how email works. If I knew nothing about email, I could see myself assuming IT has a magic way to archive this. Remember when Sarah Palin's account got hacked? She probably never thought about how the security questions could easily be looked up once she was in the public spotlight. Once your email account is set up, I imagine most people don't really think about it. Of course, it's also 2014, there is no reason a high-level official should be this ignorance, but it wouldn't hurt for aides to make sure they are using the correct email account.

Varcht 12y ago
C'mon, she hired someone to set up a mail server just for this position, she knew what she was doing.

Borogravia 12y ago

Because nobody else in politics ever did this.

jazzyk 12y ago
Does not make it right. It is time to clean the house.

StylusEater 12y ago

GASP ... another politician gaming the system.

spenrose 12y ago

Ezra Klein is good on this: http://www.vox.com/2015/3/4/8146295/hillary-clinton-emails-transparency http://www.vox.com/2015/3/4/8146295/hillary-clinton-emails-t...

sandstrom 12y ago

It's interesting that [at least some members of] the same administration that denies privacy for citizens still want it themselves.