Read the Politico article first, then come back to here.
Are you back? Okay. Well. It’s been 20 years now since I last worked in government, but things haven’t changed since then. Here’s the thing I remember most about government: Their IT people were utter amateurs. They were reliant on contractors for the simplest of things, and panicked whenever the most elementary of problems happened. And it turns out that the State Department’s IT people while HRC was Secretary of State were just as incompetent as I remember, and HRC’s own IT people were complete amateur hour.
Here’s the take-aways I get from the article:
- Her “IT team” is typical of what I’ve seen in government — an incompetent nominally in charge, who relied on a very expensive consultant who actually set things up and configured them. The consultant actually did a decent job of setting things up and securing them, from what I can tell, though there’s a couple of things I would have done that he didn’t do. But there’s a lot he did right, too. In particular, I’m impressed that one of the things he did was set up an intrusion detection system that could alert on someone breaking into the system — there’s way too many government IT systems out there which aren’t protected even to that extent.
- The FBI is idiots. They tagged dozens of emails sent to her by Sid Blumenthal as containing classified information. Thing is, Sid Blumenthal was a private citizen with no access to classified information. Everything he sent Hillary was public domain knowledge that he’d gathered by talking to other non-government people. By definition it couldn’t be classified, because it did not originate within government and did not use any government resources or assets that could be disclosed and harm government intelligence gathering.
- HRC is a complete dolt when it comes to computers. She didn’t even know how to use a personal computer. She used a Blackberry long after the iPhone made the Blackberry obsolete because she didn’t want to learn how to use an iPhone, she felt she had more important things to do when the Blackberry worked well enough for her. Her staffers thought an iPad was a good idea, maybe, but when her staffers gave her one and tried to get her to use it, it didn’t “take” — she ended up going right back to her Blackberry.
- HRC had a policy that all classified information was to be handled in hard copy.
- HRC did not herself initiate emails with classified information. All emails with potentially classified information in them were sent by her staffers.
- For that matter, HRC’s emails were generally along the lines of “Please print out that email thread and bring it to me.” Reading long emails was difficult on the tiny Blackberry and she preferred hardcopy or talking to people personally via telephone. The emails she sent were mostly along the lines of “please print out that document and bring it to me” or “please arrange a phone call with so-and-so and add it to my calendar.”
- HRC left her Blackberry outside the “classified” section of the State Department. Everything inside the “classified” tier was done via phone and hard copy.
- It was assumed by everybody that all of HRC’s emails were being archived by the State Department because they were between HRC and her staffers, all of whom had “official” State Department email addresses. Sid Blumenthal was the only person other than POTUS outside her staff who had her email address, and nobody thought about archiving his emails because he was a personal friend and emails with him were assumed to be personal business.
- The State Department was not, in fact, archiving the emails originating from or terminating at her staffers’ email addresses. But nobody told HRC’s staffers that, they blithely assumed all their emails were being archived.
- Once a FOIA request happened for Hillary’s emails, and it was realized that the State Department did not have a copy of the emails, HRC’s staffers made a best-effort attempt to satisfy the request. A best-effort attempt that was laughable in its incompetence, but then, I’m an IT specialist in private enterprise, and I would have handled it much better.
- The FBI now has all the emails, including the “deleted” ones, because they retrieved her old retired email server that had been set up in the basement of her house and retrieved them from there. So there’s no longer any “missing” emails that potentially have a “smoking gun” in them.
All in all, I was expecting there to be some sort of smoking gun here of HRC having deliberately attempted to hide things, given the right-wing rhetoric about all this. Instead, it appears that what happened is a typical example of government bungling of basic IT functions, combined with a lot of hype by right wing outlets. It appears that HRC had a clear policy that classified information was to be given to her in hardcopy, not via email, and while clearly some staffers violated that by sending her emails about sensitive topics that probably should have been classified, none of it originated from HRC herself. There’s no evidence of HRC herself sending emails with classified content. For that matter, all of her emails seem to be one-liners along the lines of “send condolences to King Foofoo about his wife’s untimely demise” and “print me out that email thread about North Korea”, things like that. You can’t send much more than a one liner with a Blackberry. It’s just too difficult typing on that tiny little keyboard.
In short: Incompetence is not a crime, and once the fact that the emails had not been archived by the State Department came to light, HRC’s people did their incompetent best to remedy the situation. I don’t see anything here that could be used to prosecute HRC for any crime because any crime for which she or her people could be charged requires intent, not merely incompetence. There’s just no “there” there. If we were going to make IT incompetence a crime, we’d have to send 90% of the government to prison!
But hey, this is just facts. And who needs facts, when we can instead judge people based upon uninformed opinions and prejudices, right?
– Badtux the IT Penguin
If doing something crazy works, then it isn’t crazy. The very obsolescence of her Blackberry protected her from the insecurity of the online world.
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Heck, the launching of nuclear ordinance still is dependent on floppy disks. A Blackberry is at least a bit more modern and secure. Her actions, as you depict them, were to ensure there were no problems with the handling of classified information. Only problem I have right now, is that Anthony Weiner (and why he is infamous), is back in the news. Great going FBI!
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Right!
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[…] more patient than I, has dug into the details. I commend his analysis to your […]
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Sounds like the same low wage, schmoes that staff our IT. You get locked out because of not accessing a system you never use…because if you don’t use it every 60 days it freezes you out. Of course, since we don’t use these systems, we figured logging in every 90 days and changing our password was sufficient, and no one ever explained the 60 day rule! So you call for help, and they email your bosses the new one time password…that expires in 48 hours…and your boss doesn’t get it till the next day…and you get it the next day…and find out that 48 hours actually means the second 0000 EDT from the time the email was sent…and so forth.
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I don’t get to talk about the “e-mail scandal” in person with many ppl Downundahere because it’s too “inside baseball” (I don’t think there’s a similar expression of “inside cricket” for these Anglic sportscountries) for most people to follow. One politically astute chick brought up the matter as I was chatting to her last week and my question to her was “What harm occurred because of these e-mails?” Coz I don’t see that anything actually HAPPENED because of all this bullshit. Were secret agents captured and killed because of them? Did governments topple in some corner of the world? Did Hillary announce in them that she was personally awarding $500 bazillion in government money to some bankstercrook just because she COULD, goddamit?!? To mee, it seems like a lot of ominous buzzwords linked together — “private e-mail server,” “classified documents,” “continuing FBI investigation” on a layer of “Clinton, Clinton, Clinton.” Is there any THERE there? It reminds me of the Whitewater and Bill Clinton penisperjury matters — a lot of natter about a small matter where not a lot seems to have occurred. It’s nowhere near the level of invading Iraq based on lies and causing a million unnecessary deaths, or waging secret wars all over Central America and causing hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths… I’m no fan of Hillary — onya Bernie! — but if that’s the best that her attackers can throw at her, she’s doing better (in terms of what’s actually important) than her foes are.
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The GOP is scared of her. Have been since 1992. They’ve been flinging poo at the Clintons since before Bill was in the national spotlight. All teh Benghazi BS, with the wonderful 11 hour performance by (soon to be) Madam President vs the flop sweat committee was to try to tarnish her to the point of making her unelectable. The whole email server is more of the same BS, just a different spin on “if we generate enough smoke (and mirrors), the people will assume there is a fire”.
Worked out well for them that she’s up against ‘outsider’ Trump, and not one of their core Republican stalwarts, or they wouldn’t have the fig leaf of possibly winning with one of them next time (I think she’d have cleaned the clock of anyone on that roster – maybe just not by as much a margin as is projected vs Trump). They’ll regroup, form a committee to study what went wrong (just like they did in 2012), then shelve the results and keep fcking the chicken.
I have a copy of “The Hunting of the President” on my “to (re)read” pile, just to refresh my memory of what the next 2-8 years of GOP ‘investigations’ will be like. Too bad (for them) she isn’t going to try to bridge the divide during her early days like President Obama did. She is going to hit the ground knowing that it will be hardball from day one, and that with all the grief they and their allies have given her family, payback will not be served cold, but rather hot.
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Uhhh … no criminal intent, probably no great harm done. That’s fine. But there’s something dismaying about a presidential candidate who is so… disconnected … that she’s uncomfortable with using a computer. And so old and frail that she needs people about to help her climb steps and stand erect for long. That’s not someone you want mulling over the merits of competing concepts for anti-ICBM missiles or evaluating CBO estimates of future financial impacts of esoteric medical treatments. That’s a description of someone who ought to be retired and watching the news on television, perhaps someone who should be in an old folk’s home.
I expect I’ll vote for her, given the competition. But this is not a good choice.
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Uhm, she had pneumonia at the time, Mike. I don’t know if you’ve had pneumonia recently, but it whacks the crap out of you. She looked pretty darn spry at that town hall debate thingy, she was practically jogging all around the room to whoever was asking the question as Trump glowered glumly and followed her around like he was wanting to strangle her.
As for the computer thing… yeah. That seems typical of women of her generation, my mother refuses to use a computer for more than email and Facebook, but that’s more an eyeroll than anything else because it doesn’t seem to be stopping her from doing whatever she wants.
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