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Anyone who follows American politics will have heard of Hillary Clinton's email server. Rather than using an official State Department address, she chose to use a private server for her official email. Federal law requires all official email to be archived on government servers. Armchair lawyers have pointed out that it doesn't require the use of government servers to send and receive the email, but the archival requirement is clear. This requirement was clearly violated in this case: in response to a subpoena, Hillary Clinton's private staff extracted emails from her private server and turned them over to the government. The contents of the server itself were never made available to the government, and now she has had the server erased:
Hillary Clinton wiped “clean” the private server housing emails from her tenure as secretary of state, the chairman of the House committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi said Friday.
“While it is not clear precisely when Secretary Clinton decided to permanently delete all emails from her server, it appears she made the decision after October 28, 2014, when the Department of State for the first time asked the Secretary to return her public record to the Department,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi, said in a statement.
As Popehat tweeted:
@Popehat
I ask you, who among us hasn't wiped a server clean after its contents were requested by subpoena?
I naively wonder why she isn't in jail, but that's just me. Comments and views from those interested in American politics?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Monday March 30 2015, @03:16PM
I'm a private person, HRC is a _public_ official. These words mean something. A public official has a duty to the public and must be accountable to that public. For accountability to mean something, that public person account for their actions and to account, they must demonstrate what they've done.
A private individual is not accountable to a public person. Look up the word "private" if you can't comprehend this.
So, yes -- everything done by a public should be recorded. Absolutely no private communications of any kind should be recorded of private people, short of a valid warrant.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Monday March 30 2015, @06:43PM
not everything, just everything done while acting as the public's delegate. when not working in official capacity, even public officials become private persons. one should not lose their right to privacy or private life just because they're a public official, but they absolutely should not have privacy while acting on behalf of the public (basically, working/on the job = public, not working/off the job = private).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @07:48PM
+Y/+X =positive
-Y/-X =positive
Just sayin!
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday March 30 2015, @08:14PM
I don't know if I agree. So much can happen of great importance while not in their office or at their desk. We have an idiom for that: smoke filled back room deal
I think it would be better if there was 100% transparency with respect to the people who make decisions that kill millions.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Tuesday March 31 2015, @01:09AM
i already covered that - if they're doing that, they're acting as the public's delegate, and thus working in official capacity, and it needs to be documented. there will always be people exploiting loopholes, seeing how far the rules can be pushed, and even breaking the rules, so maybe the only way to ensure compliance would be to document/record everything and then have only the official stuff (working as the public's delegate, no matter what they're doing or how they're doing it) made public and delete everything else.
i stand by my statement - being a public official should not mean losing your non-work-related private life, but it should mean no privacy while working.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday March 31 2015, @03:50AM
I could live with record it all and delete, but when the lives of millions are at stake, and you volunteered for the job as a public representative of the American populace, it's only fair that they accept the downside to that job, which is that they are a public person and the public has a right to know what they are doing in its name. If you give them private places to hide though, that back room will just move to the closet, or the toilet. So record everything now and delete later.