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FBI Said to Recover Personal E-Mails From Hillary Clinton Server
The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation. ... A review by Clinton and her aides determined that about half of the 60,000 e-mails she exchanged during her four-year tenure as secretary of state were of a personal nature, the presidential candidate has said. ...
In 2013, the Clintons turned the private server over to a Colorado-based technology company to manage. The firm, Platte River Networks, installed the device in a New Jersey data center and managed and maintained it.
Andy Boian, a spokesman for the Platte River, said the FBI last month asked the company to hand over the server. Platte River asked the Clintons what it should do, and within 24 hours a representative for the Clintons told the company to provide the device to agents, Boian said.
There has been some question as to whether Clinton deleted her messages or took the more thorough and technical step of "wiping" the server. Boian said Tuesday that Platte River had "no knowledge of it being wiped."
Wow. What are the odds she just deleted the emails rather than doing a real wipe? It's obvious that she wanted personal total control over her emails -- that is the whole point of personal server -- and if she failed to get competent advice on how to actually wipe a machine, it demonstrates her own lack of competence in selecting people who are actual experts to help her do the things she wants. Doing a multi-pass overwrite with random data isn't exactly esoteric knowledge -- that's pretty basic stuff. There is of course the brute force method as well. Surely she remembers the Air Force personnel smashing computer equipment when they had to land in China after a midair collision. Or the destruction of The Guardian's Snowden hard drives.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Thursday September 24 2015, @03:07PM
That's not entirely true. Any cabinet level person could easily have gotten away with this in virtually any administration.
Hell, someone a little lower covered up someone in the Bush administration maliciously released classified information in a way that definitely the security of a few operations, and they got their sentence commuted to community service.
Caveats about this post
1. I don't think the Bush administration doing something shitty justifies bad behavior now.
2. I don't think the letter of the law has been violated because things were retroactively classified prior to release(which: yes, is dumb, I agree)
3. I recognize that a commuted sentence reflects a degree of acceptance that inappropriate activity took place
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2015, @04:35PM
I don't think the letter of the law has been violated because things were retroactively classified
...except that you already mentioned "transparency laws" aka FOIA.
The Freedom of Information Act of 1996 says that if you are a public servant and you have communications related to your job, those will be archived.
For C-level public servants, that covers everything you do until you no longer have that job.
To assure that electronic communications are archived, those must be made on the approved servers with a federal employee making backups.
When Sarah Palin was doing gov't business via a webmail account, that was a crime.
When Hillary did it on her private server, that was a crime as well.
Classification violations add another layer of criminal activity, but the law has already been broken.
.
As for classification, there's WAY too much stuff being classified.
To get a Top Secret classification should require the signature (no auto-pen or equivalent) of a 4-star general or the civilian equivalent.
Once a 4-star is spending all his time approving classifications, the lunch menu for the Tuesday meeting will not seem quite so important.
El Reg had some of my favorite headlines on this:
FBI may pillory Hillary with email spillery grillery [theregister.co.uk]
More email misery and pillory for Hillary as FBI starts quizzery [theregister.co.uk]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2015, @05:27PM
> Classification violations add another layer of criminal activity, but the law has already been broken.
Well, except for that part about where the communications related to her job were archived. I am 100% certain we will find that at least some of the deleted messages were also related to her job, but I doubt it will turn out to be systemic. If it does turn out to be systemic, then you will be right on the money with the law having been broken.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Thursday September 24 2015, @06:06PM
The point of using the Government servers would be so that nothing would be missed. It is HRC's fault she commingled personal and business communications, and in such circumstances, an independent 3d party should be the one making the determination of what stays and what doesn't. The fact that she had gall to say "trust me and no you can't verify" is pretty amazing. An attitude as smug as that, shows she feels completely outside any regulation, even when the problem is one of her own making. That is a dangerous quality for president.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2015, @10:21PM
> The point of using the Government servers would be so that nothing would be missed.
You seem to think that messages on government servers are not also deleted. You are in error.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday September 24 2015, @11:27PM
You have to be kidding. I'm sure they get deleted in certain circumstances, but I seriously doubt the SOS has the authority to make that determination on her own with no oversight. If HRC is going to be so cavalier about information while just SOS, how bad do you think it will be if she is president?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @12:03AM
Hey after we get Hilary, can we go after all those responsible in the Bush Administration [mediamatters.org] for doing the same thing and worse? In fact, can we file charges right now and run the trials back to back?