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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: 3, Informative) by steveha on Friday September 25 2015, @01:03AM
Hillary Clinton, instead of using the secure server set up for her to use, took premeditated steps to use a server under her control.
It seems obvious to me that the real reason she did this was so she could control access to the emails; one never knows when a Freedom of Information Act will let someone look at the email records, so this way she could have a veto over FOIA requests against her email. For example, the emails she turned over had a two-month gap [thedailybeast.com] with no email discussion of Benghazi. Either she had really excellent discipline about never discussing Benghazi in email (and I don't know how she knew to do that ahead of time), or else she never turned over the Benghazi-related emails. (I guess now we will find out which.)
However, the above paragraph is speculation; I don't know why she did it. So, let's discuss what we can discuss without considering intent.
Once she made the decision to use her own server, she was absolutely obligated to make sure that no classified information ended up on it. We already know she failed to do this. Even in a small sample of emails taken from what she released, multiple classified items were discovered, including at least two that were the highest level "Top Secret". Her defense was that the information wasn't marked as classified until later, but this is provably not true for some of the items. In particular, she personally sent multiple emails containing classified information; it was her duty to avoid sending classified information via non-secure channels.
Because of the known, proven failures to keep classified items out of the insecure server, the FBI now has the task of figuring out all the information that was on the server, so that the government can assess just what secrets were leaked. (Everyone is assuming that all the contents of the server are known to foreign intelligence services, because she was using a Microsoft server. Even the Microsoft servers run by the experts in the US government have been 0wned from time to time, and there is no reason to think that Hillary and her IT staff did better than the IT experts in the US government.)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251552653 [democraticunderground.com]
Also, we have evidence that suggests that Hillary had a system set up, where the "ops" group in the State Department would read classified email on the classified system, and then send Hillary Clinton a summary via her insecure personal server. This is a huge, shocking breach if true. The FBI isn't going to let go of this; it is not going to go away.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-department-releases-7000-pages-of-hillary-clintons-emails/ [cbsnews.com]
This article explains the importance of the situation. Unless all the quotes are fabricated and the facts are wrong, this shows that Hillary Clinton has seriously messed up and is in serious trouble. Key quote: "The FBI will get someone to talk, we always do."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/02/will-hillary-clinton-s-emails-burn-the-white-house.html [thedailybeast.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @01:39AM
(Everyone is assuming that all the contents of the server are known to foreign intelligence services, because she was using a Microsoft server. Even the Microsoft servers run by the experts in the US government have been 0wned from time to time, and there is no reason to think that Hillary and her IT staff did better than the IT experts in the US government.)
Even if the server was running Linux or OpenBSD, I would assume the server was compromised. The experts she hired would not have been on the same level as those in the government and probably didn't watch it 24/7 and read all the logs, etc. Plus, there is a good chance, although I've not seen a definitive answer either way, that it was on a VPS, which opens a whole different can of worms.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Friday September 25 2015, @05:46AM
BWAHAHAHA! You say that as if it puts her at a disadvantage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @07:09AM
NO. The office server was NOT designed for classified info, and there's no evidence so far it had better security. (There seems to be a separate system for classified info, but they don't give out that detail for obvious reasons.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @11:27PM
The office server was NOT designed for classified info
Right, the server for classified info is on the network for classified info and should be air-gapped from the actual Internet. It seems that this was too inconvenient for Hillary Clinton so she just did what she wanted to do.
(There seems to be a separate system for classified info, but they don't give out that detail for obvious reasons.)
It isn't a secret that classified info lives in a special classified network and special classified servers.