 This has been made more clear after revelations that former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton used her private email address, hdr22@clintonemail.com, during
her tenure to conduct State Department business, bringing the topic of email and
Internet security back into the national limelight.
AP file photo
AP file photo
TECH WHIZ: Hillary Clinton apparently has the smarts to set up a home-based
email server. Or, at least, think it was a good idea.
It’s claimed Clinton hosted her own email server at home, a practice endorsed by
privacy enthusiasts as one of the best ways to avoid the government snooping on
your private emails. The irony being, of course, Clinton was one of the
country’s most powerful government officials and using this practice.
This set-up allowed Clinton to keep her emails far away from the prying eyes of
the Federal Records Act, which requires government officials to keep digital
records of their email correspondence. Her staffers only recently disclosed her
emails to the State Department for review, according to the Associated Press,
and only upon request.
A public probing of Clinton’s email set-up has revealed a staggering ignorance
on the part of government officials when it comes to email specifically, and
technology more generally.
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, declared on national television on
Sunday he’s never sent a single email.
“I don’t email,” Graham said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “You can have every email
I’ve ever sent. I’ve never sent one. I don’t know what it makes me.”
He’s not alone.
“People have different ways of communicating,” said U.S. Sen. Benjamin Cardin,
D-Maryland. “I have a granddaughter who does nothing but text. You’ll never find
a letter written with her. So everybody’s different.”
Clinton’s successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, downplayed the issue while
at a public event in Saudi Arabia.
“I think we have all the (emails) that are state.gov, which are appropriately
the ones in the purview of the department,” said Kerry. “But let me check on
that when I actually have time to pay attention to such an important issue when
I get home.”
A much bigger technological foul on the part of the government is the scandal
surrounding the Internal Revenue Service’s handling of the emails of Lois
Lerner, the former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit.
AP file photo
AP file photo
FOUND ‘EM: Lois Lerner’s emails, which she claims were lost in a computer crash,
have been found.
Faced by the House Committee on Oversight’s investigation into its alleged
targeting of tax-exempt conservative nonprofit organizations, the IRS claimed to
have lost up to two years’ worth of Lerner’s emails.
How could this be possible?
Because of a “computer crash,” IRS officials claimed. And any back-ups were
automatically deleted, said IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.
This, despite the fact that emails are stored on cloud servers and were
explicitly required by law to be recorded and backed up in a secure location.
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 Months later, it’s now been revealed those emails are not only
recoverable, but an archive of up to 33,000 emails, up to 10 years’
worth, were easily found by a separate department.
Tim Camus, deputy inspector general of the Treasury Department, said
finding the emails was done without issue.
“They were right where you would expect them to be,” he told the
Oversight Committee on Feb. 27.
Federal officials are now probing for potential criminal activity
related to the covering-up of Lerner’s emails.
And how can anyone forget the infamous “glitch” embedded on
Healthcare.gov, which prevented untold thousands of potential users
from signing up for the Affordable Care Act in 2013.
The $400 million for the website caused a huge political
embarrassment for President Barack Obama.
Other government officials choose not to use email.
AP file photo
AP file photo
TIME SUCK: Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says
she stopped using email in 2013.
“I think email just sucks up time,” former Homeland Security
Secretary Janet Napolitano said in March 2013. “I stopped using
email when I was attorney general of Arizona. I was like, ‘Why am I
spending my time scrolling through this?’”
Napolitano described herself as a Luddite, a term used to describe
artisans who opposed technological progress in 19th century France.
Keep in mind these are the same public and government officials who
are devising legislation and carrying out policy that affect the
Internet, email usage and technology for millions of Americans.
It seems the one knowledgeable person who understands how email
actually works is Clinton, especially if she thought to host her own
mail server.
It takes a high level of technical skill to create — or even
delegate — the maintenance of a home server dedicated to email, as
revealed in one step-by-step guide published in Ars Technica.
It can even be complicated for journalists covering the issue.
An article published Friday by The Blaze claims Clinton’s domain
registrar, Network Solutions, was hacked in 2010 and her domain IP
address may have been “redirected to a Ukrainian attack server” in
the process. A further commentary published on the website makes the
assertion the Kremlin has copies of Clinton’s email as a result of
this “hack”.
However, the MX records reviewed by Wachdog.org show Clinton’s
server was set up on a MXLogic server, owned by McAfee, which has
never publicly revealed a breach of its systems. McAfee claims to be
one of the strongest servers on the market.
And because the domain registrar only pointed to the address of MX
records, and did not actually host or house mail servers, the claim
of a hack, or potential hack, are overblown. And it surely isn’t a
security nightmare as some claim.
Rather, it takes some examination of the technology behind email
servers to truly understand the issue at heart.
[This
article courtesy of
Watchdog.]
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