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Comment by baconner | Hacker News Reader

All this time I had assumed when Brennan called for dangerous things like encryption back doors he must understand the negative impacts would be but just didn't care as long as it helped the CIA. Now I'm thinking he actually doesn't know what he's talking about at all which is somehow even worse. An AOL email account with confidential files in it? Unbelievable.

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There was nothing in the story saying confidential files were stored in his AOL account. Also nothing about when the account was last used.

There was a time when we all had noisy modems and AOL accounts.

I think these qualify. You are free to disagree.

CIA Director John Brennan’s private account held sensitive files — including his 47-page application for top-secret security clearance — until he recently learned that it had been infiltrated, the hacker told The Post. Other emails stored in Brennan’s non-government account contained the Social Security numbers and personal information of more than a dozen top American intelligence officials

Not quite. Confidential is a technical term in the military/IC world. It's a classification, just like secret or top secret. I read somewhere that a lot of the Wikileaks cables were supposedly stuff marked confidential.

Storing confidential material in an AOL account would be a crime, just like giving the same material to Wikileaks.

Brennan's PII, job history, etc. is certainly valuable information, but clearance application paperwork itself is unclassified.

Ok then my mistake - there's nothing in the article that says they were files classified as confidential.

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