12 Red Flags in Clinton’s Email Setup
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Many of the points made by this author relate to rigid government procurement rules: three bids, lowest bidder, hard walls between buyer and seller. The violations for which Mr. Pagliano has received immunity seem to be those sorts of things. The overhead of government rules creates both high costs and long delays. These rules are intended to defend the treasury against terabuck and gigabuck scams. But the server in question cost kilobucks at most, and was paid for with non-governmental funds.
The Feds are famous for obtaining convictions by twisting the words of people they interview to construe them as lies. Witness Scooter Libby of the VPOTUS's office, who was convicted for perjury -- lying to investigators -- rather than for concealing the truth about the Iraq regime's armaments.
The rules of evidence mean, as we all know, that anything we say can be used against us. Less well understood is that NOTHING we say in interviews with police can be used in our favor in court -- it's considered hearsay. If the federal police were interviewing you, your safest course of action would be to say nothing. That's what Mr. Pagliano is doing, according to this author.
One point in the article refers to the privacy and integrity of information on the server. Yes, a private server is vulnerable to intrusion and to advanced persistent threats of various stripes: of course. SO ARE GOVERNMENT SERVERS, notoriously. Secretary Clinton never said this, but there's a possibility she used non-governmental email because she didn't want her correspondence to end up on Wikileaks.
The server setup should have been behind an actively monitored firewall. I've never seen any description of this in the press. If the server and its file systems were vulnerable, that's a problem. But, still, we have to ask "compared to what?" Compared to the General Services Administration HR systems breach, clintonemail.com may have been relatively secure. Compared to the State Department archive that came out in Wikileaks, it WAS relatively secure.
Government political appointees are agents of change. Information tech is an area where large-scale institutional change is absolutely necessary. Why shouldn't some of the people pushing that change be political appointees?
Flap. Flap. Flap.
You say that the best course of action is not to say anything. If this is true, and I believe it is, what would be the point of having an Inspector General? I think that working in a government agency would come with some sort of requirement that you cooperate with those people in the agency who are there to make it better. If not? What are you there for?
If the server and its file systems were vulnerable, that's a problem. But, still, we have to ask "compared to what?"
I believe now you are saying that each political person (?) who joins an agency should make their own private decision about network security and take action appropriately. Perhaps this is true, but only in extreme cases? I'm not sure. I don't think this is anywhere near an extreme case.
Political appointees should be agents of change, yes. I think we agree on that. But to be an agent of change, it requires you to, well, change something. In every case I've ever seen where a large organization changes, some people were let go, disciplined, demoted. It's just a rule of large numbers of people that the older and worse the org is, the more of a shakeup there has to be.
Federal agencies don't run like that. You could take any of a dozen different scandals over the last couple of decades -- for the most part, nobody got fired.
So what really happens is that the higher ups in an agency really run it, the political folks are there to provide political cover, and a collusion forms between lifelong bureaucrats and the political appointees. As a member of one federal agency told me, the first rule is that we never appear in the press. Political systems exist for political reasons.
I'm not sure what the correct course of action here should have been. I know, however, that it's extremely difficult to set an example for employees if you disregard the rules you don't like. I also know that employees have a lot more say in what an organization is like than management. This is not a good situation for any organization to be in.
She's never once said she did this to increase her security. If that was her motivation, why hasn't it been her defense of the act this whole time?
Maybe I'm just a tinfoil, but it seems much more likely that this was done in order to prevent information from legal public record keeping, than it was because she was an OpSec and ComSec wizard.
She made some bad choices around this but in the grand scheme of things, it isn't that big a deal to me, certainly not to the point of disqualifying her to be President. I would be very skeptical of anyone claiming that they would have voted for her if not for this.
> Yes, she was wrong to use a personal account even though some previous Secretaries of State did
"Officer, I've witnessed other people using drugs so it's ok for me as well"
> I also lean towards it being wrong for her to be denied the same communication setup made for Obama
"Officer, the CEO is allowed to use the private jet, so I'm allowed to steal it"
> She made some bad choices around this but in the grand scheme of things, it isn't that big a deal to me
"I want someone who makes poor decisions making decisions for me"
I am a little disappointed. I generally hold the HN community in the high esteem, and don't expect to see content like this. I would love to read up on this topic in an article without an overt agenda though.
I would highly suggest that you (and others) should read the Office of the Inspector General's recent report itself: https://oig.state.gov/system/files/esp-16-03.pdf
Don't read just the out-of-context quotes that someone else has chosen --- read them in context so they can be discussed in context. Maybe a mod could even change the URL to this?