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Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

nytimes.com

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Re: Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

#101

Post by sanderjd »

untog wrote: post #72
orbifold wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well things are not going pretty well, there is still no real solution to the crash of 2008 in sight, right now we still have essentially bankrupt banks that are trading worthless assets in an artificially created market. Look at the charts in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_... for example, real average hourly wages are still lower than in the 1970s, gdp growth has largely decoupled from…

Well that's the core of the problem, isn't it? "Pretty well" is extremely relative. The US is recovering from the crash of 2008 better than most countries in the world. Unemployment is down and getting better, but as you say, household income is still not doing great. So what is "pretty well" in this context? Damned if I know.

Yes, I'm right there with you, and "pretty well" is purposefully vague. Listening to the news and often reading here, it's very easy to forget that 2015 is pretty close to the historical maximum of how things are going for humans worldwide, and far more so for humans living in the US. That's no reason to not advocate for improving the many many things that can be improved, but I find the widespread sense of deep foreboding completely maddening, and more useful for fostering division than improvement.

To continue with your specific example, people I talk to seem largely unaware that the economy of the US has pretty much recovered from the crash. A lot of times this unawareness manifests in the thought that everything we've done since then and are still doing has been utterly and catastrophically wrong and we need to scrap it entirely and figure something else out. I don't think that's very useful. The other perspective is to say, that's great that the high level economic indicators have improved, but shouldn't we be seeing wage growth along with it? How can we tweak the system to see the gains spread more equitably? That is, it's not totally wrong, but it's not totally right either. What can we do to get closer to "totally right"? That's the sort of rhetoric I'd prefer to hear.

Re: Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

#102

Post by anu_gupta »

joshuaheard wrote: post #85
Spooky23 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a .gov and have had exposure to this issue directly in a few different contexts. The advocates for full disclosure imo are biting their nose to spite their face. Normal people running everything from little leagues to major corporations use email for strategy development, information delivery, deliberative functions and other normal business processes. Known figures in government cannot do that, because the…

That's a good argument for changing the law. However, it is not a defense against Clinton breaking the current law. The President and other executive branch members can claim executive privilege which is the actual legal defense you describe. Clinton did not claim executive privilege. She set up a secret email account in order to avoid disclosure laws. This criminal and corrupt action should disqualify her for presid…

Let me guess, you're a Republican / Libertarian.

Re: Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

#103

Post by _delirium »

pertinhower wrote: post #65

This is an unusually political post to have risen so high on Hacker News. Is that because of the significance of email to the story? The use of email in this case is not very technically interesting. Or is there some other attraction?

It's kind of a well-known phenomenon that if you give it any opening, sites will fill up with American-presidential-race news for about 1 out of every 4 years, regardless of the nominal subject of the site. Seems to have expanded to 1.5 now? Requires active efforts from the management to keep the flood out, and most sites don't.

Re: Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

#104

Post by Varcht »

navait wrote: post #76

Given the sheer number of officials doing thing this, I can only assume this is done mostly out of ignorance about how email works. If I knew nothing about email, I could see myself assuming IT has a magic way to archive this. Remember when Sarah Palin's account got hacked? She probably never thought about how the security questions could easily be looked up once she was in the public spotlight. Once your email accou…

C'mon, she hired someone to set up a mail server just for this position, she knew what she was doing.

Re: Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

#105

Post by msandford »

fche wrote: post #81
jes wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the proper response to a government that refuses to act in a reasonable manner is non-violent non-participation. I couldn't agree more.

Try "non-participating" by not paying taxes....

It's really too bad that not paying your taxes isn't thought of as a valid way to voice your opposition to what's going on in Washington. I realize why it's that way, but it's a real bummer to me. Not because I'm a greedy bastard who doesn't want to pay a dime, but because elections aren't that great of a feedback mechanism now that career politicians and parties and etc have developed into neigh unstoppable powers that put people into office.

It seemingly has been in the past, but for some reason isn't now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance

Re: Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

#106

Post by sanderjd »

JackFr wrote: post #82
sanderjd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "everything's terrible!" tone of your comment is one of the major problems and main contributors to the partisan divide. It would be harder to get people riled up for their pet party if more people were aware that, hey, things are going pretty well! It would make the things that aren't going as well easier to identify and work on.

Everything is terrible -- in that the two leading parties in the United States are doing a poor job of representing the values of the people. They need to be fundamentally readjusted or be replaced by better alternatives, and that is not accomplished easily. In nerdy terms, if there are N dimensions to public policy and individuals are represented as N dimensional vectors, the ideologies of our current parties do a t…

That perspective is absolutely what I'm arguing against, and I believe it is one of the main contributors to exactly the problem it decries. Convincing people that everything is terrible is the first step to convincing them that it's the other side's fault and you have the solution, which is how we end up with the divisiveness that fails to represent the mostly moderate values of the people.

Re: Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

#107

Post by anon-24681012 »

fche wrote: post #81
jes wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the proper response to a government that refuses to act in a reasonable manner is non-violent non-participation. I couldn't agree more.

Try "non-participating" by not paying taxes....

As an individual, you are correct.

But what do you think would happen if 100,000 people made a public commitment online to report their taxes but not pay them? What about 500K? A million? Remember: using the net, it would be possible not to disclose any of those people until all of them made the commitment.

Would the government throw all of those people out on the street? Put them all in jail?

Because this is where we're headed. I doubt you'll see mass protests about the NSA tracking cell phones, but at some point in the next 50 years the tax burden will become high enough that people will openly revolt. Future generations will protest the idea that the majority of their taxes are going for debt service on money borrowed by people who aren't even still alive. That's a great "taxation without representation" argument.

Non-participation is always a matter of degree. As the government closes its fist, more and more people will slip through, either openly or not.

Re: Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

#109

Post by danielweber »

joshstrange wrote: post #48

From what I understand she is not the first secretary of state to do this (All her predecessors did as well) and the laws that require them to keep emails and/or use provided email were passed AFTER she held the position. I'll agree it's a bad practice but can we fault her for doing that same thing as the people before her when there was no law/rule/regulation to do otherwise?

From the linked article:

> Mrs. Clinton’s aides have said her use of private email was not out of the ordinary, pointing to the fact that former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a personal email account, before the current regulations went into effect. But since 2009, said Laura Diachenko, a National Archives and Records spokeswoman, federal regulations have stated that “agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.”

Given that retention of email was a scandal in 2007 [1], there is no way someone plugged into Washington was unaware of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controve...

Re: Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests

#110

Post by buttcoinslol »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #93
jeremyt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the specific law referenced here is a federal law which only applies to high ranking federal officials (e.g. Cabinet secretaries). It would apply to Clinton, but not to most of the people on your list. "The head of each Federal agency shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the age…

Palin used her yahoo account for state business. She did violate state law. I'm not familiar with the others, but the issue isn't so cut and dry.

I forgot which Cabinet post Palin was appointed to, can you refresh my memory?
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