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Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer?

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer?

#51

This story just keeps getting better. There is either a grand nefarious plot, or worse, horrific incompetence. I just can't find a third possibility.

Somewhere in between, just based on experience from spending 1.5 years to get Rahm's phone records. I've received one week so far and now I'm working on getting as much of a sample of his phone records as possible without them invoking their usual "unduly burdensome" rejection [0]. (Hoping to have something published within the next two months or so. Crazy story.)

The level of misinterpretation of FOIA among FOIA officers, lack of domain knowledge, intentional delays and reject-if-possible mentality makes these things very difficult. Total incompetence.

Though, if you find yourself close to something juicy, you can bet your ass a lawyer will swoop in and find something technically wrong to prevent information from being released. Chicago did that to me eight months in by saying "We don't use VoIP, so your request is void." after the state's attorney general's office told Chicago to give me the info. I'd consider this mildly nefarious.

[0] As far as I'm concerned, "unduly burdensome" is just another way of saying "we're not clever enough to get that information, so you're going to have to come up with a clever way on your own, with 1% of the information we have".

Re: Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer?

#52
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not according to the parent that she couldn't get an email account, but rather that she couldn't get a "secure smartphone"

To extrapolate, the assertion is that she could get the secure .gov email account but it would only have been accessible from secured computers. They wouldn't give her a mobile device to access it, so she improvised.

They wouldn't give her the fancy mobile device that she wanted. They offered alternatives. She just wanted a Blackberry.

Re: Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer?

#53
post #8

This story just keeps getting better. There is either a grand nefarious plot, or worse, horrific incompetence. I just can't find a third possibility.

No nefarious plot. My understanding is that it went roughly like this. Back in 2009 Clinton requested a secure smartphone from the NSA. It's a custom made device (security by obscurity?). Anyway, the president gets one. As the secretary of state she has to travel a lot, and not being able to do email on the road is highly impractical. So she thought she should get one too. The NSA denied her request for a secure smar…

I never really understood why the NSA couldn't have provided her with some sort of handheld digital device that wasn't that Windows CE PDA. I also don't understand why Clinton didn't just opt to use it. Having used the WinCE devices before, they're not all that bad to do email on. They're not good, but how much worse would it have been compared to a BB? I used a UT Starcomm PP6700 (or something like that) and I even kinda liked the keypad.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/this-i...

Re: Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer?

#54

This story just keeps getting better. There is either a grand nefarious plot, or worse, horrific incompetence. I just can't find a third possibility.

It's both. The security aspect is incompetence. The idea of having it external is deliberate to avoid FOIA.

Re: Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer?

#55
post #35
post #13

The emails themselves sent from Clinton's server were unencrypted for several months, so unencrypted printing is just more of the same. There's no reasonable question anymore that laws on handling classified data were broken, the only question is will charges actually be brought?

What laws regarding handling classified information were broken? http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0330-mcmanus-clin...

Here are the two obvious one, and another one that's well. . . more in the vein of the Clinton's being the Clinton's IMHO.

http://www.ijreview.com/2015/03/264655-3-federal-laws-hillar...

- Executive Order 13526 and 18 U.S.C Sec. 793(f) of the federal code make it unlawful to send of store classified information on personal email.

- Section 1236.22 of the 2009 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requirements states 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.”

- MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell believes that the use of a personal emails server appears to be a preemptive move, specifically designed to circumvent FOIA:

Re: Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer?

#56
post #32
post #13

The emails themselves sent from Clinton's server were unencrypted for several months, so unencrypted printing is just more of the same. There's no reasonable question anymore that laws on handling classified data were broken, the only question is will charges actually be brought?

That server was for only unclassified data though. Some stuff was later called "Classified", but many innocuous things are classified.

I was unaware the clintonemail.com email server could differentiate between unclassified and classified content.

Re: Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer?

#57
post #18
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No nefarious plot. My understanding is that it went roughly like this. Back in 2009 Clinton requested a secure smartphone from the NSA. It's a custom made device (security by obscurity?). Anyway, the president gets one. As the secretary of state she has to travel a lot, and not being able to do email on the road is highly impractical. So she thought she should get one too. The NSA denied her request for a secure smar…

Do you have any sources for that? The story I keep hearing is that she had this set up to make FOIA requests more difficult/impossible to fulfil. The really out there stuff is that this was to hide any cash-for-favors exchanges that happened with relation to The Clinton Foundation.

Who is the one telling that story, and what is there evidence that that was the purpose?

Re: Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer?

#58
I really want to like Clinton for running her own server, respecting the decentralized basis of the Internet. Yet her domain name was clintonemail.com? What a pleb! Political corruption and murder is her family business, yet even with those capabilities she can't be bothered to obtain a better online identity? She may as well have been at hotmail or gmail and highlighted in blue!

Re: Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer?

#59
post #8

This story just keeps getting better. There is either a grand nefarious plot, or worse, horrific incompetence. I just can't find a third possibility.

No nefarious plot. My understanding is that it went roughly like this. Back in 2009 Clinton requested a secure smartphone from the NSA. It's a custom made device (security by obscurity?). Anyway, the president gets one. As the secretary of state she has to travel a lot, and not being able to do email on the road is highly impractical. So she thought she should get one too. The NSA denied her request for a secure smar…

This narrative doesn't address the fact that Clinton was actively opposed to FOIA requests and had sought means to keep her public work private as much as possible.

Following common sense here, her decision to ignore State Department regulations (which she lied about) and participate in classified communications (which she also lied about) on a private server immediately after she had made efforts to minimize public access to her communications, leads to the obvious conclusion that she put secrecy above transparency. If her narrative in private testimony matches the public one, then she likely perjured herself as well on the point of whether the State Department authorized the server, since they now say they did not (which again, she lied about).

Re: Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer?

#60
post #35
post #13

The emails themselves sent from Clinton's server were unencrypted for several months, so unencrypted printing is just more of the same. There's no reasonable question anymore that laws on handling classified data were broken, the only question is will charges actually be brought?

What laws regarding handling classified information were broken? http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0330-mcmanus-clin...

It's quite possible the law discussed in that article was broken. The author lists the three cases of relevance: (1) whether Clinton knew she was putting classified information into an unclassified system, (2) did she willfully communicate classified information to anyone not authorized to receive it, and (3) did she remove classified information with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location. None of those are settled yet. The headline that "Hillary Clinton didn't break the law" is an opinion, not settled. The author is only citing what Clinton's aides and one government lawyer have said -- those are far from unbiased or conclusive. And after the state department IG's report from yesterday, it is pretty clear the violation was intentional.
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