While not illegal at the time she was in office. Sec. of State Clinton used private email accounts instead of the official Dept of State system. As Dept of State’s system was hacked, then some mail released by Wikileaks, such a move may have been smart. Also, she had greater control as to what could be subpoenaed. Later laws require use of official Email and former Secretaries of State (including Clinton) have supplied copies to the department.
One of the private accounts was a personal email server running from her home in NY state.
“The Clinton’s home email system was registered to an Eric Hoteham, a name who doesn’t show up in public records database searches, adding further mystery to Clinton’s decision to avoid using official email.”
So who is Eric? The neighbor’s son who is a “whizz” with computers? A former NSA spook?
While everyone in the Clinton camp claims “nothing sensitive” was discussed on that server….that begs belief.
Unless there is a full time Administrator daily updating patches, AV and watching logs (Secret Service would provide physical security) such a system would be a gold mine to intelligence services. This would reveal the thinking of the Sec with close, trusted personal advisers.
I have to say that for people so “savvy” in politics, this may be the dumbest Official thing I have ever heard.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/03/how-safe-were-hillary-clinton-s-secrets.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clintons-email-server-traced-to-home-based-service-ap/
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Molly wasn’t alone on that in those years. Afterwards, I vowed never again to rationalize, parse, dismiss, or discount unacceptable behaviors by a Democratic politician. All that noise did was mask the horrible, GOP/neoliberal economic legislation that enacted during those years.
Hiding Bill/Hill activities from public exposure or scrutiny is second nature to him/her because they’ve been doing it for decades. Mostly just scuzzy or not socially acceptable stuff for the general public or their Democratic political base.
Others have pointed out that the email server (I assume the domain name) is registered to the address. The physical or virtual server could be anyplace on the globe. News accounts are unclear.
But I, like you, can easily believe that legal (or self) council may have advised Hillary and Bill that a private email server would make it harder for their enemies to get their hands on them. However; unless they have physical possession of the hard drives, then any hosting service would have to turn them over with just a subpoena…like from a Congressional Committee.
“After 180 days in the U.S., email messages stored on a server lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and become just another database record.[1][2] After this time has passed, a government agency needs only a subpoena–instead of a warrant–in order to access email from a provider.[1] Other countries may even lack this basic protection, and email storage databases are distributed all over the world.[3]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_privacy
So maybe they did it out of convenience, attaching to Clinton Foundation. Maybe they did it to spite their official enemies. If so, unless it is a box in the basement, then the effort was in vain.
No one gives a damn if she used that server to talk to Chelsea about her latest squeeze or her grades….
But if she used to talk to Bill about Obama Libyan position, or other advisers about North Korean talks, Iranian nuclear intelligence, etc…. and if extra efforts were not made to secure those communications; then it may have been a big, gaping hole open to foreign interested parties. Examination of the logs and database may be able to tell if its been compromised.
Or maybe the whole thing is an elaborate honeytrap, feeding false intell. So she is a spymaster or horribly naive and trusting.
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The thing is with “Bubba” out there collecting big bucks from all sorts of “sovereign wealth funds,” it was imperative that the SOS not leave even a hint of a possibility that access to her was related to donations to the Clinton fund. The best way to do that was to use nothing but government communication systems for everything except purely personal and non-business related communications. A problem for the Clintons is that they have a wide and fuzzy demarcation line between the personal and business. Not a problem for private citizens as both the Clintons are now. Not acceptable for any elected or appointed official while in office.
Eric Hoteham, name slightly mis-spelled, (purposely?) is a Clinton Family retainer IT guy working at various posistions since 1997.
“Clinton’s private e-mail — hdr22@clintonemail.com — was on a domain set up Jan. 13, 2009, the same day a Senate committee held her confirmation hearing. She was confirmed and sworn in on Jan. 21 as President Barack Obama’s first Secretary of State. ”
So it wasn’t in place previously, nor was it done on a whim. Its apperance seems directly tied to her rising to the office of Sec of State.
The IP address of emails sent from that server was tied to the domain registration listing her residence as its physical address. The location of the server is unknown. The network which the mail server was based was behind a Fortinet Firewall/VPN appliance. The VPN would be SSL based as to work with web browser access. (http://www.fortinet.com/solutions/vpn.html).
The mail server was a Microsoft Exchange server with web access enabled; providing a web interface for email databases and accessable from web browsers on PCs and smart devices.
(https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2897680)
OK, so far. Adequate for a small business.
But security experts looking at this see some flaws.
“Using those addresses, McGeorge discovered that the certificate appearing on the site Tuesday appeared to be the factory default for the security appliance, made by Fortinet Inc., running the service.
Those defaults would normally be replaced by a unique certificate purchased for a few hundred dollars. By not taking that step, the system was vulnerable to hacking. “
What they are saying is that, the digital certificate offered by the Fortinet edge gateway was the one shipped from the factory (for testing and set up purposes); not one bought or self generated specifically for Clinton’s operation. If that is so, then anyone buying another Fortinet device could have set up on the path to her network and used that certificate to decrypt the vpn to her email server (called a “man in the middle attack”)-seeing traffic to and from the server with none the wiser.
Is that hard to do? That one example, yes…but we are talking Nation State adversaries. How much money would it take to pay a late night ISP worker to mirror a port on a switch which would copy all traffic to that specific Clinton IP# to another destination as well? A couple of car payments? And that scenerio is just off the top of my head, who knows what type of mischief is available to hard core hackers with the certificate to a VPN, accessing MS Exhange server?
The heat is now on to release all the emails on that server. If there is anything hinting of National Security, deep crap indeed.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-04/clinton-s-e-mail-system-built-for-privacy-though-n
ot-security
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