Hillary Clinton’s Email and the Challenges of Data Storage

Incompetent IT people mean that there are issues. Having computers and email makes it easy to actually keep records. Way easier than paper ones as long as you do backups, have servers in the right areas etc. Now for top level federal government people all emails should go through the system, some can be in folders for personal activities that would be saved but not reviewed without a court order.

The Hillary Clinton email affair raises three questions for me:
1. Why is the communication being preserved limited to emails and paper mail and memoranda rather than all communications? After all, people who wish to hide something have other forms of secure information they can use. It would seem to me that if you wanted to do your job without being monitored you’d simply use voice only. There is no requirement that all conversations be recorded.
2. If it is necessary to record official business of the administrative branch of government why not the legislative and judicial branch. It might be very interesting to know the conversations that go on between congressmen and senators and lobbyist for example? Certainly the conversations between Supreme Court justices will be of interest to historians. These three branches are equal, why not have equal rules.
3. Is the whole affair a result of Richard Nixon’s Watergate escapades?

First, we know there are, without question, backups to all of Hillary's classified emails. The Pentagon and the NSA have them--they're idiots if they don't--but the problem for journalists is how to do FOIA on a secret government database.

Second, and most important, with Holder and the NSC, i.e., Obama, who certainly has his share of skeletons, at her back, dragging her into court just isn't going to happen--even though it is beyond probable that she dealt with classified material on her at-home server. Putting Nixon aside, being above the law is an important perk in Washington for presidents and their cabinet members/staffers.

Third, her press conference was hardly reassuring and seemed almost a self-parody with her not so subtle smirks and eye-rolling and blatant challenge for the government to come and get the server. That is, American citizens are being taken for another Clinton innuendo ride through the half-truth morass that could only come from their Bonnie and Clyde, love-hate relationship with Washington politics.

What is not new, but reinforced with the love&kisses deletions from her personal server--probably hacked by Chinese/Russians--, is that "her" history is more important than "our" history.

But one thing Americans do get is email, especially work vs. personal email. (For many it was a job-ending mistake.) From here, could be wrong, it looks like even the "can't-get-enough-of-her" love-fest crowd is beginning to see the trout in the bottle of milk.

After listening carefully to Clinton's statements, I don't understand exactly what happened to all those emails. Since she is a skilled communicator, and I am a good listener with excellent technical skills, I can only conclude that she doesn't want me to understand; she just wants me to be lulled into acceptance. These are not the droids I'm looking for.

Is she being candid? That depends on what the definition of "is" is, as the Clinton family likes to say.

One of the things that's been overlooked in contretemps over Hillary Clinton's unofficial nongovernmental email account is the understanding that not everything that passes through the hands of a governmental official automatically becomes a public record. In fact, most public records of formal agency actions exclude drafts of materials relating to proposed official action, recommendations or critiques, or other sorts of communications are generally exempt from disclosure, whether under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), or state public records disclosure statutes. As a general rule, there is no legal or regulatory requirement that every scrap of paper or record of communication be retained as an official record of official action. Public agencies frequently designate certain types of materials used in formulating official action as "nonrecord materials" simply because their relevance to an agency's final action may be at best tangential. When agency action is challenged, the public record is invoked to determine whether that action is supported by by reasoned explanation and compliance with applicable law. Officials may disagree over whether a proposed course of action will be prudent or effective, but the evidence of their discussions is relevant to the public record only in so far as they reflect facts and argument bearing on the final action and agency might take, or not, depending upon the circumstances. All else is irrelevant. Email traffic is no different.

While Ms Clinton states lots of emails were deleted, unless very special techniques were used, the messages will still be on the hard drive, just that the file structure will be gone. Recovering deleted files and messages is a standard forensic law-enforcement process today at local levels, and at national levels recovering data off even carefully erased disk tracks is sometimes possible with scanning technologies. Smashing with a sledge hammer and drilling hols through the platters is one of the better ways to ensure material is unreadable. Then there are the backup tapes and records!

I am sure there are many sincere Republicans who consider issues on their merits. My mom & Dad were such. I was raised Republican.

The Republicans trolls who flame NYT comments are not this kind.

This discussion is ridiculous. Anyone on the outside, including myself, is completely ignorant as to how secure the server was. We have no idea if it was ever compromised. We have no idea how secure it was (although up until recently it still accepted SSL2 connections).

However, can Clinton produce reports that show that:

* the server was regularly scanned for vulnerabilities,
* the server was regularly audited,
* the server was protected against unauthorized access,
* the server was kept up-to-date,
* there was even basic intrusion detection and monitoring being done,
* was it even being backed up?

I doubt it.

Nobody cares about your home server in your closet. Lots of people would be very interested in the Secretary of State's mail server. Would you trust the security of the United States of America to a mail server in someone's house?

The level of naivete shown by IT people commenting on this issue is unbelievable. You can set up a server badly in 10 minutes using a DVD. Securing a server is a continuous process that never ends. That's the difference between professional IT people and amateur commentators.

She was Secretary of State at the time Manning walked out of an army IT office with much, including state dept docs. She knew her email wasn't in federal hands. She knew her email server was in her own house. What was that about except avoiding oversight or avoiding people like Manning (I assume he and Snowden were the tip of the iceberg)? Unfortunately, it avoided the work of leading a fix to the federal system and put her at risk of being easily hacked (as I understand her system was, in 2013). This was NOT the way to go.

I have had my own personal email server in a closet at home since the mid 1990's. Any 14 year can build on today that wants to.

In many ways Mrs. Clinton email was much more secure that anything the government has. Why? Well, first of all someone has to know it is there. If everyone had their own email server and did not use a government, business, or cloud email then the bad guys have a lot more work to do to hack into many many systems. When centralized they have but one target to hack into.

I have a couple of friends who have servers in their homes like I do. Since we use encryption between those machines, our "Papers" are fairly secure. Oh the snoops like the NSA also have to work harder to see our "Papers" because of it.

Centralization means less privacy and less security.

Clay Johnson appears to be giving plausible cover to Hillary Clinton in his March 3rd article about her private email server imbroglio. Going into the details of computer technology as part of a political discussion is like using statistics in a public policy discussion. It usually only obscures what is going on because few of us know how this stuff works. It becomes techno-babble, and only muddles whatever did, or didn't happen, on a political level.

Ms. Clinton has since spoken publicly about this tempest in a teapot, and what she said, in part, was that, in retrospect, it would have been better for her to use separate email systems (so-called 'two phones') for her work emails and her private emails. Yes, I agree. She may have been able to keep them separate using only one phone, but that is more techno-babble.

Could she have been more transparent? Yes. She had her people, and her people only, decide which State Dept.-related emails to send to the Federal government during her employment there after this issue blew up. And, she had her people delete over 30, 000 supposedly private emails at the same time. We will never know what the content of those mostly private emails was, and, for the most part, it's none of our business.

For a lady who has been in the public eye for so long and has aspirations to be President, her judgment re her email strategy was surprisingly poor, but it is not a scandal, nor will voters care 19 months from now.

Let's simply have the NSA provide all those e-mails, we know they intercept and store them.

Really? She didn't even think that she wasn't using the government systems? How absurd!

I think Democrats will lose support from more Independents if Hillary Clinton is their only choice.

Is this article a joke? As an IT guy it is beyond absurb to suggest it is difficult to archive emails.

How would the government preserve text messages? The govt. doesn't routinely provide its employees with cell phones and, hence, has no authority to get anything back from them. In many instances, text is the only method for communication, and these records will not be preserved.

Hillary: "might have been smarter to use a State Dept. e-mail account" Ya think?? Look, it's clear she is not ready for prime time. She has history of basic bonehead decision making. America, ask yourself this question.. Do you want your "Leader of the Free World" calling the shots when she can't even figure out it's not a good idea to co mingle private electronic messages with State Dept. business???

More focus is required on the issue of Security of her server and email contents. Presumably her home-sited email server was not covered by government specifications, protocols, software, firewalls, security updates, backups, supervision, etc. Can you envision the Chinese, Iranians, Russians, North Koreans, terrorist organizations, etc., hacking into that server, reading its contents, planting a clever worm, whatever? Talk about reckless endangerment of the Nation's security ... No individual has the right, today, to make such unsupervised, un-reviewed decisions as she made, on any kind of official or government business-related traffic. I was a Clinton advocate but this serious lapse of prudence and judgment has destroyed any vestige of such support, now. You cannot trust a person who acts in that manner, in the nation's top office.

Clinton said she printed out the government emails and sent them to state.
Then she said "At the end, I chose not to keep my private personal emails"

Notice she didn't say delete.

Was she saying that after she printed out the government emails and sent them to State that she then deleted all the emails.
Even worse, was this Clintonian Speak to say that she destroyed the hard drive.

She kept talking about fulfilled her responsibility.

HRC initiated the setup of her clintonemail.com domain right before Obama was inaugurated--so she's not as tech-dumb as she might like us to think. This matters because the secretary of State emails with foreign leaders all the time. She's not secretary of Labor or Education.

Reporters need to ask WHY she set up this domain at that time and WHY she did not do that when she was a US senator. Such an obvious question!

She also needs to be asked why she said this week that she'd wanted to avoid using two devices yet in the recent past told one reporter she was in fact using several; "two steps short of a hoarder" was her phrase. Hard to see this as an accidental slip; the "one device"desire was ostensibly her whole reason for not using .gov email.

If you have electronic records, storing them is not an issue.
There is virtually unlimited storage capacity at little cost.
The issue is how to index them for easy retrieval.
Even there, searches can easily be done useing key words.

The issue here is very simple. Was she using her position as Secrtay of State to get donations for her Foundation.
This is the type of information she would want to hide and get rid off.
No mother would delete emails concerning her daughter's wedding.
Anymore, no one permanently deletes their emails except for spam.
Most mail systems allow you to keep your emails indefinitely.
On average one gigabyte will hold 100,000 pages of date.
Most hosting services will charge you an extra $5.00 per year for the extra storage.
Cost is not the problem with storage.

"...required to maintain email in electronic format?"

That is comes from an executive directive speaks volumes about the level of intelligence in some agencies of our government.

In my job, my company doesn't need to ask me for my work email, they have access to them because I work for them, they own those emails. Similarly, the US Government, as Mrs. Clinton's former employer, shouldn't need to ask, beg or cajole her into providing those emails.

Data storage is very complicated & expensive due to regular system & media upgrades & requires skilled technical management. The advantage is the data is easily searchable by the end user & it requires less physical space. Properly stored paper is still the only form that endures. It requires more space & manual searching but will always be readable by human eyes.