Archive: Year: 2015

Shredding Here are the just-published FCC net neutrality rules. Here's my favorite quote from its opening: "Congress could not have imagined when it enacted the [Administrative Procedure Act] almost seventy years ago that the day would come when nearly 4 million Americans would exercise their right to comment on a proposed rulemaking. But that is what has happened in this proceeding and it is a good thing. The Commission has listened and it has learned." Outside of the White House, there is no uniform federal government standard for using official versus personal email, or for what records must be saved, Julie Hirschfeld Davis reports for The New York Times. Patrice McDermott of OpenTheGoverment.org tells her, “It really is chaos across the...

Finessing At a time when government classifies practically everything, The New York Times' Scott Shane talks to secrecy experts who say that it's hard to believe Hillary Clinton's assertion that in her four years as Secretary of State, she "did not email any classified material to anyone." On Vox, Ezra Klein writes that Clinton's avoidance of her official State Department email account shouldn't be seen as unusual in the context of the "transparency theater" that many federal officials conduct (hiding sensitive business from official reporting), but her claim that her email server's security was never breached betrays a dangerous naivete about digital eavesdropping. Press critic Jack Shafer, parses Clinton's reference to her deleting 30,000 personal emails as "not saving" them, and notes that...

Transparency Theater If you want a no-nonsense evaluation of Hillary Clinton's press conference yesterday responding to questions about her reliance on a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State, read Alex Howard's report on techPresident. On both the issues of official record retention and security, her answers--she gave State 30,490 emails she deemed non-private and deleted the rest; and yes, the server was based in her home, set up originally for President Clinton (who doesn't email?!), and guarded by the Secret Service--she left more questions dangling, as he details. That said, the political press is far more interested in the "optics" of the episode, the "how it's playing," than the right or wrong. See for example Glenn Thrush and...

Failures Hillary Clinton is going to hold a press conference in New York sometime in the next few days to address questions about her private email account, Glenn Thrush reports for Politico. (Continuing a trend, Thrush says that the Clinton server was "housed in her suburban New York residence," which despite the New York Times and AP stories he references, remains an unverified assertion, not a fact.) White House press secretary Josh Earnest also acknowledged yesterday that President Obama did "trade emails with his secretary of state" but was not aware how the mail was handled or that she did not have an official account. The State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that "we don't have any reason to believe" that Clinton's...

Long Games The White House and State Department both knew that Hillary Clinton's personal email usage while Secretary of State had become known to House Republicans as early as last August, but as Edward-Isaac Dovere reports for Politico, they deferred to Clinton's staff, which "made the decision to keep quiet" about the issue. Republicans and some Democrats are not happy about the issue, with Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) saying Sunday on Meet the Press that “I think that she needs to step up and come out and state exactly what the situation is. From this point on, the silence is going to hurt her.” BREAKING: Hillary Clinton has changed her Twitter avatar from a photo of her reading her Blackberry to a...

Violations The State Department's review of the 55,000 emails Clinton did turn over to it may reveal if she violated security policies, Carol Leoonig, Rosalind Helderman and Ann Gearan report for the Washington Post. An unnamed Clinton aide told them, "Of the e-mails that were turned over to State…90 percent were correspondence between Clinton and agency employees using their regular government e-mail accounts, which end in state.gov. The remaining 10 percent were communications between Clinton and other government officials, including some at the White House, along with an unknown number of people 'not on a government server,' the aide said." The National Security Archive's Lauren Harper and Nate Jones offer a definitive analysis of the legal obligations Clinton had as Secretary...

Hotmail Security experts are not impressed by the news that Hillary Clinton ran all her emails through a private server while she was Secretary of State, Andy Greenberg reports for Wired. For example, the ACLU's chief technologist Chris Soghoian comments, “Although the American people didn’t know about this, it’s almost certain that foreign intelligence agencies did, just as the NSA knows which Indian and Spanish officials use Gmail and Yahoo accounts.” Greenberg also points out that Network Solutions, Clinton's domain registrar, had hundreds of its domains hacked in 2010. Stanford computer science geek Jonathan Mayer, who is quoted in Greenberg's Wired story, caveats that "us outsiders can't say, with any certainty, whether this server was more or less secure than the State...

Masters of Their Domain(s) Hillary Clinton's private email account traces back to a URL registered to her family home address in Chappaqua, NY, report Jack Gillum and Ted Bridis for the AP. The exact location of the mail server running the account remains unknown, but Gillum and Bridis oddly speculate that the Clintons might have be running their own "homebrew" system from their home: "Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton's home, an email server there would have been well protected from...

Shemails Remember #TextsFromHillary? it looks like Hillary Clinton's tech cool just lost a lot of its shine. The New York Times' Michael Schmidt reports that during her years as Secretary of State, Clinton "exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business," possibly violating federal records laws and also potentially risking the security of her communications. On Vox, Max Fisher reminds us that Clinton's decision not to use a government email account looks even worse as it came in the context of the still ongoing congressional investigation (from 2007-2009) of the Bush administration's firing of US attorneys for political reasons, and its failure to turn over millions of private emails pertaining to that scandal. John Ellis (Jeb) Bush, who is planning...

Outings In Slate, Reihan Salam argues that the "Snowdenites"--a group that he says is made up of disproportionately younger, male libertarian technophiles--now have the "upper hand" in the politics of surveillance. Among the points he makes: the NSA is having a harder time recruiting young techies and big tech companies are pushing back forcefully against their former allies in government. Time will tell if he's right. On Greenpeace's Mobilization Lab, Michael Khoo of Spitfire Strategies, which helped coordinate the net neutrality coalition, offers ten lessons from "the underdogs' victory." The latest cover of Der Spiegel, featuring Apple's Tim Cook, Uber's Travis Kalanick, Google's Sergey Brin (in ominous Google Glasses), Yahoo's Marissa Mayer and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, ticked off CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis,...