The FBI’s decision has come down: there was no “intentional misconduct” in Hillary Clinton’s email. Can we all just put this aside now? There’s a giant shrieking Cheeto on fire over in the Republican camp, and every racist in the country is plotting to use it to start an even bigger fire. Why are we focusing once again on a ‘controversy’ ginned up by right-wing liars?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Well, I think the repubs are going to launch another investigation into the investigation. To be sure.
Of course, the thing they want to be sure about is that their constituents have this ‘criminal’ activit fresh in their teeny little minds come election day.
I’m sure Jake and the Vicar will come by to explain how this makes Hillary just like Hitler…again. Any minute now…
Right now we have to vote for the lesser evil, but I do have misgivings about a POTUS whose staff apparently told her why she couldn’t do what she wanted to do and who bullied them into doing it anyway. Bosses who think security rules don’t apply to them are the bane of computer security.
Because Hillary is eeeeviiiil!
Sigh.
I’m sure the conservatives will get over it, somewhere between their 20th pointless Benghazi hearing and the 21st.
Never mind her predecessors did the same thing.
Simply because only communicating over classified secure systems is cumbersome, and makes it hard to keep up with what is happening in the world, or to communicate with aides/consultants from all over the world on a timely basis.
The government computer systems are in dire need of upgrades.
As usual, the republicans are making a benghazi out of a bump in the road. What they’re complaining about is bullshit: the kind of secrets the state department swaps in email is nothing much. Which, by the way, is why Chelsea Manning doesn’t belong in prison.
The issue surrounding presidential records and private email servers, though – that’s also bullshit. Hillary would know that having a private email server was a no-no because Bill had the same problem and the presidential records requirements were put in place after the Reagan administration tried to conveniently “lose” emails relating to iran-contra.
What Hillary should have said is, “I didn’t work so hard to become who I am, in order to follow the rules that apply to ordinary people!” Seriously – it probably never occurred to her that she couldn’t just do exactly whatever she wanted – she’s an oligarch damn it and oligarchs gotta oligarch. Get out of her way, all those records-keeping things are for the little people. Now she had to throw a perfectly good minon under the bus to lubricate its wheels.
If she had said what I suggest the republicans wouldn’t have come after her because, well, fuck they all do the same thing. They’re all oligarchs. Shh, invoke the secret code of oligarch omerta.
Comey said that there was evidence showing that criminal statutes were potentially violated, but that those violations did not warrant prosecution. That’s not quite the same thing as “sloppy, not criminal.” Both the FBI press conference and the OIG report make clear that Clinton screwed up badly (although almost certainly in pursuit of efficiency over security, as Nerd says). She also made several statements in her defense that turned out to be false (i.e. that it was allowed, that she fully complied with every rule and that she never sent material that was classified at the time she sent it). Not disqualifying by any means, but worth criticizing.
Source
The government computer systems are in dire need of upgrades.
They’ve had the money – many times – and have consistently blown it on the wrong stuff, or allowed it to get sucked up by beltway bandits. Building a secure communications infrastructure for basic messaging is not hard — many companies do stuff that’s close enough for government work. What you’re seeing is decades of institutional cluelessness coupled with visionary mismanagement. The government has completely un-learned how to do IT, if it ever knew in the first place. You could give them a really great convenient overall security system and they’d probably trade it for the first shiny thing Lockeed Martin or General Dynamics told them was “coming soon” at 10x the price.
Fixed link – https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-director-james-b.-comey-on-the-investigation-of-secretary-hillary-clintons-use-of-a-personal-e-mail-system.
Perhaps the Dems should add to their platform that a goal will be to put in place a robust, safe and efficient cybersecurity system across all government departments. I would vote for that, but somehow I don’t think that the other party would be very quick to add this to their platform.
almost certainly in pursuit of efficiency over security
Nah, it was almost certainly in pursuit of efficiency and a desire to bypass record-keeping requirements. You can tell that Hillary didn’t particularly like record-keeping requirements by the way that some of her emails selectively disappeared. If she’d had them on a state department server, that wouldn’t be possible. Being able to hide their activities from oversight is something every politician wants for themself, but not for their peers.
Again, the 1st Clinton administration had to deal with this (I was actually creating presidential records at that time) and got a lot of lectures about how to properly handle data – followed by injunctions that “if you ever have something sensitive to say, make sure you just grab someone in the hallway and tell them when it’s not part of a meeting where the minutes and attendees are recorded.” If you work with lawyers nowadays, you’ll get the same thing: don’t communicate anything by email because that’s all subject to discovery.
The elephant in the room is that records-keeping requirements are in place because politicians try to do sneaky stuff and we want to be able to keep track of their sneaking about. Of course the very first bit of sneaking about that they do is figure out a way to sneak about so their sneaking can’t be detected. It’s a game the dems and the republicans are really good at. And so is Trump, FWIW – he seems to have remarkable security around his tax filings.*
(* Although I have a running bet that if he gets the nom, those are going to get hacked out of someplace and doxxed to journalists at the most damaging possible time)
fmitchell:
This is true, and, in my experience, it’s a large majority of bosses.
Cross posted from the Moments of Political Madness thread.
As Steve Benen said:
The fact that FBI Director Comey bothered to come out and make a public statement that included characterizing Clinton as “extremely careless” guarantees that Trump supporters have a hook on which to hang their conspiracy hat.
Comey has no proof, none whatsoever, that Clinton’s private email server was hacked, and yet he made to sure to make a public state intimating that it may have been hacked:
WTF is that? It comes across as unprofessional and as a sneaky way to condemn someone even when you don’t have enough proof to prosecute. Comey also said:
Umm, dude, why are you saying that? What is your motive?
He was saying that, and other stuff, just so Republicans could say this:
What I’ve noticed over the years, is that as my company tried to ramp its cybersecurity with strong passwords, people had to write down the passwords and keep them handy, either on a zip drive, phone, pad/tablet, or a piece of paper in a desk drawer, especially when one had to have 6 secure passwords changed every 2 months during a calendar year, just to log onto their computer. Then there is the e-mail account with its password requirements.
Us old fogies need a little black book to keep tract of all the new-fangled security features out there these days. Which also seem to change at whim and without announcement.
From Nerd in comment 6:
From Think Progress on the same subject:
Ran into a case recently where I was unable to download e-mail from an old, but continuing, e-mail account. Took a little probing to figure out my old password was not long enough for their new software. Changed it, and all is well, but it is documented in my little black book. Good thing I’m retired and can spend some time on the problem.
Isn’t this the point where a Congressional committee is required to drag this out until at least November?
Nerd of Redhead@#15:
Us old fogies need a little black book to keep tract of all the new-fangled security features out there these days.
You should look at a password vault like lastpass. It keeps all your passwords encrypted in the cloud, so your stack of post-its becomes a problem of cut&paste.
Lastpass has had its share of problems but it’s still a huge win over the old “pick a hard password” days. Especially since it’s no harder to cut&paste different passwords for different sites. Generate 18-char random passwords and tell the site “remember me” and you only have to do the cut&paste monthly.
I am going to (eventually) be doing a series of practical computer security posts over at stderr..
“Why are we focusing once again on a ‘controversy’ ginned up by right-wing liars?”
Because the Berniebruhs get erections at the thought of a Hillary indictment.
@#2, CaitieCat, Harridan of Social Justice
Hey, thanks, I sometimes wonder if maybe I should vote Democratic instead of Green this election, just in case. I need a reminder now and then that Democratic loyalists are incredibly condescending and rude to reassure me that even if my vote causes Trump to win my state, at least I will have the satisfaction of knowing that it made Democrats like you absolutely furious, which would be worth it.
@#11, magistramarla
The Democrats won’t do this under any circumstances, because Hillary Clinton has already come out in favor of requiring all security systems to have backdoors to let the NSA spy more effectively even though she knows it’s a bad choice, and a project to break all encryption.
That’s really why I consider this issue so important: when it comes to the rest of us, Clinton wants us to compromise absolutely everything in order to make things more convenient for spying, but when it’s her? Eh, the hell with security. Laws are made for the peons to follow, not for the Clintons.
(An echo of this attitude is found elsewhere, such as her pressing for war against Libya even though Congress voted not to invade. So we apparently destroyed Libya in a non-war, because only Congress can declare a war. Good to know that that constitutional scholar Obama obeyed the separation of powers so accurately, and that the lawyer Clinton abided by the laws so well. I’m sure that side-stepping the Constitution itself doesn’t suggest that Clinton will constantly be caught up in abuse of power.)
I think the time is not far off when no password will be secure, ever.
Human nature is, of course, “if it’s hard to remember write it down” so of course “secure” passwords are generally stored on paper completely unencrypted.
LastPass is fine and I use it myself. But it’s only as safe as it’s own main password and the same thing applies – it that’s hard to remember it will be written down somewhere or stored in a text document unencrypted. Eventually computers will be able to crack that one and then they will know all your others as well. Single point of failure.
I wonder if these investigations truly cost as much as they are said to. Doesn’t the stated cost include primarily just the usual salaries of all the people working on the investigation. When I worked in a psychiatric hospital the head of psychology said that our recent screening of state police applicants(the psychologists gave each applicant a battery of psychological tests and wrote a report) cost the hospital X number of dollars. It seemed like a lot. I pointed out that none of us was paid extra for the work so the only cost was the paper, ink, and test materials. My boss was silent so I assumed I was right. Is it the same with these expensive investigations?
The Vicar@20:”An echo of this attitude is found elsewhere, such as her pressing for war against Libya even though Congress voted not to invade”
Nope. Congress voted against an authorization to invade, but that is *not* the same thing. Obama had already claimed constitutional authority to do so without the vote and Congress did *not* attempt to stop him. They could have passed a resolution saying he had no such power, or they could have taken him to court, but they did not, and they did not because the Republicans *wanted* the invasion, they just didn’t want to have to take responsibility for it.
Re # 22 according to this page
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qaefh/eli5_why_do_congressional_investigations_cost/
There are extra costs beyond the usual salaries. Only info I could find.
@#23, Ed Seedhouse
They didn’t want to take responsibility for it, so they voted against doing it. It’s amazing, but according to you they actually showed better understanding than Obama of how things work.
If Obama asserted that he could start a war without the approval of Congress, then one of two things is — absolutely must be — true:
1. Obama was deliberately wriggling around, twisting the meanings of words to avoid obeying the obvious stated text of the Constitution, which does not give the President the right to do what he did. Scalia used to do this, too, and people like you were livid about it. Why does it not make you livid to think Obama might be doing the same thing? Oh, right, tribalism. I forgot.
2. Obama was simply wrong.
Ed Seedhouse@#21:
Passwords have been a failure since the early 80s. The availability of SSL significantly extended their apparent viability but it was mostly an illusion.
The Vicar #25
You really should spend a little time Googling before making such pronouncements. The war in Libya was authorized by the UN Security Council and then funded by the US Congress, as was the Korean War, the Bosnian War, the invasion of Lebanon in 1978, the Persian Gulf War, and others. Obama was following a precedent set by many other presidents, and if the Republicans in Congress truly opposed the invasion they could simply have refused to fund it.
While I don’t want to see the only viable candidate eliminated at this time, the fact is that intent is irrelevant. AIUI, this is strict liability law: compromising national security by mishandling classified material is a crime regardless of your intent.
Not to worry, though: such laws are only enforced on the little people.
“strong” passwords are a misnomer. Don’t pick a password that’s hard to remember, just use a long phrase. “BigFloppyDonkeyDick” is FAR harder to hack than “@#$^&#*$&(“
While it’s certainly possible (maybe even probable) that Comey’s remarks were politically motivated, and intended to damage the Clinton campaign, that doesn’t change the fact that what he said needed to be said.
Clinton choose a private email server in an attempt to dodge presidential record keeping laws. She’s hardly the first person to do it, and certainly not the most corrupt. She may not be corrupt at all, for certain values of corruption (in my view, any hardcore authoritarian is corrupt). That’s irrelevant, because this shit NEEDS TO STOP.
Everyone going on about “this is just to help Trump/the RNC” or “it’s those wicked Berniebros” needs to take a good, long look at what they’re defending: an authoritarian trying to dodge laws designed to check her power. It doesn’t even matter if she never abused it, and frankly it doesn’t matter much if she shared some classified information over it. What matters is that it’s one more example of a politician showing utter contempt for the idea that they should be accountable to the people whose interests they ostensibly represent.
That all politicians commit these types of abuses isn’t a defense, or an excuse. She deserved to get raked over the coals for this. All of them deserve to get raked over the coals for the despicable things they do in order to preserve their power. I know that all of them don’t, and this is a big problem. But the answer isn’t to get angry because they raked your favorite. The answer is to demand that all politicians should face such scrutiny.
And yes, I will be voting for Clinton in November. However, I’m not going to pretend that she’s something that she isn’t.
So why weren’t there investigations when W and his crowd were doing it?
To say that something Clinton did is not legally actionable is not the same as saying it wasn’t a problem, and that it’s perfectly OK for politicians to try to skirt rules about transparency by playing games with their own servers.
And if the neofascist wins the election? Hey, at least you stuck it to those rude “loyalists”!
Lmao at your typical USan assumption that I must also be USan, Vicar. I am not. I vote NDP here in Canada. I just enjoy watching you splutter out your irrational hatred, and am amused by how reliable you and Jake are at rising to the bait Every. single. Time. Thanks for that.
The Vicar calling people “incredibly condescending and rude” is rich.
The Vicar keeps talking about other people in absolutes – “loyalists”, “blindy furious”, and cetera. It’s more like grudging acceptance and mild annoyance, thanks.
I know a person who used to classify documents for a Secretary of State. That one insisted that anything for their eyes had to be classified before they’d read it. So the job involved downloading public material off the internet, printing it, getting a Secret stamp on the paper, and transporting the Secret documents to SecState.
So there’s a chance that the classified documents Clinton was careless with were not important at all. But, then, Clinton was photographed at the Bin Laden takedown meeting with an aerial image of the compound in her hand. The photo had the image blurred out, but when it was posted as a thumbnail, the blurring kinda cancelled out, and it was easy to see it was the compound. (Maybe it was to hide something in the photo, but it was amusing to see.)
Hopefully this isn’t too O/T
sinthetic @ 25
That’s not really true. Any passwords that are made of real words (even with R3pl@c3ment Ch4r3cterZ) are subject to dictionary brute force attacks. A passphrase like you mention is better, but still not all that great. Random secure passwords are insecure because people write them down, which is bad. The best solutions are using randomly generated passwords and a password manager. Also multi-factor authentication. That way you only need to memorize (and you better memorize it) a single strong password. As suggested above, lastpass works well for this, especially if you use something like Google Authenticator, or in my case a physical Yubikey. I create a password “story*” and take the first letter from each word to create a password (with replacement characters). I find that to be a fairly easy way to generate a pseudo-random password that I can easily recall. My ¢2
*My mother was born in the state of Indiana and lived there for twenty eight years = mMwb1TS0!@lTfTeY (the replacements/caps are actually fairly easy to recall from motor-memory after a few times) **
Alverant @31, same reason no one on the Bush administration was tried for war crimes – Obama wanted national reconciliation and thought he could work with Republicans to deal with a massive economic recession. Prosecutions for past misdeeds would have wasted the political capital he needed to pass the stimulus and the ACA.
Speaking of sloppy, it seems that the Ham has finally opened the taxpayer-supported wooden pile of nonsense to the public:
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/update-noah-s-ark-biblical-proportions-ready-open-kentucky-n604381
Thought that might interest you and didn’t see a blog-post on it yet.
Here is a good piece on this topic by Glenn Greenwald, certainly no right winger, who makes the excellent point that the problem is not so much that Clinton was showed mercy by the FBI, but that almost no one else is for similar offenses: ‘The Obama-appointed FBI Director gave a press conference showing that she recklessly handled Top Secret information, engaged in conduct prohibited by law, and lied about it repeatedly to the public. But she won’t be prosecuted or imprisoned for any of that, so Democrats are celebrating. But if there is to be anything positive that can come from this lowly affair, perhaps Democrats might start demanding the same reasonable leniency and prosecutorial restraint for everyone else who isn’t Hillary Clinton.’ https://theintercept.com/2016/07/05/washington-has-been-obsessed-with-punishing-secrecy-violations-until-hillary-clinton/
“Sloppy, not criminal” could be the Clinton family motto, though I suppose Bill went more for sleazy than sloppy. Speaking of Bill, am I the only one who thinks he keeps trying to sabotage Clinton’s candidacy? I had that impression in 2008 and I have it now. He doesn’t want to be demoted to the less historically significant Clinton, though, really, he already has been.
Well, thanks for making your priorities clear, I guess. Sticking it to the Democrats is obviously more important than making sure America doesn’t end up with a fascist as a president.
I just know that Hillary will do everything Trump says he’ll do because Reasons Everybody Sucks Giant Meteorite 2016 Benghazi Emails
jefrir, #42
That’s kinda unfair.
Sticking it to the Democrats isn’t the only reason. It’s also about feeling good about yourself and making a point, because that’s what this election is about. Deciding who will be president starting January of 2017 is just a side effect.
you know who else commonly votes for a candidate out of sheer spite?
republicans.
you shouldn’t be voting green, you should be voting red. you’re just too embarrassed (read: chickenshit) to be seen with that crowd is all.
Greens don’t want ya either, I’m guessing.
“Not criminal” only by assertion and special treatment. Anyone who has worked in a classified environment has seen people lose their security clearance (and then get fired–since they can’t work without a clearance) for offenses so mild by comparison that you’d need a log plot to place it on the same scale as what she did. Offenses involving slight mishandling of documents that never leave a secured facility. Twice I saw people lose their clearance for having a document signed out of a safe, and locking the document in their desk and then locking their office, which is inside the secured facility, to got to the bathroom–because returning a document to the safe and getting it back out is a tedious process. Anyone removing a document–let alone putting it on a private server, would surely be prosecuted.
Another example of how the rich and famous and powerful live by different rules. She didn’t even lose her clearance.
#20, Vicar:
In case you still wondered whether or not the BernieOrBusters were just zombie Naderites. Blegh.
At least you guys have been demoted to irrelevance since President Clinton won the minority vote and you can’t doom the country like back in 2000.
don’t… they’ll take that as a challenge.
The Vicar @ 20:
“Let’s play a game.”
(Hey, he was just trying to teach people lessons, too, right?)
If Westeros was a democracy:
“I think I’ll vote for the Bolton ticket. I mean, sure, they flay people alive, rape women before their husband’s corpses and feed their siblings to their hounds, but get real, Man! Sansa Stark doesn’t write her letters in cipher and Jon Snow hanged a teenager: That should disqualify this family from power, I say!“
*remembers how hard it was for Snow and Sansa to raise troops to take back Winterfell*
uh… other than the paper ballots… it pretty much WAS like that.
Clinton ought to have her clearances revoked for how she knowingly mishandled classified material. She’s been around long enough to know that she made a terrible mistake, which is why her immediate reaction was to lie about it, try to remove evidence, and throw an underling in front of the trolley. People have their clearances revoked for much less. But in this case it shows the oligarchy how qualified Clinton is to be the designated figurehead.
John Deutch, CIA director, had classified material at home in a personal safe (probably more important material than Clinton had, but not being transmitted over public internets to an internet-connected server) Deutsch was lucky Bill Clinton stepped in and dropped a presidential pardon on him. Hillary should be expected to remember that incident as Secretary of State.
Hillary is concerned with keeping her actions secret from taxpayers, not so concerned with keeping the government’s secrets. Granted the government secrets are mostly overclassified records of its own chicanery, but it tells us nothing we don’t already know about what kind of president Hillary will be.
Note to above vucodlak@#30: Clinton is not under presidential record keeping regs. Yet. But she can’t claim not to know about them given that she deliberately acted to get around them.
@20 Vicor: This XKCD is just for you.
https://xkcd.com/774/
sorry….Vicar…stupid typing!
On the subject of passwords and xkcd…
http://xkcd.com/936/
It is so great to realize that everyone is just a partisan hypocrite, we have Hillary “The Liar” Clinton who never met a war she didn’t like or a country she wouldn’t bomb being defended to the death by “die hard liberals” While her husband Rapey McRapeface who is in some kind of competition with Bill Cosby for who can be the biggest creeper being defended by people claim to be feminists. Fucking Hilarious! How many trips did bill take on Jeffrey Epstein’s child rape plane 10? 20?
The best part are the threats “Fall in line or you will get Trump!” and then references to “berniebruhs”…classic.
I have been a lurker on this site for so long, I post once in a while, but I think I am actually finally done.P.Z You seem like you don’t totally like what you see but you also seem willing to let it slide and compromise ideals I never thought you would. Neolibs, fucking fantastic, enjoy em.
Just one thing, I’m not going to Vote for Trump, but if he wins it wont be because of “berniebros” it will be because of piece of garbage neolibs who seem to be acting a lot like the republicans have been acting for years.
Ah, another Clinton hater heard from. Another boring rant. And no viable alternative is demonstrated.
Fee better?
First of all, the FBI’s report didn’t just say that she was sloppy, it said that past statements she had made were blatantly false. Considering the subject matter, that is more than a small problem. Yes, the Republicans have been exploiting this for political fodder since day 1. Yes, she is hardly the first person to do it. But it typifies the “the law applies to everyone but me” mentality in American politics that has resulted in so many of the biggest clusterfucks of the past decade and a half. Anyone who thinks this was a one-off bit of poor judgement and not emblematic of who Hillary is is fooling themselves. If you put this person in charge, watching the news every night will be as if George W was back in office.
And putting Donald Trump, with envy for every dictator, and a proven bigoted bully, will lead to what?
Either show a viable alternative, or admit that there isn’t one.
@56
I’m sure you’ll be missed, whoever you are. There’s the door.
And, in case the Clinton haters have any idea of evidence and what viable means, (cross-posted with Moments of Political Madness). Clinton has a 13 point lead over Donald Trump in a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken this week.
Clinton is well ahead, avoiding a Drumpf dictatorship. Now, show me with links, similar evidence for your preferred candidate to show that they are viable, meaning ahead of Drumpf and Clinton in a three-way race.
#58, treefrogdundee:
We’ve hit peak tone-deafness, it seems. So, the LBGTQ-, minority-sympathetic capable stateswoman is the same as the braindead crusader puppet? That’s Southpark-level false equivalency, hot damn.
Nerdr of Redhead@61,
A further quote from your link:
Presumably these reasons for voting for Clinton are not mutually exclusive, but it’s interesting that keeping Trump out came top.
notsont, #56
Wait, walk us through the reasoning on this one?
Whether you like it or not, this contest is between Hillary and Trump.