MESSAGE
| DATE | 2015-03-09 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] The right to your own private mail and papers
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http://www.nysun.com/editorials/hillary-clintons-cables/89076/
I'm reading this and it is bothering me that the actions of Mrs Clinton,
in even setting up her own mail service and communications network can
even be question. If a messenger goes to here house and knocks on her
door, is this a crime. It is a crime to have any privacy with in your
home, or even work. If something illegal is happening, say a
communication with Putian to overthrow the Ukraine, the mechanism for
investigation is as it has ALWAYS been... get a damn warrant from a
judge and subpoena the papers.
This attack on our rights to our own papers is bullshit
Wonder what is being made of Hillary Clinton’s private email system by
Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. We are not about to suggest that
there is no scandal in the way Mrs. Clinton conducted her official
communications while she was our chief diplomat. It will be
illuminating, though, to see how she justifies setting up in her own
private home the server that handled her wire traffic over the Internet.
In the age of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, is it possible that this
was, whether or not crosswise with the law, a prudent maneuver?
Click Image to Enlarge
/Library of Congress/
CABLE TRAFFIC: What was Hillary Clinton thinking when she set up a
private email server in her home to handle her email traffic while she
was secretary of state? Above, a long-ago lineman from the days before
the Internet.
We are not the first to raise this question. One technology expert, Clay
Johnson, who has worked in politics and for government agencies, was
quoted by the Daily Beast as saying that, while he had no knowledge of
Clinton’s decision-making, “it was possible,” as the Beast paraphrased
him, that “she decided the State Department’s own networks weren’t
secure enough.” Not just from Wikileaks but from foreign governments
hacking our senior-most officials.
Wikileaks was launched in 2007. No doubt many think it is a dandy idea.
The New York Times and the Guardian newspapers became, for a while,
collaborators with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange. Mrs. Clinton, who became
state secretary in 2009, was not among the scheme’s admirers. If a
private system were being set up for the collection and publication of
classified State Department cable traffic, is it possible that a prudent
state secretary might be tempted to go to the edge of the law, or even
over it, to protect her wire traffic?
It strikes us that Republicans might want to think these things through.
Did Mrs. Clinton do the same kind of thing that Wikileaks has been
doing, that is, moving government messages onto its own servers? Or was
she doing the opposite, putting government message out of reach of those
who mean her — and our country — harm? If it was the latter, how
successful was this effort? This might require the government seizing
and examining her servers.
Where is the line to be drawn in respect of the ownership of cable
traffic of our political appointees? We understand there are laws on
this head; they suggest that most of the mail is America’s property. The
New York Times last week quoted an expert lawyer, Jason Baron, as saying
that it would be “difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear
winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its
cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications
channel for the conduct of government business.”
Only time, though, will tell what is in Mrs. Clinton’s cables. Maybe
there is a lot of damaging information. But when Governor Palin of
Alaska was eventually forced to disgorge vast troves of her email,
reporters looking for salacious or scandalous messages came up with
zilch. Either Mrs. Palin wasn’t doing anything wrong. Or she kept it off
the wires. For our part, we’re less concerned about Mrs. Clinton’s modus
operandi — whose server she was using and whether it was a private email
— than the substance of the Clinton doctrine.
/That/ strikes us as unacceptably vague, even vapid, after all these
years. Her support of Israel is not unalloyed (her husband sent a raft
of operatives to the Jewish State to try to defeat the Likud in the 1999
election). She is no better than anyone else on Jerusalem. She’s hinted
at a hard line on Iran but backed President Obama’s appeasement. Her
re-set with Russia is a joke. She made erroneous statements in respect
of the riots in Egypt and Libya, laying the blame a film protesting
mistreatment of Coptic Christians.
There are, in short, no achievements. That is a bigger scandal than the
question of through what servers she ran her email in the age of hackers
and Internet spies. It could be a case of the scandal being not in
what’s illegal but in what’s legal. Wouldn’t it be something if the
woman who wants to be our next president went to all this trouble to set
up a private email system, safe from prying eyes of her rivals in
government, only for it to be discovered that she did nothing of
substance worth protecting?
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