Clinton's Homebrew E-Mail Server: Risky or Genius?

If you are a government employee, you should not be using any email other than the official .gov email account. This is for lots of important reasons, but is very inconvenient. It is much easier to just forward all your mail to a personal email account and work from that.

Inconvenience of .gov email:

• PKI
• No webmail on non-government run or non-approved machines
• Pesky Public Record

By government rules and laws, Ms. Clinton should probably be carted off to spend some time in the government run Kansas resort.

However, I do run my own email server. And I've read through a few articles about Clinton's setup. The biggest security problem I've read about is the use of self-signed SSL certs for account access. I don't see this as a problem, since presumably Clinton was the only account holder. If so, she only needed to accept the 'dubious' cert once -- and it was probably her self-hired IT guy who pressed the 'yes-accept' button. I did not see anything in the articles related to SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records or configuration. These three are absolutely essential to protect your mail server domain reputation... and it's a bit surprising that the government servers didn't reject her mail to begin with.

With probably tons of illegal stuff to hide.

Government ethics rules are based on the appearance of unethical activity, not just the actuality of a breach of conduct. This means that even if it looks like someone is doing something dubious - ethics charges are possible.

Nothing will happen, we've been living in a Bush Clinton oligarchy for how long? And it's likely to continue. Voting is a joke.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic... To a politician. ;)

> Nothing will happen, we've been living in a Bush Clinton oligarchy for how long?

20 of the past 26 years. :( And yes, I agree that nothing will happen to her.

Ummm, excuse me, but what's wrong with running your own email? Or your own web server. Or your own dns. Or your own voip node.

I think the Internet is still free and open...

> ....but what's wrong with running your own email?

Nothing. What's wrong is using it for government business.

Because it's against federal law. I would also say it's been 26 years of 26 years since obama and bush are cousins

> Because it's against federal law.

To be clear, as a U.S. federal employee it's against U.S. federal law to use private email for government business.

It's not against federal law for non-government employees to run their own email (or, for that matter, for government employees to run their own email for non-government purposes.)

@NoDough:

As a prior government employee, it is absolutely against government regulations to conduct official business through a personal email account. And if you are employed by the US government, you are subject to ethics rules. If it can be shown that Ms. Clinton conducted significant government business through her personal email, whether she runs the server or Google does, her conduct would certainly be listed as at least the appearance of unethical behavior and in violation of government regulations in conducting official business... not to mention security violations ranging from the lack of signed and encrypted email between government agents to the possibility of disclosing classified information either directly or through the compounding of large quantities of unclassified information.

In short: If she was a staffer - at the very least, she would immediately lose her clearance, be fired, and escorted off the government installation.

> I would also say it's been 26 years of 26 years since obama and bush are cousins,,,

Well, obviously they're not really related. But philosophically speaking, yes they do have a lot in common.

> If she was a staffer - at the very least, she would immediately lose her clearance, be fired, and escorted off the government installation.

Yep. Now, does anyone want to place any bets that's going to happen?

One law for us another for our "betters" is the new normal.

@NoDough

Somehow, I read your post as "it's *not* against" ... Oops! Please don't parse my strongly worded post as an attack on you... this particular issue makes me particularly angry... and not because of Ms. Clinton, but because of the incompatibilities between X509 s/mime certs and PGP keys for PKI and email signature/encryption. Oh well... I suppose it's best just to send everything in the clear to Google archives to be stored forever.

@jdixon they most certainly are cousins, remember obama is half white, which people commonly forget. http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/obama-and-bush-a...

> ...remember obama is half white...

Oh, I remember. Anything beyond 3rd cousin normally isn't considered related though. If you go back to 8th or 11th cousin, you'll find a whole bunch of people you've never met.

Point I was trying to make is they call them the 'ruling class' for a reason. It's not simply a definition of those who are currently in charge. A 7th grader figured out that 42 of the 43 presidents have been related. All are part of One Bloodline http://www.quora.com/Are-all-the-US-Presidents-related-to-ea... While I understand that if you go back far enough we are all related. It just rubs me the wrong way, then again I'm a goof. :)

Just write in CFWhitman... that's my vote plan... in fact, I'm sure anyone posting here would be a better leader than any of the POTUS-es since the end of WWII. And don't worry if you're not an American, I'm sure you too can vote here just like everyone else.