Ex-Chief Information-Disclosure Guru on Hillary’s Email Defense and the Folks Asleep at the Switch

March 19, 2015 By in Controversies, Hillary Clinton, Huh? News, Political Appointees, Politics, Regulations, Secretary of State, State Department, Technology and Work Tags: , , , , , , ,

Posted: 12:40  am EDT
[twitter-follow screen_name=’Diplopundit’ ]

 

.

Dan Metcalfe spent more than thirty years working at the U.S. Department of Justice where he served from 1981 to 2007 as director of the Office of Information and Privacy. He was responsible for overseeing the implementation of the FOIA throughout the entire executive branch. He now teaches secrecy law at American University’s Washington College of Law. His deconstruction of the former secretary of state’s explanation on her exclusive use of private email is probably the best one we’ve seen so far. There is also an analysis here from the National Security Archive.

Below is an excerpt from the op-ed piece Mr. Metcalfe wrote for Politico:

[T]here is the compounding fact that Secretary Clinton did not merely use a personal email account; she used one that atypically operated solely through her own personal email server, which she evidently had installed in her home. This meant that, unlike the multitudes who use a Gmail account, for instance, she was able to keep her communications entirely “in house,” even more deeply within her personal control. No “cloud” for posterity, or chance of Google receiving a congressional subpoena—not for her. No potentially pesky “metadata” surrounding her communications or detailed server logs to complicate things. And absolutely no practical constraint on her ability to dispose of any official email of “hers,” for any reason, at any time, entirely on her own. Bluntly put, when this unique records regime was established, somebody was asleep at the switch, at either the State Department or the National Archives and Records Administration (which oversees compliance with the Federal Records Act)—or both.

[…] as Secretary Clinton might like to claim personal “credit” for this successful scheme when talking with her friends about it within the privacy of her own home—perhaps while leaning against her private Internet server in her basement—the fact is that she didn’t invent this form of law circumvention; she just uniquely refined it. Yes, it was the Bush administration—specifically, the White House Office of Administration in concert with Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and the Republican National Committee—that likewise succeeded with wholesale email diversion back in the pre-smartphone days of freewheeling Blackberry usage.

Unfortunately for all of us, the competition for perverse “honors” in the world of circumventing both the letter and the spirit of federal records laws is indeed quite stiff.

Read more here in Politico Magazine.

An internet security expert tells Quartz  that a home server is “kind of like putting your money in your mattress.”

.

.

It did, did’t it? Lockbox.

Then there’s this guy who in 1994 was a 22 year old who worked as a computer programmer for a company called Information Management Consultants tasked with sorting through presidential docs in 1993.  He wondered if the Clinton team included technical wizards who designed a flawless keyword search when combing through her emails:

If so, she should release technical documentation of the search algorithm, the test procedure, and the test results — assuming they tested it. Without that information, we have no basis for sharing Hillary Clinton’s “absolute confidence” that the State Department has received all her work-related email communication.

Hey, wouldn’t it be nice to know who should get a large medal for being asleep at the switch at the State Department on this? Asleep at the switch doesn’t sound very good but perhaps it is a kinder version for whatever it was that happened at HST.

#