Clinton’s ‘Please Hack Me’ Server Lawmakers this week should ask her about the potential damage. By L. Gordon Crovitz
http://www.wsj.com/articles/clintons-please-hack-me-server-1445211001
“I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry, ” President-elect Obama said in early 2009. “They’re trying to pry it out of my hands.” The National Security Agency was so anxious about foreign intelligence agents gaining access to classified information that it assigned dozens of technologists to work for months before the inauguration to modify a BlackBerry Mr. Obama could use. The new president was told his device could safely communicate with fewer than a dozen other people, after their devices were loaded with special encryption.
His secretary of state took a different approach.
Hillary Clinton set up her own private email server. By avoiding use of government servers, she succeeded in keeping emails off-limits to information requests from congressional overseers and journalists—but American counterintelligence agents must now assume that Chinese, Russian and possibly other agents had full access. A Pentagon counterintelligence official told the Daily Beast that if he were in charge of a foreign intelligence agency, “I’d fire my staff if they weren’t getting all this.”
Mr. Obama jumped the gun on the FBI inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified material by saying earlier this month that “this is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.” The New York Times reported that Mr. Obama’s comments “raised the ire of officials who saw an instance of the president trying to influence the outcome of a continuing investigation.”
Meddling with the FBI investigation is only part of the problem. Mrs. Clinton’s conduct in office is forcing U.S. counterintelligence agencies to review her emails to identify what sources and methods of U.S. intelligence they have to assume were burned. From what has been released so far, that includes the name of a CIA source on Libya that Mrs. Clinton divulged in unprotected email to confidant Sidney Blumenthal. Other emails identified as containing classified information include those dealing with discussions of Iran’s nuclear program, spy satellites and drone strikes.
There’s good reason to assume that foreign intelligence agencies were able to read the Clinton emails. Government servers are not hackproof, but they offer basic defenses and alerts. An Associated Press investigation found that the Clinton setup didn’t use a virtual private network, a common corporate safeguard. This meant her email server could be accessed over an open Internet connection.
The AP reported attempted hacks on Mrs. Clinton servers from China and Russia. It identified a hacker using a computer in Serbia who scanned the server in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y., home multiple times in 2012. This was at a time when Homeland Security had issued a general warning against the software Mrs. Clinton was using because even “an attacker with a low skill-level would be able to exploit this vulnerability.” The same year, the State Department banned any remote connections to servers with classified information.
The Espionage Act makes “gross negligence” in handling national-defense information a crime, but whether the Obama Justice Department would accept an FBI recommendation to prosecute the leading Democratic presidential candidate is an open question.
Why would Mrs. Clinton run the risk of her communications being intercepted by foreign surveillance? It’s not just a vast right-wing conspiracy that wonders.
Vice, a left-leaning media outlet targeting millennials, last week ran a Q&A with its investigative journalist Jason Leopold explaining why the emails matter: “The most important aspect of her emails that anyone should be paying attention to is the fact that we don’t have answers as to why she was using a private email account and avoiding the Federal Records Act and why the State Department failed to respond to legitimate requests from journalists under the Freedom of Information Act for her emails years before this scandal was ever revealed.”
Mrs. Clinton testifies this week before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. She has said repeatedly that her home-brew server and private emails were “allowed by the State Department,” of which she was the head. It would be educational to hear her assessment of how much harm would be done if Chinese and Russians were able to gain access to the emails of the country’s top diplomat. Congress should also ask the country’s counterintelligence leaders for their view of the harm.
Cyberwar against the U.S. began before the Obama administration, but it has grown in intensity—including the Chinese hack of the personnel records of more than 20 million federal employees. Mr. Obama’s successor will have to decide how best to defend the country from cyberattacks, surveillance and crimes. It shouldn’t be too much to ask that the next president be someone who appreciates the risks and hasn’t contributed to them.
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