RUTHFULLY YOURS

The liberal position essentially holds that if General Petraeus had brought home top-secret SAP documents and left them on his dining room table in a neighborhood with a large number of recent robberies and then gone on vacation for a few years, he would have done nothing wrong.

Liberal reasoning also says that if General Petraeus had just removed the classification markings from the data he shared then he would have done no wrong.

Yet it’s hard to imagine anyone in the national security community or the military, or even the FBI or your local police department, thinking that if General Petraeus had done either of those things he’d be legally free and clear.

Essentially Hillary is guilty for two reasons:

1. By not properly marking materials she made it likely that classified data would be spread.
2. By placing classified data on an insecure system she made it likely that classified data would be stolen.

Not properly marking data in an email can easily lead to the following scenario:

a) Hillary forwards an improperly marked email to a subordinate

b) The subordinate assumes the data is unclassified since it is unmarked

c) The subordinate shares the information with the press or with co-workers believing that they, the subordinate, aren’t doing anything wrong

That’s why properly marking material is critical to ensuring that it is not inadvertently disseminated. It’s hard to believe that anyone who has been granted access to classified material would not know that.

Hence it’s likely that Hillary either knowingly disregarded the rules or that she was grossly negligent in understanding what she needed to know in order to be secretary of state given that mishandling classified data could lead to the deaths of Americans or American agents.

Similarly, given the ubiquity of hacking these days, especially by foreign governments, it’s a given that any data on a private computer connected to the internet is likely to be accessible to bad actors such as Pakistani intelligence.

Hence to put classified data on a computer associated with the internet is tantamount to putting it on your Facebook page.

Now some might argue that there are so many Facebook pages, or computers on the internet, that it’s unlikely that foreign actors could stumble on Hillary’s data. But of course the foreign actors were looking for computers related to senior government officials and the emails Hillary sent would give them all the info they needed.

Given one of Hillary’s emails, accessible from the computers of everyone she ever emailed, would make it easy for threats to find Hilary’s server. But even without access to such an email there are ways to find people’s email accounts. Essentially just as it’s easy to find someone on Facebook if you know their name, it would have been easy for any threat actor to find Hillary’s server and then break through its security and access her emails.

For these two reasons, Hillary’s actions are far worse than what General Petraeus did, since the person that Petraeus shared the data with had a security clearance and, as far as we know, the data was not exposed to outside hackers. Further, it’s clear that Hillary’s actions exposed far more classified information than Petraeus’s actions did.

That Hillary seems to be skating on this issue is another indication of the MSM-Washington Elite’s increasingly brazen behavior. The Demican establishment feels powerful enough to publically acknowledge that the new American rulers are above the law.

During WWII, average citizens were told that “Loose Lips Sink Ships” because everyone thought that spies could be listening. In today’s hyperconnected cyber world where Beijing is a few milliseconds away from every bit of data connected to the internet, the saying is even truer.

But Hillary and her supporters don’t seem to care about the American lives that may have been lost due to Hillary’s lawbreaking or negligence. Perhaps because the people who are likely to die were members of the military who don’t tend to vote Democrat.