I had every intention of fully supporting Hilary prior to the e-mail issue that is still ongoing. This was for a number of reasons, chiefly her experience as Secretary of State (not for what she did at State, see Libya) which would make me think she would run a strong, foreign policy oriented presidency.

That e-mail thing, though. It re-opens all of the questions that people have had about the Clinton's, and had hoped could be left to be buried with the Bill side of that union. Before the usual responses are given about why it isn’t that big of a deal — others have done it, it wasn’t illegal, State had its own e-mails hacked, she didn’t transmit anything that was classified — I have heard them and I understand the issues. I have worked in information security for a branch of the government that is joined at the hip to State. That is to say I do not just understand the issues from a personal, reading on the internet level, but that I understand them on a professional, reading policy and being given training level.

The very first level of the problem is that anything the secretary of state does over e-mail is important. Even if its coordinating flowers for a wedding, or whatever other mundane things were done (and then deleted, because trust us). The Secretary of State is a top three foreign intelligence target, after the President and Vice President. By virtue of her frequent travel, she also had more exposure to foreign intelligence. Why is this important? State has its own security detail; they do bug sweeps and so on. They also do things like setting up secure communications whenever the SOS of is traveling. Top secret encryption, exclusive communication satellites, trained electronic intelligence and counter intelligence professionals — men and women who are at the top of their game when it comes to protecting American officials from foreign intelligence exploitation — all of that can be for naught if she is working off of a compromised private e-mail server. Had she been working off of a .gov server, she would have multiple layers of protection, multiple layers of review, and a means to fix vulnerabilities as they occur.

None of this even touches her motivation. Why was I pissed off when Cheney and Rove had a private e-mail server in the white house installed and then deleted everything when they wanted to? For obvious reasons — they wanted a means to communicate that would not end up at the federal archives. It was, and still remains, an outrageous violation of public confidence, and the democrats dropped the ball by not going after them harder. I hope that if either of them were to resurface in some sort of public role that we’d see a similar effort to what is going on now to go after them.

So why have a private server? All it does it reinforce that the Clinton's are secretive. It gives her no positives whatsoever, and gives her negatives whose density can explode into something that will kill her candidacy if she is indited.

If I, or any of my colleagues, had done what she did? We’d either be looking at fines or jail time (probably both) and would certainly lose our security clearances. As someone who has worked with political appointees, many of which simply do not give a damn about the sorts of procedures that everyone else has to follow, her behavior reminds me of the worst sort of entitlement. Don’t worry, I got the president on my side, so it doesn’t matter what I rules I break.

Go look at a SF-312. She had to have signed one to be granted a security clearance, and it makes clear what responsibilities she has to protect government information.