This Hillary email thing cracks me up.  “When I got to work as Secretary of State…”  Yeah ALLLL those years ago.  It sounds like the dark ages of green screens; it was 2009.  “I opted for convenience…” good thing she took her role so seriously cuz she is what, only 4th in line of constitutional succession, yeah nothing really sensitive or anything like that.  Was her account ihatemonica@gmail.com ?  Come on really?  What pisses me off more is the sheer incompetence of the reporting of this issue.  No one can call a computer geek to help ask some simple questions about the “email system” ?

I work in a financial services company and our security “when I got to work there in 2003” was a hell of a lot tighter than the State Department. Good thing those guys aren’t sending communications about state secrets.  What director of IT lets a lawyer from Arkansas run their own email server for official business?  If she did send ‘internal’ emails from this machine, how did they ensure security?  We run trainings every 5 minutes about security and using personal resources for business. I have to ‘attest’ to policies each year.  You’re telling me that the Secretary unilaterally disavowed this kind of stuff?  Why is this State Department computer geek not on TV with his/her right hand in the air?

And why is it coming to light now? If you get an email from nocigarsforme@clinton.com or whatever she used, would you answer it? And if her extension is @state.gov then a government employee was supporting this machine?  She said it was in their home, guarded by Secret Service.  An Exchange server needs lots of support, who was doing it?  Who was the IT tech?  What is his security clearance?  What was the backup policy? Who did the endless Microsoft patch upgrades?  Was the hardware upgraded?  If so, where is that old machine? What was the disposal policy?  What was the encryption algorithm?

If Bill or Hillary maintained the machine themselves..big props. That requires some technical skill.  But is there really no congressman computer geek anywhere on an oversight committee that will ask these questions?   The Secretary of State communicates with Congress all the time, no one noticed the sent-from address???  She said that all of her official emails printed out to 55,000 pages.  So she printed it.  On paper.  What Democrat is ok with that much paper being wasted and I am sure photocopied?

Let’s do some simple math.  If you are SecState for a few days over 4 years, that is roughly 800 official working days.  I will exclude weekends, but we know she is emailing constantly, because there are a thousand pictures of her staring at the Blackberry.   I will be overly generous and say, half of those are original emails from her at 1 page each, so that is 27,500 emails.  This is way overstated, because the role of Secretary is all about gathering information and processing it before sending communications.  But I digress.  Of the rest, they must be incoming single emails or part of a thread.  Now if you have ever printed an email thread, you know that each time you see the email, it retains the prior string.  My 12 year old daughter knows that.  Also, that means that your inbox was hit multiple times for the same email.  So let’s discount the rest of those emails by a factor of 2.5 average printed pages per email.  That makes another 11,000 emails for 38,500 in total at my very conservative assumptions.  That translates to 48 emails per official work day. Really? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???  The Secretary of State of the most powerful nation in the world only receives 48 emails a day?  I do 50 before 10 am and I only communicate with a few countries.  Imagine having contacts in every single country on the planet, how many emails do you think you would you get?

What moron only has 1 email account?  So Hillary never set up anything on Yahoo or Gmail?  Did she use her Senate created account for the 8 years there?  She said the server was set up for the Clinton Global Initiative.  That started in 2005.  She was Senator from 2001-2009.  If you do personal stuff on your work account, you better know that it will be read. If you do business stuff on your personal account, you better know you are going to get fired.  And if you don’t know that, then you are certainly not in touch with the American people or reality.

I guess what might scare me even more than Hillary’s arrogance is an interview with Lindsay Graham this past weekend on Meet the Press.  A probable presidential candidate actually proudly admitted that he had NEVER sent a single email.  He then snarked that he would gladly turn over all of them. In an age of technology where we need leadership to make sure we maintain a dominant position in tech for the coming decades, do we really want to elect someone who hasn’t done the single most basic facet of internet use possible?  What a joke, I think South Carolina should “Exchange” him.