John Schindler deconstructs the Gray Lady’s attempt to whitewash:
At the National Security Agency—where I used to work as a senior intelligence analyst, including as the technical director of NSA’s largest operational division—what outsiders call hacking is handled by a shadowy group called Tailored Access Operations that gets at the hard targets requiring actual cyber-break-ins. TAO are probably the best hackers on earth, but Russia and China are no slouches either, as demonstrated by their repeated infiltrations into protected U.S. Government computer networks in recent years.
However, unencrypted IT systems don’t need “hacking”—normal SIGINT interception will suffice. Ms. Clinton’s “private” email, which was wholly unencrypted for a time, was incredibly vulnerable to interception, since it was travelling unprotected on normal commercial networks, which is where SIGINT operators lurk, searching for nuggets of gold.
They hunt for data with search terms called “selectors”—a specific phone number, a chatroom handle, an email address: here Ms. Clinton’s use of the “clintonmail.com” server was the SIGINT equivalent of waving a huge “I’m right here” flag at hostile intelligence services. Since the number of spy agencies worldwide capable of advanced SIGINT operations numbers in the many dozens, with Russia and China in the top five, that Ms. Clinton’s emails wound up in the wrong hands is a very safe bet, as any experienced spy will attest.
The amount of ignorance on this issue spouted by her defenders is both staggering and terrifying.
The latter is a great idea, but it’s going to be really hard to come up with a way to enforce single-issue that the porkers and get-along-to-go-alongers won’t find a way to circumvent.
In the view of Texas and others, Obama admitted both that he had no power under the law and that he thus, in his words, “changed the law” while pretending that he wasn’t. Bad faith.
“There generally wouldn’t be any evidence of bad faith,” Georgetown University Law Professor Randy Barnett, who formulated the winning Commerce Clause argument in the Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act, said in an interview. “But here we have public declarations [from Obama] that ‘I don’t have the authority, I don’t have the authority, I don’t have the authority’ and that ‘Congress won’t act, Congress won’t act, Congress won’t act’ and then you also have the enactment of what looks like legal rules, not just discretion, but whole classes of people who are exempt from the law, the very same law the president was urging Congress to pass….it suggests that he’s not acting in good faith.”
Someone will be or is being threatened by the FBI with a long vacation in Club Fed over this. I suspect that someone isn’t going to be willing to take the fall for Her Highness.
I haven’t read the whole symposium yet, but I agree with the Beck And Boaz. I understand, and even share the rage that fuels his campaign. I don’t understand the notion that someone as completely lacking in principles as him is the solution.