clintonemail.com Scheming
Hillary’s private email system is not subject to the FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act).
Emails on that system are secret and, short of a search warrant and the messages still being available, they can remain secret forever.
Hillary can pick and choose which emails to publish and which to keep secret.
It’s up to her.
Obama’s Open Government Directive was issued in December 2009.
"The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration form the cornerstone of an open government."
But apparently Hillary’s private email system whose domain was issued earlier that year (13 January 2009, 2nd line from the end below), because it pre-dated Obama’s directive, was not subject to it.
$ whois clintonemail.com
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
Domain Name: CLINTONEMAIL.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, LLC.
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 2
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: http://networksolutions.com
Name Server: NS15.WORLDNIC.COM
Name Server: NS16.WORLDNIC.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 04-mar-2015
Creation Date: 13-jan-2009
Expiration Date: 13-jan-2017
Hillary also gave her staffers email accounts on that machine. Those messages don’t have to be divulged. Unlike a state.gov email account which is subject to the FOIA, Hillary’s communications are secret unless a search warrant is issued.
Since this “cat” has been out of the bag for some time, the website, clintonemail.com, is pretty well closed to anything from the outside including the following port scan I ran a couple of minutes ago.
$ nmap -A clintonemail.com
Starting Nmap 6.46 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2015-03-04 16:07 MST
Nmap scan report for clintonemail.com (208.91.197.27)
Host is up (0.067s latency).
Not shown: 998 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
53/tcp open domain?
80/tcp open http Apache httpd
|_http-methods: No Allow or Public header in OPTIONS response (status code 200)
| http-robots.txt: 6 disallowed entries
| /fcmedianet.js /__media__/js/templates.js /cmedianet
|_/cmdynet /mediamainlog.php /
|_http-title: clintonemail.com
Warning: OSScan results may be unreliable because we could not find at least 1 open and 1 closed port
OS fingerprint not ideal because: Missing a closed TCP port so results incomplete
No OS matches for host
Network Distance: 13 hops
TRACEROUTE (using port 80/tcp)
HOP RTT ADDRESS
1 6.12 ms 192.168.165.1
2 35.40 ms phnx (my home neighborhood IP address removed)
3 26.14 ms phnx (my home neighborhood IP address removed)
4 ...
5 45.30 ms be3048.ccr23.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.11.185)
6 41.17 ms be2180.ccr21.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.41.57)
7 52.78 ms be2331.ccr22.phx02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.30.194)
8 63.13 ms be2414.ccr21.elp01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.42.106)
9 68.32 ms be2301.ccr21.sat01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.5.173)
10 ...
11 67.68 ms te0-0-2-0.nr11.b006628-1.aus02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.24.30.250)
12 65.82 ms 38.122.254.14
13 63.85 ms 208.91.197.27
OS and Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at http://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 80.23 seconds
Attempts to read a web page (port 80) at clintonemail.com gets an error message – here is the actual HTML that is returned.
<html>
<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />
<meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet" />
</head>
<body>
<div align=center>
<h3>Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your serviceprovider for more details. (6)</h3>
</div>
</body>
It’s interesting that clintonemail.com responds to a web browser. Most system administrators would go to great lengths to make sure such access, even if accessed only in error, would give no response whatsoever. To even respond as clintonemail.com does above is worrisome – have the administrators truly locked things down or have things been moved to obscure ports that would only be discoverable to more determined hackers such as those employed by foreign governments?
There are, of course, more disturbing aspects to all this.
Since state department resources would have been adequate for her email needs – it is sufficient for everyone else, after all – setting up her own email system and adding her staffers to that same system indicates her intention of keeping those communications secret. Not only from foreigners but also from US citizens. (This is the FOIA issue mentioned above.)
Since we don’t know what archival or backup process has been in place, or not, for that system, there’s no way to find out if emails have been deleted and evidence of wrong-doing concealed.
Elsewhere it has been reported that the machine was (is?) running Windows Server 2008 R2. And while I don’t know the details of security provisions on that particular OS, I do know that I trust very little to Windows and, for a machine on the accessible-to-anyone Internet, that certainly would not be an option I would choose. From a reliability viewpoint if nothing else, almost any Linux distribution would be better. And there’s more expertise available in the market for making sure that system is locked down against intruders and stays that way. (Microsoft’s recommendations for virus scanning for this specific OS are available here – the provisions are not trivial.)
Of course, this could all just be naive oversights by the Clintons. It could be there was no plotting, no planning, no scheming.
Lawyers and politicians never do such things, right?
Yeah, right.