World is Falling Apart Thread (Locked forever)

[dsheinem]

Willfully transmitting confidential federal data through known insecure infrastructure constitutes gross negligence.

I don't know that you've accurately captured what happened here, though. I don't think there was ever a willful transmission of confidential data through an infrastructure that was known to be insecure.

Per a Washington Post editorial from yesterday that I think is dead on:

Ms. Clinton is hardly blameless. She treated the public’s interest in sound record-keeping cavalierly. A small amount of classified material also moved across her private server. But it was not obviously marked as such, and there is still no evidence that national security was harmed. Ms. Clinton has also admitted that using the personal server was a mistake. The story has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts.

[Exhuminator]

What I said was an answer to this:

"As a thought experiment, I was trying to think of a way someone could violate the Espionage Act through gross - as opposed to ordinary simple - negligence."

I wasn't implying that Mrs. Clinton did or did not do it.

[dsheinem]

What I said was an answer to this:

"As a thought experiment, I was trying to think of a way someone could violate the Espionage Act through gross - as opposed to ordinary simple - negligence."

I wasn't implying that Mrs. Clinton did or did not do it.

ah, gotcha.

[Ack]

Well, CNN has an article up about the number of gaffes in this election:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/09/politics/ ... index.html

Anybody interested in the number discussed for each candidate:

Trump: 4
Clinton: 4
Johnson: 1

While no gaffes are given for Green Party candidate Jill Stein(though the anti-vaccine flap could certainly be considered one), the article does mention that she currently has a warrant out for her arrest.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Willfully transmitting confidential federal data through known insecure infrastructure constitutes gross negligence.

I am not sure that knowing it is insecure is enough. (The situation you described is analogous to leaving confidential documents overnight in an unlocked car.) I think you would have to have some knowledge regarding the probability the data would be compromised to meet the gross negligence standard. (Leaving confidential state department documents in an unlocked room overnight at the Iranian embassy might do the trick. ) Gross negligence is just shy of willfulness (e.g., handing confidential documents to a known enemy agent), and it is a pretty high standard.

[Exhuminator]

So I've got some confidential documents to keep in a car. You give me a car with locking doors and a secure garage to park it in, but rather I choose to leave the car unlocked overnight in a bad neighborhood. I think that's gross negligence.

[Sarge]

I think it would be gross negligence to leave them in a locked car in a bad neighborhood. Bust the windows out, and you've got the goods. There's a reason classified information is supposed to reside on systems that are not connected to the overall Internet at large, because said Internet is the equivalent of a really, really bad neighborhood.

Another issue, and one would assume there has to be some sort of audit trail, is how those SAP emails ended up on that server. It would seem that some employees would have had to cut and paste things from the secure system and move it to an insecure system for that to happen.

[MrPopo]

What happened to having Jefferson run against Adams and McCain run against Obama? Why is it so rare to have legitimate choices? I honestly don't know who I'll vote for. It certainly won't be Trump, and not voting isn't an option to true patriots (inflammatory perhaps, but I adamantly stand by that). I guess I've got two months to choose between the crook and the moron.

Well, the problem is that we give the vote to everyone who can work up the energy to fill out a form but don't have the energy to get informed about the issues.

I certainly can't work up the energy to make a truly informed voting choice, so I do my patriotic duty and don't vote.

I would argue that informing yourself is part of your duty.

If you're going to vote. I prefer to discourage people from voting because I think nation-wide democracy is an incredibly terrible idea.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Again, I am not so sure that either of the situations described above (or even the example I provided in my previous post) amounts to "gross" negligence. (Like many legal concepts, it is incredibly amorphous; so, none of us are strictly right or wrong.) Here is a very old, but entertaining (and public domain!) law review article on the concept and its development:

http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cg ... ntext=mulr

If you are interested in learning about it, you should give it a quick read. (Debating things like this is one of the more fun aspects of studying law.)

[isiolia]

See, this is where I keep getting hung up. What law(s) were broken? The law you cited specifies an "unauthorized location", but if the Secy of State authorizes a location as ok to store things, is that not sufficient authorization? Other than the president, what higher authorization would you need? (I also like how the misogynistic language specifies "his". That alone should get her off the hook! )

And...even if I buy that there was some law broken, why haven't we investigated and/or prosecuted former Secretaries of State for breaking the same law?

It's not enough to make a location "authorized", because there are a number of conditions that have to be met for a location or system to be approved for storage of classified material ( http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corr ... 1_vol3.pdf ). As the FBI statement says, Clinton's private email server did not meet those requirements. Mandating that all email be send there was essentially a standing order to violate that law.

As Secretary of State, sure, she had some authority to classify or declassify things. However, as I understand it, it's not a blanket authority to do so, limited by who originally classified it. Even then, I don't think handwaving it as anything she sent was automatically declassified works.

I couldn't say why previous Secretaries of State haven't gotten in trouble for it. I assume it came to light with Hillary due to her email being subpoenaed, hence the focus on her. Either way, part of having access to that material is supposed to come with responsibility to follow protocol regarding it. Not just deem it too much trouble and not bother.