Journalistic train wreck
Bad title, but some of us have to work for a living.
The few technical details that are floating around this story and the tinfoilery that's been built on them are more evidence that most people, including journalists and supposed "cybersecurity" experts are clueless when it comes to how the Internet, and e-mail in particular, work. They also seem to have a problem with the concept of "ex post facto" law.
I'm not going to address all of those in this comment, just going to point out that nothing publicly released so far could give a real expert without special access to the backend involved any way to draw the conclusions I've seen flying around this issue.
Yes, it should have been illegal starting a few decades ago for any government official to use their personal e-mail to transact official business. The same is true for landline or moblie communications. But it wasn't. As I understand it the law was unsettled enough up to the time Mrs. Clinton left the State Department that the rules had to be tightened significantly afterward. That's a scandal, an inexcusable breach of the public trust, but not just for the Clintons: it's also a scandal for both parties and especially every bureaucrat who didn't clearly separate their personal from business mail for the last generation. If company boards of directors want to allow such slipshod information management, that's up to them -- and their shareholders.
But government, especially government agencies that handle the kind of classified information whose publication is worth sending young people to jail for the rest of their lives, should be held to a higher standard. I guess what I'm saying is that this is a systemic problem, a problem of principles, not just the misbehavior of a bunch of political appointees.
On the journo side of things, I've really given up any hope that anyone in the press is competent enough to cover technology topics. They all seem to be a bunch of credulous adolescents with a tenuous grasp of what's going on around them. Most people who frequent this site could do a better job reporting on these kinds of topics, with a little editorial assistance to clean up their grammar and punctuation. However that's not going to change because publishers are clueless and only concerned with marketing to the rest of the clueless.
It's akin to how the threat of Nuclear Winter was handled between around 1950 and 1988. Everyone in the field knew the risk, but that information didn't get to the public, first as the result of government secrecy and later due to self-censorship by both the press and the public itself (self-deception didn't start with Fox News viewers, after all, it's a quintessentially American way of dealing with "inconvenient" realities). It took a TV miniseries, "The Day After" to enlighten then President, Ronald Reagan -- even though he was alive when the film version of the prophetic "On the Beach" was released way back in 1959.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
