Since news broke of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, Mrs. Clinton and her campaign have sought to downplay the significance of using non-government equipment to conduct electronic correspondence as the nation’s top diplomat. During her first press conference to address the issue in March, Mrs. Clinton said:
So, I think that the — the use of that server, which started with my husband, certainly proved to be effective and secure.
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign website also emphasizes the measures taken to keep her private email server secure:
[R]obust protections were put in place and additional upgrades and techniques employed over time as they became available, including consulting and employing third party experts.
However, in 2010 and 2011 in the wake of the WikiLeaks hack, Mrs. Clinton was less sanguine about the security of personal email accounts. In remarks entitled “Internet Rights and Wrongs: Choices & Challenges in a Networked World” at George Washington University on February 15, 2011, then-Secretary Clinton noted that the very openness of the internet can “enable wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale” and that “[h]ackers break into financial institutions, cell phone networks, and personal email accounts.”
Here are Mrs. Clinton’s remarks in context:
So we need successful strategies for combating these threats and more without constricting the openness that is the internet’s greatest attribute.
Even closer to the disclosure of the WikiLeaks State Department documents, Mrs. Clinton said in November 2010 that she had “directed that specific actions be taken at the State Department, in addition to new security safeguards at the Department of Defense and elsewhere to protect State Department information so that this kind of breach cannot and does not ever happen again.” It is not clear if these “actions” would have included any changes to her private server, which after all was not located “at the State Department,” but in her home in Chappaqua, New York.
Shortly after her speech at George Washington University, as THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported in May, Mrs. Clinton again addressed the issue of her personal email in an interview with Savannah Guthrie of NBC’s Today Show. She acknowledged that there were “a lot of security restraints on what I can and can’t do:”
SECRETARY CLINTON: I do.
QUESTION: Are you good at it?
SECRETARY CLINTON: I’m okay. For someone of my generation, I’m okay. But no, I have a lot of security restraints on what I can and can’t do. But I do try to stay in touch as much as possible, and electronically is by far the easiest way to do that.
QUESTION: Are you a BlackBerry addict?
SECRETARY CLINTON: I’m an aficionado. I’m not sure about the addict part.
Mrs. Clinton did not give any further details on what those “security restraints” were, although presumably they would have included the prohibition on transmitting classified material through an unsecured system. Secretary Clinton did not respond to Guthrie’s question about “how many people have your personal email address” either.
