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by mkobit 3893 days ago
> The hackers described how they were able to access sensitive government documents stored as attachments in Brennan’s personal account because the spy chief had forwarded them from his work email.

How is this acceptable? Shouldn't he be held accountable for this kind of stuff?

6 comments

It's also VERY foolish from a liability standpoint to do this kind of thing, as it gives someone justification to subpoena your personal email.
>How is this acceptable? Shouldn't he be held accountable for this kind of stuff?

You're the new young email admin. You see this in your logs. You tell your boss. Your boss shrugs and says, "He's the director and I don't feel like getting fired."

I don't know why people think government, be it any agency including intelligence, is run any different than any other political or corporate bureaucracy. Humanity has a natural pecking order cooked into it and it reflects in our organizations. One does not just challenge the big dog without consequences. Hell, staff may not be able to even audit him the same way Congress has made itself immune to the NSA wire-tapping programs.

>I don't know why people think government, be it any agency including intelligence, is run any different than any other political or corporate bureaucracy. //

Maybe it's the big "democracy" label that people apply to it.

Maybe it's the concept of "Rule of Law" that underpins Western Democracy.

If it's possible to be fired for simply applying the statutory regulations to a civil servant then any semblance of either democracy or rule of law has clearly been replaced with other structures.

Presumably the CIA would try to kill you to cover this up, because otherwise the sacking of the infringer should be a normal conclusion?

Agreed, that's frankly amazing. How can he even get it through their mail system with an attachment to an unsecure address.
They have separate computers & networks for unclassified vs classified material. You probably couldn't do that on a classified network.
Yeah, that seems to be very foolish.

However, I wonder why the agency simply does not disable forwarding or at least add sure warnings in bright red that doing so violates policy and subject to charges.

Sure, disabling fwd-ing is trivial to defeat but it makes clear fwd-ing is non standard.

None of it was classified.
Doesn't matter-- He's talking about torture and Iranian "realpolitik" on an @AOL email address. In an election cycle. With one headline candidate already getting grilled over improper use of private email.
It was sensitive however. Some contained employee SSNs.
How do you know? Maybe this 'hacker' hasn't released the classified stuff yet.
Accountable for hackers claiming something that's not necessarily true?