I held a clearance for 20 years, during which time I was in-briefed multiple times, received annual security refresher training, and de-briefed when I no longer required access to particular material. The regulations regarding the handling, processing, classification and storage of such material was made crystal clear on every occasion.
I have no doubt that had I done the same as Hillary Clinton, a "reasonable prosecutor" (to use the FBI's theoretical situation) would be easily found to go after me.
I am personally pro-Hillary, and she may be basically an honest person trying to do her job, but even I can see clearly that what she did was wrong. It was serious and shouldn't be hand-waved like it wasn't a big deal, even by supporters of her. Listing all these violations was essentially proof that she did something wrong.
I'm with you on this. It shouldn't be hand-waved away. It's serious. I just wish we could find some appropriate action between hand-waving and federal indictment...
If you believe that previous people in the same position also had private servers and received classified information on them, why do you hold it against her?
I said "what she did was wrong," which is was. I made no claims beyond that. I'm not sure where you're getting anything about my feelings regarding previous people who may have done it. And my feelings on whether things are "overly" classified are irrelevant here. If something is marked classified, there are legal restrictions on its release.
I didn't assume anything about your "feelings regarding previous people who may have done".
And your feelings regarding over-classification is not irrelevant to whether something is "wrong". Wrong is not the same as legal, which is why there is discretion.
"If you believe that previous people in the same position also had private servers and received classified information on them, why do you hold it against her?"
Two wrongs don't make a right. Should failure to prosecute prior crimes mean that charges for the same crimes in the future be dropped?
"Do you not believe that things are "overly" classified, and are liberally and retroactively labelled as such?"
The regulations for declassification of classified material are quite clear about who is authorized to do it and when. Whether material is overclassified or not is as irrelevant as arguing that the quality of the diamond in a stolen ring should determine whether or not theft charges are filed against a suspect.
Edit: I cannot reply to @projectramo in the thread, who asked "Well, you can still go back and prosecute them now. Is that what you propose? That we also prosecute Rice and Powell?" My answer: yes, if the statute of limitations (if one exists in such a case) has not expired.
The law MUST be applied equally for all, or it is tyranny.
It seems it would be just as tyrannical to apply the law as it is written and not as it is intended.
Here is a law intended to keep vital secrets out of the hands of enemies who might do harm to the national interest. And you want to apply it, broadly, to government officials who are trying to do their job.
I don't think Rice or Powell intended to do any harm, or wanted to give any secrets out to any enemy. I also think the likelihood that their use of non-government servers on a tiny number of emails really caused such an issue.
Yet you are advocating to end their careers, put them behind bars, subject them to years of trouble.
Doesn't something seem off here?
(I am putting aside Hillary for now because she is just such an emotionally supercharged example at the moment that it is hard to talk about her and just discuss the facts, so I am using the other two as examples).
If a cop pulls you over for speeding, do you say, "How come you didn't go after that guy in front of me doing 100?!" Just because other people did it doesn't make it right.
No, I would not. But a bunch of people discussing it on Hacker News should definitely say to each other "How come the cop didn't pull over that other guy?"
I hate this argument because Colin's actions were so overt that extra regulations were passed after he left to flat out make what he and and others did against standard operating procedure. Stop using this as your argument.
>If you believe that previous people in the same position also had private servers and received classified information on them, why do you hold it against her?
The law is the law. It should be held against all of them. This is akin to saying, 'well that robber got away with it in the past, why do you hold it against this gentlemen for stealing?'
>Do you not believe that things are "overly" classified, and are liberally and retroactively labelled as such?
What do this have to do with the mishandling of classified info? If it's classified, it's classified; that it might have been classified erroneously or too liberally has nothing to do with the fact that it is currently classified and should be treated as such.
Yet, immediately after she realized she was being investigated, she immediately deleted relevant data in a way that made it impossible to recover--or words to that effect.
What's more, the FBI director said that any reasonable person should have realized the sensitivity of information they were transmitting regardless of its markings.
I find it really bizarre how people go out of their way to tune out any information that paints Clinton/Trump/Sanders in a bad light (depending on your temperament).
I'm not saying Clinton should be tarred and feathered (or even sent to jail), but she has hardly been exonerated of any wrongdoing. Why do people find that so difficult to admit?
What the FBI said was that her lawyers filtered out the relevant emails with algorithms based on headers rather than contents, gave those to the investigators, and non-recoverably deleted the irrelevant remainder. The FBI looked at the search filters and didn't find any evidence of attempted concealment in them.
An honest person trying to do her job wouldn't set up a private email sever to get the ability to delete incriminating evidence in the event of a subpoena.
her husband sold us to the banks when he was president.
they have made hundreds of millions off those banks in intervening years.
That Should be enough, has everyone forgotten 2008 already? it appears so.
millions of people lost money and jobs because of the 2008 financial crisis, and deregulation of the things that lead to the crisis falls squarely in their laps.
they don't even pretend to be against the banks, even though just about everyone in America feels like those banks not only stole from them, but got away Scott free, and they got giant bonuses for doing so.
somehow that's not enough, and lucky us, they're so misguided and fraught with iniquitous thoughts, they keep getting caught out on things, and it not only has no influence on her candidacy but people seem to rally to her to protect her from her own truths.
we seem to have easily forgotten (thanks to trump) that there is little to no difference between the parties (only a topic that comes up after someone is elected and they turn out to be just like the previous one), they are wholly owned subsidiaries of the United corporations of America.
nobody wants to hear this, and it's bound to knock me below 50 karma again, but how is it that, I hear this again and again after someone is elected but then election time comes around and it's back to a clean slate and let's just keep this moving forward.
it's like they started the election news cycle even earlier to keep us enthralled and remove our ability to think rationally by bombarding us with irrelevant crap, when we know the real issues, we talk about them for years.
As soon as Loretta Lynch announced that she would follow the recommendations of the FBI, I had a very strong feeling that there would be no charges filed.
That thread has been flagged, despite being clearly a reputable source and in scope for 'hacker news'.
There seems to be a cabal of down-voters to take politically undesirable stories off the HN homepage. For instance, a while ago there was a story called 'The Myth of the Lone Wolf Terrorist.' I read it, then when I clicked back to HN to look at the comments, there was no sign of it.
Happens far too commonly. I'll see a great link in the RSS feed and come to look for discussion about it after reading, but the article will have been removed. I've learned to search site:ycombinator.com with the article's title in order to track it down and see if there was any discussion before it was binned.
What a travesty of both justice, democracy, and government.
Too big to jail, I guess. Ignorance is an excuse when you have a president running interference for you to undermine democracy, even if you knowingly and intentionally weakened and exposed the whole country and then lied about it and played it off.
But let's make a crooked, incompetent, and dangerous person our leader.
Honestly, the 2016 presidential election really does feel like the 1996 Simpsons Halloween special. (only without bothering with the meat-suit disguises)
It's a two party system; you have to vote for one of the green tentacled monsters.
One for you and I, and one for the elite.
I held a clearance for 20 years, during which time I was in-briefed multiple times, received annual security refresher training, and de-briefed when I no longer required access to particular material. The regulations regarding the handling, processing, classification and storage of such material was made crystal clear on every occasion.
I have no doubt that had I done the same as Hillary Clinton, a "reasonable prosecutor" (to use the FBI's theoretical situation) would be easily found to go after me.
Some animals are more equal than others.