Intelligence officials fear Hillary Clinton’s private email server was a magnet for Chinese, Russian and Iranian intelligence services. The fact that Hillary included the name “Clinton” on the server only made it easier for foreign spies to break into her computer records.
J. Michael Waller, senior reporter at American Media Institute, penned this report at Investor’s Business Daily:
Hillary Clinton’s private email server was a spy magnet for the Russian, Chinese, Iranian and other intelligence services, say current and former intelligence officials.
As secretary of state, Clinton routed all her government-related email through the server, based in her house in Chappaqua, New York. She reportedly hired a Cablevision (NYSE:CVC) subsidiary to run the server, with antivirus protection from Intel’s (NASDAQ:INTC) McAfee. And she registered her domain name, clintonmail.com, through Network Solutions.
Intelligence professionals fear that the use of the privately installed server, free of certified government defenses against foreign interception, has been a boon to foreign cyberspies.
“By using her own private server with email — which we now know was wholly unencrypted for the first three months of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state — she left this easily interceptable by any decent 21st century SIGINT service,” said John Schindler, a former National Security Agency counterintelligence officer. SIGINT is shorthand for signals intelligence, or electronic spying.
“The name Clinton right on the email handle meant this was not a difficult find,” Schindler said. “We should assume Russians, Chinese and others were seeing this.”
‘Epic’ Counterintelligence Disaster
“In all, this is a counterintelligence disaster of truly epic proportions, not to mention that, since Clinton admitted she did not use higher-classification email systems at all” — systems like SIPR and JWICS, Schindler said — “we have to assume some bleed-over into her unsecured private email too, which makes this even worse.”
SIPR is the Secret Internet Protocol Router network that the Department of Defense runs to ensure secret communications for the U.S. military, other agencies and certain allies. JWICS is the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System for top-secret government communication. Both provide secure communications for the State Department and secretary of state. Clinton’s private server was not protected by the Department of Homeland Security’s Einstein intrusion detection system, which relies on NSA systems, for official State Department emails.
“She may have deleted 30,000 e-mails before turning her files over to the State Department, but that doesn’t mean that the Russians and the Chinese don’t have them,” said Michelle Van Cleave, former U.S. National Counterintelligence Executive.
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