LiveWire

Maynard says:

A comment by Taranto:

Mrs. Clinton insisted during her press conference that “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email.” Even if true, there are three reasons that is not reassuring.
First, as the Journal notes in a Wednesday editorial,”emails between a Secretary of State and others in government don’t have to be classified to be valuable to foreign hackers.” Second, as the Journal points out in a Thursday editorial, “Mrs. Clinton didn’t say she never received classified information via email.”

Third, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy argues at National Review Online, it depends on what the meaning of “material” is:

In the government, classified documents are maintained on separate, super-highly secured systems. Yes, if security gets lax or you have a determined Ed Snowden type with sufficient expertise, the protections can be defeated. But in general, Mrs. Clinton would not have been able to access classified documents even from a .gov account, much less from her private account—she’d need to use the classified system. In fact, many government officials with security clearances read “hard copies” of classified documents in facilities designed for that purpose rather than accessing them on computers.

That said, there are two pertinent caveats. First, since we’re dealing with Clintonian parsing here, we must consider the distinction between classified documents and classified information—the latter being what is laid out in the former. It is not enough for a government official with a top-secret clearance to refrain from storing classified documents on private e-mail; the official is also forbidden to discuss the information contained in those documents.

The fact that Mrs. Clinton says she did not store classified documents on her private server, which is very likely true, does not discount the distinct possibility that she discussed classified matters in private e-mails. We would not be able to judge that absent reviewing the e-mails. If any of the 31,830 withheld e-mails from the private, non-secure system—involving America’s top diplomat who was in constant discussions with other important diplomats, top military and national-security officials, her trusted advisers, and even the president of the United States—touched on classified matters, that could land Mrs. Clinton in very hot legal water. It would be a powerful incentive to hit the “delete” key.

A frequent complaint from journalists and other advocates of government transparency is that agencies dealing with national security classify far too much material. “I would assume that more than 50 percent of what the secretary of state dealt with was classified,” a “former senior State Department official who served before the Obama administration” tells the New York Times. “Was every single email of the secretary of state completely unclassified? Maybe, but it’s hard to imagine.” (The official requested and was granted anonymity “because he did not want to seem ungracious to Mrs. Clinton.”)

The real questions here are whether Hillary placed national security at risk, and whether she broke the laws that were supposed to protect us from the bad guys as well as maintain archives and accountability. It disturbs me when the debate turns to questions of polling and electability. We’re talking about potential harm to the nation; serious stuff that the rules/laws were supposed to protect us from. It’s not about how it spins and polls; it’s about putting the nation’s top secrets within reach of evil people that mean us ill. If this doesn’t rise above petty politics, then how can the nation survive?

For some technical security comments, here are a couple of articles in GeekWire and Wired.