July 18, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:28
3352 CLASSIFIED: Security Expert on Hillary Clinton's Email Scandal
What do those on the inside think about Hillary Clinton escaping prosecution for being "extremely careless" with classified national secrets? Stefan Molyneux is joined by a government security expert to discuss the often obscured facts of the Hillary Clinton email scandal and the important points the mainstream media has completely ignored. Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So we have a fellow on the line who we will call John.
Now, John contacted us and said that he had expertise in security and classification systems and had some observations that he wished to make regarding Hillary Clinton's use of her private email server, relatively unsecured, open to the web, no security patches installed at times, and so on.
And I think, you know, I always like deferring to experts, to people who know what they're talking about, so very happy to have you on the show, John.
Thanks a lot, Steph.
So, for a lot of people, you know, you send and receive email, maybe it's Gmail or Hotmail or something like that, and they don't really think about the mechanics, the exposure, the security that goes on because, you know, we're not really handling very sensitive stuff.
What is so different in the security world and why?
In everything I'm about to say, anybody can Google it on their own.
There's a mountain of documentation, rules, regulations that not just the Department of Defense, but the entire federal government put out on just how you have to handle classified information and the method in which you transmit that.
And if anything, it is not more convenient to transmit classified information than it is something to your Gmail.
The Security requirements of simply storing a physical document is one thing, and then when you're talking about transmitting that information electronically, that takes it to a whole other level.
You have entire teams of people, this is all they do in their career, day in, day out, is they specialize in this type of specific transmission.
Just to be real clear on it, this is completely apolitical.
Probably like everybody on their Facebook feed, I've got people on the lunatic right and people on the lunatic left, family and friends.
And everything that you hear in the media is usually very specialized or people are talking.
It doesn't make sense to the average person.
So I wanted to give everybody a chance to really understand what it is like on a day-to-day basis.
Right, because the moment...
I mean, if you have something physically locked in a drawer, right, that as far as I understand, it was the problem that General Petraeus showed some sensitive information to a woman.
That sensitive information was in his locked study drawer in a house that's guarded by Secret Service 24-7.
And he got into a huge amount of trouble for that, where, of course, there was no chance of foreign government snooping in on it, and so on.
And so with Clinton, with Hillary Clinton, the fact that she had...
I was sending and receiving information in relatively unsecure ways and that her server was exposed to potential outside intrusion.
It goes against everything that basic security stands for and I don't think people understand the degree of risk and money that is involved in the generation of these secrets.
I mean there are Marines around the world Who are sworn to defend these kinds of state secrets with their lives.
And some have died in the defense of those secrets.
So it is a huge deal.
People's lives hang in the balance.
Negotiations hang in the balance.
Relationships with friends and foes hang in the balance.
It is incredibly dangerous and toxic information.
And powerful information probably is a better way of putting it.
And the degree to which it needs to be fenced off and held secure almost can't be overstated.
Is that a fair way of putting it?
Absolutely.
And if you look at the report and the testimony that the FBI director gave, and you mentioned on your show, and everybody I think has heard on the media right, you've got the confidential, you have the secret, then you have the top secret information.
The other caveats that they were talking about, the SCI, which is Sensitive Compartmented Information, and the SAP, which is the Special Access Program Information, that is an entirely separate batter on top that compounds everything else.
Those are the programs where you have to jump through a whole number of hoops just before you have access to or to even know that a program is in existence.
Those requirements are far and above anything else that you do for regular classified information, which is usually it's classified at that level because it's a source or a method where somebody could possibly get killed if that source or method got out or it would invalidate some very, very expensive government investment in either a collection capability or something in industry.
Well, this is the great challenge of this information as far as I understand it is that if you have somebody say out there working in the field and there's even a possibility that that person has been named or exposed Don't you basically have to pull the entire situation because if somebody gets that person's name, they then could blackmail, could threaten, could do any number of things and you wouldn't necessarily know.
Like they might just go kill that person, in which case you'd kind of know, but they also might try and turn them through a variety of methodologies and threats or bribes or whatever.
So once that person is known, doesn't the entire apparatus then become open to doubt or question?
Well, absolutely.
And one thing that hasn't really been touched on too much in the media, but it's black and white in the government regulations.
Anytime you have something, a leak or something like this happens, the agency that owns the information that was compromised has to go about and do a damage assessment.
In this case, with everything being deleted by the lawyers, with unsure exactly who it was sent to, the Judgment you have to make is that all of your information that you had or that had sent at one point has been compromised.
That all has to be changed now, you know, depending on what the nature of the information was.
And that gets, obviously, in the human capital, people have to do this.
It takes a lot of man hours and resources to do it.
It's very, very expensive.
And then, obviously, you also have the information that could be out there now where you have somebody's life that's in jeopardy.
Right.
Because, of course, these relationships, they take years to develop.
Infiltrations take years to achieve.
Billions and billions of dollars are spent.
And then, you know, according to some of the information that I've read with regards to the intelligence community's view of this, because emails were deleted, and it does, as Comey said, Clinton was supposed to turn over all of her work-related emails, and they did find emails that were work-related that she hadn't turned over.
And so the really frustrating thing for a lot of people in the intelligence community is that foreign governments may be in possession of emails that the US intelligence community will never have access to because they're stored on some foreign server that may have hacked Clinton if they intercept it, but there's no record of it on American servers, so they don't even know.
They're actually in a state of having less information potentially than foreign governments.
Right, and I think you brought the point up too that the ones doing this assessment now, they have to assume that it's all been compromised.
You know, the Secretary of State would be probably read into just about everything at the executive leadership level in the United States government, and whatever she would have been read into for these special programs, they would have to make the assumption, since they don't know what was destroyed, they don't have a record of it, and they know some of it's been compromised, they would have to go off the assumption that most or all of it's been compromised.
Okay, so let's talk about what that means.
If the agency is going to assume that all information that may have been shared with the Secretary of State during her tenure has been compromised, what does that set into motion?
What happens from there?
So, right before we get into that, though, there was one point that was made up, was made a lot in the media, that this was a case of an agency dispute between the State Department or the CIA or the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency, or that things were over-classified, they weren't really as classified as they were made out to be, or they were incorrectly classified.
There is...
No chance that happens in any way, shape, or form.
There's never a department dispute about classified information.
A single agency may dispute that something is classified appropriately and they can attempt to remedy it with that agency.
But whatever agency produces the information, that's the way you have to treat it.
It doesn't matter if you disagree with it or not.
So if the State Department, for instance, produced a very highly classified document and the CIA used it, the CIA could not turn around and treat it however they felt it should be treated.
They would have to go by what the State Department said it needed to be treated as.
So all those thousands of emails that have been deleted and they're probably never going to be able to recover, regardless of what the former secretary says, oh, well, it was overclassified, or there's a dispute about which classification to be.
Completely irrelevant.
The agency that owned the information makes that determination, not the agency receiving or using it.
So, for the information that the FBI director, and obviously, this is all compartmented.
Unless you're actually on the investigative team, you wouldn't actually be able to dig into it to see which programs specifically.
But anything that got mentioned, they have to assume that that program, all the words, the identifiers, all the funding methods, all those things that they use to get those special programs Compartmented and just to the right people and limited and, you know, off the internet.
All that would have to be considered to be compromised and you'd have to start from scratch.
Now, whether that means that they ignore it to make sure that there's not an indication that they think something's been compromised or they completely take apart a program and start it up, you know, taking time, effort, and resources, that would have to be up to the agency that owns the information.
But either way, it's manpower and resource intensive.
Well, and you can never put that house of cards back together again.
Correct.
If you have someone embedded somewhere and then that person gets pulled out, that's as much as signaling that that person was an agent.
And then trying to get someone else back in there after you've basically alerted people that there was an agent in there, doesn't that, I mean, you can't go back to where you were.
There's no way to put this house of cards back together again as far as I can see it from the outside.
Right.
Once the genie's out of the bag, the genie's out of the bag.
And to be completely fair, you can look up the numbers of personnel in the United States government that have security clearances.
Ninety-five percent of all the people with security clearances in the government probably don't ever see classified information.
Maybe once or twice a year in a brief or in a presentation that they have to give.
However, that is not true for the people making decisions at the top of executive agencies.
They're exposed to classified material every single day.
The former secretary, she had original classification authority, which meant she could make a decision to classify information that the State Department produced as long as it fell within certain guidelines.
And not to mention, every single person around her Would have known what she was doing was a violation of every rule and regulation, not to mention presidential executive orders.
And I haven't heard anything talk about what's going to happen to them as well.
That's probably next month.
Because those are the rules, right?
As far as I understand it, the rules are that if you are aware of any compromise to security information, you must report it to the appropriate security officer.
That is not just a nice to have, but a have to have as far as protecting this information goes.
Correct.
I can speak from personal experience.
I'll give you a couple of examples of things I've seen over the years.
People making honest-to-goodness mistakes, sending something in the email that they should not have sent on a classified site.
It should have been on a classified system.
You have eight different systems on your desk.
People make mistakes.
They're human beings.
That happens.
The people who are responsible for the security organization are immediately notified, and so is the local criminal investigative service.
Regardless of whether or not you think the person did it on accident, or it was an honest good mistake, or you think anything nefarious, that is a requirement.
They have to be immediately notified, because there are certain steps that they have to go through for their investigation.
And with the number of people that we're sending It is beyond belief that that wasn't immediately reported at some point when somebody realized what was going on.
Well, and of course it may have been reported, and we don't know what happened to those reports.
True, true.
Right.
And this to me is why thinking this is about Hillary Clinton As a solo actor is a red herring because she would be the epicenter if charges were laid.
She would be ground zero, but the legal blast would go out many, many layers for whoever was in contact with her.
Is that a fair point?
Absolutely.
I've seen people reprimanded for not reporting You know, fellow government employees, when they were just in a position of trust and confidence, didn't even have anything to do with classified information, just for not following directives.
So when you get into the classified information, that's another step that's supposed to be taken more serious.
But ever since this whole thing came out, there's not a day that goes by in our community that people are not making a joke about this.
You know, dark humor, not that it's funny, but, you know, Somebody will tell somebody, hey, make sure you protect this appropriately.
You need to transport this from A to B. And the joke will be, oh, you mean I can't just email this to you?
I mean, that is on a daily basis.
Every single training event I've been to, any type of serious interaction, I mean, it has become the laughingstock of the Intel and security community.
And some of this, because, you know, to some degree, Clinton, she's saying, well, you know, I'm not computer literate.
I don't know what I'm doing.
And, you know, to me, that is such a ridiculous non-excuse.
But some of these special access program, apparently she received at least one special access program email.
And to get that information, again, I don't know how it works on a private server, but as far as I understand it, to get into that information, you have to input certain codes that change randomly.
You've got to ask for the code before opening it.
The document, so the idea that she, if she had to go through those steps, then to say she didn't send or receive any classified information when she has to input, get an input, a special code just to read the email, seems, I mean, ridiculous beyond words to make that claim.
Right.
Well, a good friend once told me that security is not easy whenever somebody would complain about how difficult it was just to get information of a classified nature to somebody who needed to get it.
If anything, it is inconvenient to do your job on classified systems because there's so many other requirements.
People probably aren't aware, but it's not as simple as just having a laptop that you can send information to because it's a secure laptop.
There's entire buildings that have to be built to contain these systems, and only a certain number of people can go into them.
The buildings have to be built to these amazing specifications just so you can have that classified information processed on the inside of that building.
It has to meet all sorts of alarm requirements, People with guns have to be within a certain time response to protect those systems.
The idea of having it simply sitting in a homebrew server somewhere completely breaks every single rule there is on controlling that information.
I mean, it's as simple to me and as powerful as the idea that with a secure system, either there are no USB ports or there's a log of every single attachment that's ever made to those computers and there may be searches of people going in and out.
I mean, given how portable electronic information is, things like just not having any USB ports, I assume that our home server had USB ports and would not have any particular log.
Of what may have been transferred here or there.
And it just makes the whole rest of the entire setup look ridiculous if this is not a punishable offense.
Right.
We're always taught that the insider threat, whatever that takes, the insider threat is the one that you can't defeat.
You could spend millions and millions of dollars on walls and doors and guards with guns and dogs and electronic systems, but all it takes is the person on the inside not to pay attention to what they're doing or to However, we want to look at this specific situation.
It defeats all that.
It defeats all the effort, time and energy and resources that went into all that.
Right.
So let's talk about some of the, we sort of touched on it briefly with the architecture and the design of these secure facilities.
What are some of the steps, you know, I guess, do people just think it's encrypted and you send it, that there's some sort of cryptolope around the data?
What kind of steps are taken to ensure as best as possible that this information never gets intercepted?
So basically, depending on the classification level of the information, there'll be a separate dedicated system that in theory, or for most intense purposes, doesn't talk to a lower classification system.
Their own networks, their own method of transmission, separately depending on the type of information it is.
So, for instance, if you were the Secretary of State or the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency or something like that, depending on what you wanted to send, you would have to go to a completely separate system to send it, depending on what program or what classification level that you were needing to send information to.
And that would be separate computer, separate Ethernet.
Like, I assume this would not be wireless in any way.
And so, it's not just, you know, switch your network.
Like, you probably would have to go to a different area, maybe a different set of computers.
And, of course, transferring that information, again, thumb drives.
So, I assume that there's just a huge number of dominoes that have to go down before you can get information from one system to another.
That's correct.
And it looks like with what they've released so far with the FBI and the State Department, More than likely, what happened is somebody took the information and put it themselves on a non-secure.
They had the information, either they remembered the information or they had a hard document of some type, then they could have easily put that on an unsecured line.
Because at that point, it's actually not crossing domains anymore.
It's actually somebody just writing something or something.
It's a wetware transfer, right?
Some brain is moving it from one place to the next, right?
Okay, like how you can ship currency by remembering your key if it's cryptocurrency.
Okay, so that's somebody who would...
And there are indications when they were having trouble sending or receiving on a secure fax line.
Oh, just strip off the classified headers and send it non-secure, I think was something similar to what she said.
I'm surprised that didn't come up more during the congressional testimony.
That was, I thought, a pretty open and shut case.
Well, that's intent.
Correct, correct.
I mean, intent apparently is not that relevant, but even if we say it is that relevant, when you say to somebody, oh, you're having trouble sending it secure fax, strip the classified headers off and send it non-secure, that's intent right there, and that's recorded as far as I understand it.
Right, and I'm not a legal investigator, so I don't want to get out of my lane of expertise, but yeah, that makes complete sense to me.
I'm no legal expert either.
These are just my opinions based upon the available information.
But that at least, if that's not proof of intent, although it seems to be to me looking at it from an amateur outside view, if that's not intent, when somebody says strip the headers off and send it non-secure, I'd like to know why that's not intent and what the hell is intent if that's not it.
At the very least, again, from a security perspective, that would have cost, I think, anybody their security clearance immediately.
I've seen cases where personnel have been forced out of the government or out of the military because they couldn't pass Their investigative background checks anymore because they were being slightly evasive or slightly dishonest about something, whether that was a marital infidelity or they took back souvenirs that they shouldn't have from Iraq or Afghanistan, something like that.
And because that weighed on them, they couldn't pass the background screening anymore and they were no longer eligible for security clearance.
And that's pretty minor stuff in the grand scheme of things.
This is not what we're talking about deliberately taking markings off a classified document and then sending it in the clear.
Yeah, I mean, that's stuff where you'd want to screen people for susceptibility to blackmail or other forms of manipulation.
So, because some of the other stuff that I've sort of talked about, General Petraeus and so on, a sailor took a selfie in a sub, was at least at some point in the past facing 20 years in prison, didn't realize there was a sonar screen right over, right behind him.
There was a Marine who informed his superiors about a guy who was pretending to be an Afghan policeman who was in fact Al-Qaeda and he informed them using a Gmail account he's facing or was facing I don't know whether the process is there 20 years in jail as well and these of course seem like don't even show up like sunspots on the sun relative to this sort of multi-year intentional homebrewed server Unsecure passage of information.
Not to mention, of course, the fact that under threat of perjury, she said she turned over all her work-related emails.
It turns out that she didn't, let alone the fact that her lawyers and other people who had access to the server didn't have security clearance.
It just seems...
I mean, I kind of knew there was not going to be a recommendation for prosecution, but I thought that the story as to why she wasn't going to be prosecuted would be a little bit more believable.
I agree.
I mean, if you're going to do a cover-up, could you please try to cover it up?
And the other thing that has struck me with regards to all of this is morale in any institution is very key as to its efficacy and capacity for success and follow-through and driving all this stuff along.
And I do have to wonder, if I was in the intelligence community, With the fact that all of this happened and there's no recommendation for the pursuing of criminal charges, and it looks like, I mean, the State Department's reopened its investigation into this handling and so on, but it looks like there's some decent possibilities you might just, they all might get away scot-free.
What's my motivation going to be like for embarking on big new World-changing security operations, thinking that this woman might just become president again, and who knows what's going to happen to the secret information that she might get a hold of.
Yeah, well, I don't...
Deal with that type of operation, but I will say that generally, I mean, it was pretty much a gut punch when the people in the security intelligence community were watching that testimony and then at the end of it, nothing came of it because, I mean...
Every year, if you have a security clearance, you have to go through training.
You have to sign documentation.
Depending on what you're involved with, there's all sorts of hoops you have to jump through just to maintain your clearance eligibility.
Someone with a top-secret SEI clearance like the former secretary had, they're supposed to report on Any foreign contacts that they have?
I mean, any type of close continuing contact with a foreigner?
I mean, did that happen like it's supposed to happen in her case?
I've seen people, you know, lose their clearance because they didn't do that.
They didn't report all their foreign contacts.
Was she doing that?
I probably don't think so.
Right.
And what else is being said that you've heard within the community?
Is there any other fallout that we haven't mentioned yet?
Well, investigations by their nature are pretty tight.
Some of the investigations in the past that I think due to leaks or FBI investigations due to mishandling classified information, eventually they become pretty available if you go to the right place to talk to the right people.
I don't think the community at large is going to see the entire investigation on this one.
Just by the information that was coming out about the extra steps that the FBI agents go through.
I understand this is a public figure that they were investigating, but the likelihood of anybody getting their hands on the whole story on that's probably not very likely.
Are you referring to the fact that some of the investigative agents had to sign additional nondisclosure agreements documents with regards to this investigation in particular?
Usually when people do counterintelligence investigations, I'd imagine that there's lessons to be learned from that, that they make available to the community at large to prevent things in the future happening.
I wouldn't expect to see that in this situation, though.
Right.
And with regards to the number of violations that occur, because, you know, he says, well, she says, well, other people used personal emails as well.
But yes, but not on their own homebrewed server and so on.
So can you just sort of run through a sort of number of the layers of...
I guess, non-conformity with best practices that she pursued, not just, of course, with her home server, but with unsecured and unapproved BlackBerrys, which now apparently have been destroyed and so on.
I mean, how many icebergs did she crash through on her way to the avoidance of Freedom of Information X promised land?
Any single one of the things that she did would have gotten me fired.
Any single one of the things that she did would have gotten anybody in the military or the federal government that I know fired, if not charged.
And not even saying the amount of what she did.
At the very least for some of the special programs that have such very strict access requirements, if somebody became aware that you had set up your own server at your house and that there was even the remotest possibility that you had sent classified information to it, It would have gone something like this.
You would have been sat down and questioned.
You would have been immediately informed that your security clearance had been suspended.
Not revoked, but suspended immediately.
You would no longer have access to classified information.
You would have been directed to turn over everything that was government property to the government.
The local criminal investigators would have gotten a warrant and seized everything electronic at your place of residence.
And that probably would have happened all within 24 hours.
Immediately.
Not a question about it.
In the end, would you have lost your clearance or not lost your clearance?
That would have been, you know, up to an adjudicating authority.
But that's what would have happened to anybody that I know, including up to generals.
There would not have been even a question about it, and no one would have made it seem like it was political.
These are the requirements that you have to go through if you had done something that reckless.
Right.
And are there any theories that you've, I mean, I have my own pet theories, which I talked about recently with Bill Whittle, but do you or do the people who you've heard from, do they have any explanations for what Bill referred to as the Comey paradox?
Like, here's all the things she did wrong, but yeah, it's fine.
I mean, does anyone know or have, I shouldn't say no, because it's a big statement, but does anyone have any theories or have you heard theories as to why this went down the way it did?
I honestly don't know, Steph.
I think like everybody else, you know, I watched the first five minutes.
I was like, oh, I can't believe she's going to be indicted for this or at least something's going to come out of it.
And then when nothing did, I was shocked.
But it may be just a point to where we're at that political appointees and executive agencies, they have all their own staff.
They live in their own world.
This just doesn't matter to them anymore.
Rules are for the little people, right?
I mean, that's what it looks like.
I mean, they made a lot of good points.
Regardless of what the reasoning is behind closed doors, that is the perception that's being played out, which is very unfortunate.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I really, really appreciate your time.
It's good to get a view from people who are more knowledgeable about security.
And it is one of these things that I think is a pivotal turning point in the history of the Republic, because it's very rare, to me at least, that it looks like somebody who has enough power, enough political juice to be able to get away with stuff that...
Would have resulted in severe negative consequences for anybody else.
The question around the rule of law, the question about universality of law, the question of equality before the law has, I think, been significantly punctured.
And for everyone in law enforcement, I think that creates a different relationship to political power.
And for those of us outside of law enforcement, there are a lot of people, I imagine, who are just saying, oh, okay, well, if rules don't apply really, then I'll just do what I can get away with rather than obey the law because it's virtuous.
And that is a A very dangerous precedent to set socially.
Yeah.
The irony of one of the things that the State Department mentioned was this, you know, oh, this is a case of overclassification, which is, there's actually a small bit of truth to that.
There is rampant overclassification in the intelligence community.
But the reason things get overclassified is because people are so afraid of misclassifying something.
Not protecting it appropriately.
That's why everything gets overclassified, because people are so worried about the consequences if they mess up.
I don't know if that's going to be true in the case in the future.
Yeah, I mean, you throw the net where the fish aren't, just so you get where the fish are.
So I can certainly see why, when in doubt, you know, classify.
And classify as high as you can possibly get away with.
That would make sense to me from a cover-your-ass standpoint, and...
I can see that, but the reality is, as you point out, you can't just retroactively unclassify things in your own mind.
There is a whole process and procedure that goes on, and you have to accept the way that it is.
If you want to work to change something, you can't act as if it's already changed.
You can work to repeal a law, you just can't act as if the law isn't the law at the time that you act.
I appreciate your time.
Thanks so much for giving us the lowdown from a more sophisticated viewpoint.
It is important, you know, that this process is going to continue.
If Trump gets in, I think there's some possibility it may be reopened under Trump and maybe that has something to do with what happened.
