There's also the whole body of meta-analysis, which definitely has its uses; and also tends to substantially increase the number of studies you 'used' without necessarily vastly increasing the number of pages you had to slog through.

You really think that everyone swapping email with her knew that their communications were being stored on a poorly configured server kept in her house? So far, the general level of panic being displayed by her many party confidants and lots of people in the business suggests that yes, indeed, the completely absurd circumstances were indeed a secret.

No, she eventually turned over only those emails that she and her personal advisors decided to hand over. Because she chose to conduct her official government business off a badly secured server in her own house and without any IT governance from her agency, we actually have no idea whatsoever what she's decided to leave out. If she'd been actually using the system that her own underlings told her she should use in order to secure and archive her communications, FOIA requests could tell us the story. But instead, we have to trust a person who - the day she was sworn in - immediately set up a system to keep her official communication off the record.

It was illegal before, too. It's just illegal on more than one front, now.

And of course we have congressional subpoenas looking for exactly this sort of communication now because they're now aware it exists, despite earlier investigations concluding that there was no email like this at all, and she and her staff - who knew exactly what they were looking for - didn't say a peep about the existence of tens of thousands of them.

That's just factually incorrect. Take for example Obama's special hot-rodded Blackberry, which he apparently uses for all sorts of direct personal e-communication. And of course there's the issue at hand (Hillary's email) which numbered in the tens of thousands ... but those are just the ones that her staff, after the fact, had laundered and decided under her direction were OK to pass along to the systems at State so there'd be copies. Thousands and thousands of emails is the opposite of "don't use email at all."

The newer law about such officials having to forward ALL such correspondence to their official mailboxes within 20 days is a direct result of it being apparent just how much government officials DO use email, all day, every day. It's why it's so fascinating to see tens of thousands of them being brought back to life from the abyss after the new director of the IRS swore there were no backups of Lois Lerner's comms during her supervision of the politicized treatment of non-profit applications. People in the bureaucratic food chain AND those at the tops of agencies and branches use email constantly, since they can do that asynchronously (compared to elaborately timed phone calls).

But Obama campaigned on changing every aspect of such things, and said that he would guarantee the most transparent administration in history. And here we have a person that he trusts enough to put in the line of succession to his office (Secretary of State) that - on being nominated - didn't just flub her way through a crappy email backup system (a la the career IT people in the WH during Bush, which were not appointees - these are permanent staffers, which you do understand, right?), but rather she immediately went about setting up a system to prevent her communications from being part of the official record.

Then she went around the world doing things like posing with giant plastic "reset" buttons to make everything wonderful with Russia and whatnot, even as she was soliciting millions in donations from foreign governments for use by her personal family foundation. But we'll never know what those emails looked like, and how such things might have been tied to or tangled up with her official duties, because she shielded all of those messages from FOIA requests by never having an official box. And when pressed, she had her own loyalists go through some of the message, and pass along those that SHE considered appropriate for the public archive.

Completely pre-meditated obfuscation of her communications as a senior official. No Sarah-Palin-style cluelessness about using her Yahoo account, no career IT people in the White House having a lame backup system ... no, the completely planned in advance absence of any records except those that Clinton decided, later, should be present. Today we see reports that the IT people in the State Department warned her that her not having an official State mailbox was going to endanger compliance with record keeping laws, but that her completely casual personal mail server was a huge, huge security risk. So we have not only premeditated law breaking to avoid transparency and accountability, but we also have horrible incompetence in understanding the risks of conducting top-level international diplomacy via a mail server set up by some guy with a fictitious name, paid in cash. One really can't make this stuff up.

Actually, she did. The law requires all official communication to be archived by the government. She deliberate set up mechanism to avoid that. That legal requirement was in place long before it was further enhanced by a later bill that spoke directly to the issue of personal email accounts and the timeliness of forwarding personal mail to offical mailboxes. She HAD NO OFFICIAL MAILBOX, because she didn't want that record keeping to even happen in the first place. She set up a personal platform so that she, and only she, could decide what content, if any, might eventually be passed along to a platform subject to FOIA requests, etc.

She was both nefarious AND wrong, and in every way that matters here, acting deliberately outside the law for her own purposes. And she paid cash to someone operating under a false name to set it up, just to make sure we'd all eventually realize just how sleazy she was really being about it.

Oh, I get it. You hate Bush and think people in his administration did something wrong, and so that makes it cool when Hillary does it. That's some awesome moral compass you have there.

Nonsense, Mr/s Clinton apologist. Well before that law was passed, there was already a requirement to retain all official communications, including emails. She set this up specifically to get around such scrutiny, and did it the moment that she was named as the nominee for the job. Her use of a false name on the registration and cash payment to the consultant just contributes to the atmosphere (and reality) of deliberate avoidance of the legal requirements.

A law the speaks directly to the matter of forwarding along private messages from private mailboxes that get occasionally used in connection with official duties doesn't mean that the already existing laws about retaining all official communication didn't already exist. They did. She chose not to establish an official mailbox at State. Her personal mail account on her phony-name-registered domain WAS BY DEFAULT her official email channel. And she did not in any way comply with the existing laws that required ongoing official storage of her communications within government systems and available for things like FOIA requests. Countless FOIA requests for her correspondence were in fact completely ignored because of this deliberate loophole that she established (look! no official records of my communication exist because there are no records!).

And because it's her own private email sandbox, SHE gets to decide which messages she should or shouldn't pass along for official archiving per the law. We as her employers have no recourse to see if her judgement on the matter is or was sound, or even legally correct. This was a deliberate act on her part to avoid legally mandated scrutiny of her communications as a government official. Combine that with her panhandling for donations from foreign governments (WHILE she was Secretary of State!) to fund the foundations from which her family drew income and which did things like fly them around the world in luxury accommodations, and you can see why she might indeed want to dodge the law and hide her communications.

Not at all. I think it's humorous (or would be, if it didn't contribute to a large body of evidence about the Clinton way of doing things) to think that one of Obama's would-be (at the time) cabinet secretaries, the moment she was named for the job, ran out and paid cash to have a personal mail server set up under a false registrant's name, specifically so that nobody could ever know which or her emails was, or wasn't part of her official legacy in that job - despite the law requiring her to make all such communication part of her ongoing records at State. That she did this under the table, and never even set up an official mailbox at State, and was magically able, for years, to avoid FOIA requests for her official communications, is just fantastically corrupt. The parallels with some IT guy in Mexico being asked to set up a shadow communications platform for a corrupt cartel there aren't imaginary, they're actually interesting.

It's topical because new of Clinton's furtive behavior along these lines is breaking right now, and it's a related topic. The main point of interest for this audience is the notion of being asked (or forced, in the example of TFA) to set up systems under dubious conditions (legality-wise), and keeping mum to avoid the sort of heat that can come down on them from the people who want the work done.

I wonder if that's the same guy who worked under a fictitious name, for cash, to set up the private e-mail server and domain that Hillary Clinton used for HER back-channel communications, in lieu of an official mailbox, throughout her entire tenure as Secretary of State. It has to be odd to be an IT consultant with a high profile customer like that and be unable to mention the gig on your CV. We've all worked under NDAs, but I guess working for a well-funded person or group that insists you actually use a fake name with the registrars and take cash (if you're lucky!) for the job would certainly take on a different flavor.

As others said, there's not necessarily a guarantee Russia wouldn't decide to use Snowden as a bargaining chip or sorts, turning him over to the U.S. govt. at a very inopportune time for him to get any hope of justice. Surely, that's in the back of his head as at least a lingering possibility?

Also, he has quite a bit of support in the U.S. from people who think he's a hero, not a criminal. (Not everyone makes the front cover of Wired magazine, covered in a positive way.) Our current folks in political office may not care for him -- but *if* he could negotiate a high profile trial here, at least there would be a LOT of eyeballs watching, concerned that he received a fair outcome.

I'm positive he'd instantly find work in the private sector too, doing infosec of some sort.

I just attended a seminar today where a couple of Microsoft people gave presentations. One thing that they made pretty clear is that Microsoft's Azure "cloud" is a HUGE part of their future business model.

Right now, when you ask the typical MS user if they can name 3 things Azure does, they usually get stuck naming even one item. But one of these days, Microsoft hopes to embrace the software as subscription model to the point where practically everyone will just pay for Azure to spin up and host whatever servers they wish, vs. trying to run their own on their own hardware, in-house.

They've also made a big deal in their recent marketing about the Titanfall game running on Azure -- and I'm sure there will be more of this to come. If they do a Minecraft sequel, I'd suspect it will be designed so people can easily host Minecraft servers on Azure (probably with a friendly web front-end to create and configure them?). Maybe that will be the ONLY authorized way to do it?

It would be my pleasure to see the whole lot of them have the actual text of the law applied to them as though they were a tattooed black guy with multiple priors.

We often have suitable laws; but they just mysteriously never even get brought up, much less by people in a position to do something about them.

OK, and digging loose change out of your couch cushions is you making use of a banking platform.

Everybody involved here knows that "investment" means something very specific when you're handing money to a company to use in the formation and growth of their business. What happens when you funnel money towards a favored project through Kickstarter is no more an investment than losing some change in your couch is you making a bank deposit.

There's nothing wrong with Kickstarter or with people on both ends of the gift-giving making use of it. But it's not an investment. If you're one of these people that thinks you've just "invested" money when you go to see a movie, then the term - to you - is so absurdly broad as to have no meaning, especially not in the context of an actual discussion about business finance and project funding.

It's either bullshit(fairly likely) or the rules need to be changed yesterday(actually, at least a couple of administrations ago).

Aside from the obvious issues with complying with transparency, discoverability, and archiving requirements that are legally imposed on official business even at much lower levels(heck, I've done penny-ante IT minion stuff for small municipalities that was subject to public records laws that would have made doing things over personal email grossly unprofessional at best and illegal at worst, and she's the fucking Secretary of State...), what about security?

Given the delightful creep of the Top Secret National Security Stuff blob to cover ever larger swaths of DC, surely the Secretary of State does some emailing about stuff that is, at least for little people, probably supposed to not leave the SCIF, much less be handled by who-knows-who at some random email provider or a DNC mailserver admin.