By Kurt Schlichter
Monday, January 25, 2016
Hillary Clinton’s acolytes are racing to dismiss the
latest allegations that classified material was cut and pasted into her emails,
but this isn’t some mere oversight that can be hand-waved away with a shrug and
a sad trombone honk. One doesn’t spill classified material into an unclassified
system accidentally or through mere negligence. What these new revelations
show—if they are true—is conduct that was conscious, intentional, and felonious
as all get-out.
In basic and open-source terms, there is no one big
computer system where innocuous, unclassified material shares space with
classified material. They are kept on physically separate computer systems:
there is the unclassified system, and there are several classified systems.
They don’t connect, unless someone chooses to intentionally connect them.
When there is spillage of classified material into
unclassified systems, all hell breaks loose. Well, at least it does when it’s
not a friend of the administration doing the spilling.
Filching
Information from a Secure Facility
Let’s take a look at what it would take to make this
happen. Hillary Clinton refused to use a secure system. She wanted to use her
own system because she could control it and unlawfully shield it from the
prying eyes of the American people and their representatives. Her minions
therefore had to deliberately act to circumvent the rules and procedures put in
place to prevent people from doing exactly what Clinton wanted done.
First, someone would have to enter a secure
facility—usually called a SCIF—to access a classified document on one of the
secure systems. These terminals are behind locked doors with access controls
and multiple security measures. You have to have the clearance to enter, and
you leave your Android, iPad, laptop, and everything else with a chip outside.
Inside, you access the terminal and review the document
you are working with. There are myriad warnings that you are viewing classified
material. It is no surprise. So, Hillary’s minion would be knowingly examining
classified information when he or she decided to break the law and send it to
Hillary’s unclassified, private email server.
There are several ways one could move the classified
material, each almost too horrific to contemplate to anyone who has worked with
sensitive materials. You need to understand that even discussing this gives
professionals the shakes. There are a lot of serious things in the national
defense world, but nothing is taken more seriously than classified material.
People can and do go to jail for screwing up. Well, at least the little people
do.
How to Get the
Secure Information Out
One way would be to download it to a portable medium,
like a thumb drive. Leaving aside that you can’t bring a thumb drive anywhere
near a SCIF, the USB ports on the computers are likely deactivated. You would
need a technician to somehow work around that, which is in itself horrifying.
The easier way would be to print the material out so you could take it
somewhere else and either type or scan it into a new file on an unclassified
system.
Of course, printing classified material and taking it out
of the SCIF are themselves huge violations even before you get to not only
reproducing it but introducing it to an unclassified system. So now the minion
has contaminated the unclassified system, but there are still more steps to
take and rules to break.
The minion could type text into the email, but that seems
unlikely. More likely is that the minion opens the PDF of the classified
document, which still retains all the classification markings. The minion then
cuts and pastes some or all of the classified material, sans classification header, out of the PDF and into the body of an
email, then sends it, unsecure, to Clinton’s unsecure server. This was an
unsecure system where, it is important to note, she stored over a thousand
documents containing classified material. And those are just the documents she
didn’t delete.
Enemy Intelligence
Cackles In Glee
In any case, this is not hard to show. You take the text
of the suspect emails and compare them to the relevant classified documents,
and if they are identical or substantially the same, you have a breach. Let’s
be really clear, because Clinton has tried to be anything but: classified
material does not somehow become unclassified simply because it is no longer
marked due to minions cutting and pasting the text out from between the
classification markings. That is not a thing.
So, Hillary gets the email, reads it outside of a SCIF,
and, unless she is transcendently stupid, sees that it is sensitive material.
Now, she did fail the District of Columbia bar examination, so she is no rocket
scientist, but it is utterly implausible she did not understand that this
material should not ever be on a server that some start-up runs out of a
bathroom in Denver.
It’s equally implausible that enemy intelligence agencies
also failed to recognize the nature of this material. There’s no reasonable
doubt that they
pillaged through it in real time.
18 United States Code Section 1924 reads:
(a) Whoever, being an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of
the United States, and, by virtue of his office, employment, position, or
contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified
information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials
without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at
an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not
more than one year, or both.
(b) For purposes of this section, the provision of documents and
materials to the Congress shall not constitute an offense under subsection (a).
(c) In this section, the term ‘classified information of the United
States’ means information originated, owned, or possessed by the United States
Government concerning the national defense or foreign relations of the United
States that has been determined pursuant to law or Executive order to require
protection against unauthorized disclosure in the interests of national
security.
If these new revelations are true, then it appears
Hillary Clinton systematically conspired with her minions to transmit
classified information from secure systems to her unsecure server. It’s not
merely hard to see how she is not guilty of multiple violations of Section
1924. It’s impossible.
No comments:
Post a Comment