Clinton wants to run the country, but hasn't mastered Windows.

[Fawke Em]

She did not want the inconvenience of carrying two phones, Mrs. Clinton said initially. She did not want a government account that might pull in nonwork matters, she said later. Or perhaps, an adviser has said, she simply did not want Republican lawmakers rifling through her personal emails.

Yet another explanation emerged Thursday: She was not comfortable with using a computer to read email.

Lewis A. Lukens, a former State Department administrative official, said in a sworn deposition last week that after Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, he had proposed accommodating her by setting up a desktop computer in her office that would not be connected to the department’s system. That would have allowed her to send and receive email on a personal account, Mr. Lukens said in the deposition, which he gave as part of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal advocacy group. The group released a transcript of the deposition on Thursday.

But that idea was abandoned, Mr. Lukens testified, after an aide to the secretary told him that Mrs. Clinton was “very comfortable checking her emails on a BlackBerry, but she’s not adept or not used to checking her emails on a desktop.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/politics/hillary-clinton-state-department-email-inquiry.html

[elleng]

1. And, more important,

hasn't mastered good JUDGMENT.

It is possible, after all, to consult with others about how windows and other tech crap works, even take lessons, but attaining good judgment doesn't work that way. (I know YOU know that!)

[NWCorona]

2. Both points are good!

[Fawke Em]

3. Very true!

I used to work at a computer training center - we had people of all ages come in and learn Windows. It's easy to do, but teaching good judgment has to have a receptive audience. I don't see that in Clinton.

[okieinpain]

72. Lol, she does c o dumb shiY, I'm still

Voting for her if she is the nom.

[SheilaT]

4. It's a bit scary to think that people running our government are about as tech-savvy

as some middle-aged businessman from 1950.

I'm old enough to recall when men absolutely didn't know how to type. They had secretaries for that. Then, most men learned how to type, although every so often I'll come across one who works in an office and still can't type.

(As a total aside, I happen to know an award-winning, reasonably prolific science fiction author, a woman my age, who never learned to touch type, which totally astonishes me.)

Anyway, back when Hillary was still a working attorney, I'm going to guess that she never typed up any of her own documents, and hand-wrote first drafts of everything. Back in 1982 I had a temp job where I was typing up the first, hand-written, drafts of the managers in the department of the company I'd been sent to work for. While I was happy for the job, and cheerfully did the job, I was honestly astonished that at that late date these people weren't typing up their own first drafts, then hand editing and handing them off to someone like me to type up a finished copy.

Anyway, I'm guessing that Hillary, and those around her, have zero expectation that she needs to properly master the technology she needs for her day-to-day working life.

I do wonder where Bernie is on the competency continuum here.

[Fawke Em]

8. Bernie has a Reddit account. LOL.

I'm guessing he's more savvy than she is.

[SheilaT]

15. Aha!

I've signed up with Reddit at the behest of my 29 year old son, but still haven't figured out how to navigate it. Same son needs to visit me and stand over my shoulder, helping me out here.

On a related note, I know that various celebrities and public figures apparently have Twitter accounts (something else I don't have), and I wonder if they actually generate their own tweets. Especially those who have lots of staff.

[Fawke Em]

26. Some do and some don't.

You can usually tell by how interactive with fans they are (the more interactive, the more likely its them and not staff).

Bernie's presidential campaign Twitter says it's manned by the staff, but I think he used to do some of his Senate account Tweets.

[itsrobert]

70. He's just two clicks away from releasing his tax returns

Well, maybe 6 or 8 clicks away.

[elleng]

22. You may be right, SheilaT,

but I find it difficult to believe she didn't have to type her own documents. I'm an attorney, a couple years older than hrc, and sure as hell had to type my own work (beginning in the early '80s, anyway.)

FINALS were done by the 'typing pool,' and they were VERY happy with computers and updates thereof; this was Fed government work.

[virgogal]

33. My brother learned to type in the early 1950s-----I didn't.

[JonathanRackham]

5. We live in an age of potential cyber terrorism.

Many of our politicians (and people in general) are dated and don't comprehend the extent of the technology that runs the world.

I have freaking computer chips that monitor my coffee pot, the toilet automatically flushes and my cats have ID and tracking chips in their ears.

[Fawke Em]

10. This!!

I work for a cyber security company. While I'm not a white-hat hacker or a security and compliance analyst, I am the content manager. I have to know the ins and outs of data security in order to write about it.

I don't expect everyone to be as security-minded as those who work at my company with me, but I do expect people to have basic knowledge of data security.

That said, I certainly expect the Secretary of Freakin' State to be HIGHLY competent in data security matters.

[SheilaT]

24. I was married to a man who did IT for a couple of decades.

He'd explain to me what he was doing, the security measures he put on his company's computers. Probably low-lever stuff compared to what you deal with, but it was still important enough to make sure that their servers were secure. Who knows who'd want to hack into an alcoholic beverage wholesale company and order cases of stuff that wouldn't need to be payed for?

Anyway, among the things I'm frequently surprised about is how many people use their work emails exclusively, for all of their personal as well as work communications. It's always struck me as a dumb idea, even without company policies to the contrary. Plus, if you leave that job, you need another email, and you lose the entire history of what you had before, which might be a bit of an inconvenience.

And that's without the sort of security issues a Secretary of State should be a fuck of a lot more aware of.

[Fawke Em]

29. I hardly use email for personal reasons anymore.

My family and friends primarily text me these days.

[Art_from_Ark]

71. I hate texting

It's much easier for me to use both hands and type the email on a computer. And that's especially true when I have to include attachments.

Texting in English is especially a pain. When I do have to text, I prefer to do it in Japanese, because the Japanese texting program will offer lots of suggestions merely by typing in one or two phonetic characters, and if I have previously used a word or phrase before that begins with that character, it will be at the top of the suggestion list.

[JonathanRackham]

25. Look at the amount of cyber credit card fraud.

That's the lower spectrum of cyber security too.

Look at the people who use 123456 or "PASSWORD" as their actual computer password.

malware, firewalls...............................................

[Fawke Em]

34. Yup.... my company does PCI compliance assessments.

The crap we find...

[jonmac511]

39. at least

I can accept that not being competent with data security doesn't automatically disqualify someone from being president. My problem is they need to at least acknowledge that incompetency and take every step necessary finding a remedy, especially when it comes to national security. If this is the real reason behind using her own personal server, exclusively, then she has no business holding the highest office in the land. Leadership is all about being proficient at delegating responsibility. To me, this whole thing being about incompetence might be worse than knowingly avoiding the rules.

[Fawke Em]

47. Agreed.

[merrily]

6. Sorry, but that makes no sense. Blackberry is no easier than a desktop or laptop.

One of the first things I read here way back when the email thing first hit the fan was that Hillary was too old to grok email. It was from a king or queen of pro-Hillary talking points and I spewed.

When Hillary floated her "Wipe? You mean, like with a cloth?" I thought, oh, noes. She is NOT going to try that while running for President, to pretend that she is that naive about technology.

So, now, it's that she can handle a Blackberry, but not a clunky desktop? Come on, now.

[Amaril]

61. Agreed -- makes no sense

BlackBerries are not user friendly devices, and checking email on one is WAY more cumbersome than on a desktop / laptop. The last two companies I have worked for issued one to me, and I HATED them. I'm fairly tech savvy and wasted way too much time -- and would usually have to resort to consulting the manual -- trying to do even simple things like changing the ringtone, for example. No so with my iPhone.

[Bob41213]

7. PCs are hard...

[img][/img]

[Fawke Em]

11. Social Engineering 101!!

That is Hillaryous!

I'm going to Tweet that (if I can figure out how. )

[Bob41213]

16. Sad thing is....

If you read the Lukens deposition, she wanted to install a computer that had no password on it so she wouldn't have to log on. I suspect her actual password was probably as suspect and probably shorter.

Maybe not because maybe someone set it up for her and she never had to actually type it.

[Cheese Sandwich]

65. LOL

[MgtPA]

9. Because the difference between email on the two platforms is....what, exactly?

[Fawke Em]

14. On the Blackberry, you push this thingie:

But on a PC, you have to push this thingie:

[Bob41213]

21. That's a damn right wing smear...

On the PC you probably have to hit that thing twice AND in rapid succession.

[Fawke Em]

36. Yes. We learned about that during the GOP's Outlook Icon Committee.

[SheilaT]

30. I have two email accounts, both are desktop icons

on my laptop AND my desktop. I double click and I'm automatically in. Not difficult at all.

I also keep a very lengthy file on my passwords, which I print up now and then to take with me when travelling, so I have easy access to them when I want to sign into some other site which doesn't allow my log-in and password to be automatically remembered from the laptop. It's a bit of a nuisance, but I probably have vastly more accounts than Hillary Clinton does, because I probably spend more time on the internet in ways that she doesn't.

A server in the basement in her home was never a good idea, and it's actually appalling that any respectable IT person would have been willing to set it up for her.

[noiretextatique]

68. Outlook can handle many email accounts

Other software can too. So can web-based email accoubts.

[Hiraeth]

12. Maybe she is planning on letting the VEEP do all the work while she reaps the praise and

benefits ...

[JoePhilly]

13. One minute you guys claim Hillary came up with her own network architecture ...

... and then the next you're complaining that she's not tech savvy enough.

You guys should just go argue with yourselves. You've already staked out both ends of the argument.

[NWCorona]

27. No one is saying she designed her server.

[elleng]

31. Who ever suggested she came up with her own network architecture?

[Fawke Em]

37. I've NEVER said that.

Mainly because I don't have my head in the sand about this case.

Bryan Pagliano set it up for her, but he, by the looks of it, didn't know much about data security.

[yodermon]

44. I think she asked Pagliano to set up a system that would be "off-book" completely

so that she could avoid FOIA completely. She obviously didn't have the skills herself (duh), and Pags was the best she could find to do it for her. Her turned out to be incompetent too, and has now been granted immunity for his testimony.

[div class="excerpt" style="box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888888;"]

May 26, 2016: Some on Clinton's campaign allegedly privately admit that Clinton tried to keep her emails from public scrutiny. Journalist Carl Bernstein says that Clinton "set up a home brew server for purposes of evading the Freedom of Information Act, evading subpoenas from Congress, that's its real purpose, to not have accountability, to not have transparency." He alleges, "if you talk to people around the Clinton campaign very quietly, they will acknowledge to you, if you are a reporter who knows some of the background, that this is the purpose of it. Is so she would not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. So that - because the e-mails aren't there, that nobody knew about this server."

Source: The Clinton Email Scandal Timeline ©2016 #ClintonEmailTimeline
http://thompsontimeline.com/Latest_Timeline_Entries
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1605/26/nday.05.html

[DisgustipatedinCA]

63. I'm challenging your claim as untrue.

Please give documentation for your claim.

[Attorney in Texas]

17. Reporter: "Did you wipe the server?" Hillary: "Like with a cloth or something?"

[randome]

18. And what are Sanders' computer qualifications?

For all you know he uses carrier finches to communicate with aides.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

[MgtPA]

23. Well, he is a Redditor, so there is that...

[randome]

41. All that means is he knows how to type. That pic of him doesn't exactly inspire tech confidence.

My point, though, is that it's silly to apply some sort of technology test to candidates. It only applies when one faction of DU is out to 'get' another.

The Sanders team was supposed to be all about the issues, not "her damn emails". Now it's about anything but.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

[Fawke Em]

58. I don't really care about her damn emails, either.

But I do care about her judgment. Having an unsecured server that contains national security information is a huge judgment blunder.

For me, it's not so much about the emails, themselves, but about the server.

And, yes, that is an issue.

[Ichingcarpenter]

19. She could have called Al Gore

I'm sure he could have helped.......... never mind

[Fawke Em]

40. I remember that room!

That was in his Brentwood home.

So, that had to be in 2007ish (before he and Tipper divorced and sold the home)

[Ichingcarpenter]

42. He endorsed Obama not Hillary ..

She didn't like that.





But there has never been much love between the Clintons and the Gores.

For good reason.....

[Fawke Em]

50. Al felt personally betrayed by Bill's lies about Monica.

Note: I used to be a reporter in Tennessee. I've know Al for years. IRL he is a hoot - always playing practical jokes on his staff.

I never met the Clintons, though.

[emulatorloo]

55. Gore definately knows the ends and outs of computer use.

Remember reading some articles at the time, very computer savvy.

[demmiblue]

20. I remember when DU excoriated McCain for his lack of technological abilities. n/t

[NWCorona]

32. But

[WhiteTara]

28. Trump wants to run the country but wants to source it out to someone else

unless he thinks it will be fun...and he can make money off it.

[Merryland]

35. like a grown-up child: can't drive, can't use a computer for email.

kind of pathetic - and being surrounded by sycophants whose only real jobs are to tend to your every whim.

[Scuba]

38. Ouch! That's gonna leave a mark!

[HereSince1628]

66. If she wasn't always spinning truth I'd give her the benefit of the doubt

and say that these things are within the range of common learning disabilities that carry into adulthood.

With specific reference to your comment...Automobiles (especially when backing/parking) and advanced Windows have a way of bringing to the foreground life-long learning disabilities. That's especially true for people whose dyspraxia involves spacial orientation/mental mapping as well as spatially organized planning in such things as flow charts and hierarchical groupings.

... to your comment on being a grown-up child... in England where this disorder is more openly discussed, it's often spoken of as a problem similar to arrested development in early childhood, although there is some evidence it may actually involve fetal delayed or incomplete neural development.

The odd thing is this sort of disability needn't impact all functions associated with good cognitive capacity. People can be great at displaying knowledge of rules of math, but incapable of story problems or application of what they know. High functioning careers that involve clear repetitive rules and simple rules and assumptions about human nature (law, politics...especially conservative politics) are possible for some people with this disorder.It all depends on the nature of their disabilities.

[OutNow]

43. She's not the only IT idiot

I was a developer for a very successful email product named PROFS back in the 1980s. It usually ran inside the enterprise. This was before the Internet and SMTP. It had over a million users at its peak. They used it at the White House during the Reagan administration. You might remember a famous PROFS user named Oliver North. He was caught in the Iran-Contra scandal because he actually thought that by selecting delete for an email it would disappear without a trace. Ha ha. He was wrong.

I was walking down executive row one morning and saw a secretary printing dozens of email messages. That was unusual enough, even 30 years ago. When I asked her what he was doing she told me that the Director (who worked for the largest IT company in the world and was the Director for office automation software ) didn't know how to use a computer terminal and didn't know how to read/reply to email. The secretary had to print out every email, deliver it to his office, and enter the replies later after retrieving the marked up paper.

HRC is just following in a long line of executive idiots.

[Fawke Em]

52. OMG!!!

I had forgotten about Oliver North! Thanks for the reminder!

For the record, I know what security software the Office of the President uses. We sell it to them. Obama and his office staff are very well-versed on cyber security.

[MH1]

64. I think that practice is not unheard of today.

I roll my eyes a little when I see the automatic sig line telling people to protect the environment and not print this email unless absolutely necessary. Roll my eyes but realize it is there because there are STILL people - typically executives - who have their email printed because they don't want to use the computer.

[BernieforPres2016]

45. Learning to send and receive emails on a computer is horribly complicated

It should take about 5 minutes for an IT person to show anybody with a room temperature IQ how to be reasonably proficient. I would think it wouldn't be beyond the grasp of a graduate of Wellesley and Yale Law School. But if Hillary says she doesn't want to do it, that's the end of the conversation.

[Ferd Berfel]

49. Yes but that sort of thing is for the Little People.

[Zen Democrat]

46. Isn't she supposed to be brilliant? A 5 year old can check email on a computer.

[Fawke Em]

53. My daughter was playing Minecraft at 3!

Maybe she should check Clinton's server. She couldn't do any worse than Pagliano.

[Ferd Berfel]

48. SHe didn't want the inconvenience of being open to

FOIA either, apparently

[tonyt53]

51. A good manager doesn't have to know everything about the tasks their employees do.

But a good manager makes sure that they have all the tools and support needed to get the job done and done properly. They also know what people to put on what jobs and projects. Pretty clear that there aren't a lot of managers on here, otherwise they would know that.

[Ford F-150]

67. Are you implying

That Hillary is some sort of super delegator who doesn't need to know how to use email?

[noiretextatique]

69. I think so

A good manager apparently let's her underlings handle her email.

[David__77]

54. So what?

Do you conclude something about that?

[brooklynite]

56. Could you point out the computer she'll need to work with?

[Fawke Em]

59. Yes. It's right here.

And, trust me, it's loaded with security software.



And here's the one he uses in the library:


Nice try.

On edit: He also has the regular office phone, which is a VOIP Cisco phone (the one standing up) and a secure landline phone in that picture you provided. All his communications are very protected.

[Darb]

57. Shark Jump!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let's see, how would I categorize this attack? I know it's.......................................

[felix_numinous]

62. If you don't understand the tech you don't understand the danger

Clintons seem to be stuck in the 90s and don't understand social media enough not to lie, or cybersecurity.