How the ‘Texts From Hillary’ Photo Sparked an Inquiry Into Clinton’s Emails

[NWCorona]

"Never let anyone tell you memes don’t matter. That famous image of Hillary Clinton looking chill with her Blackberry actually prompted a government official to inquire about the status of her State Department email account. No one listened, and here we are now.

In a deposition this week, State Department official Karin Lang revealed some new details about the photo’s wacky history. Lang testified that the government knew that Clinton didn’t plan to use her official email address back in 2008 or 2009. Then the photo of Hillary wearing sunglasses and looking at her phone appeared in late 2011, and Clarence Finney from the office that handles FOIA requests got curious.

“When Mrs. Clinton’s photo appeared in the media with her using appearing to use some sort of a mobile device, Clarence Finney checked with [information management staff] to confirm... whether the answer was still that she did not have a State.gov e-mail account,” Lang said in her testimony.


Well, the inquiry didn’t go very far at the time, but the photo went viral in 2012. It spawned a dedicated Tumblr called “Texts from Hillary,” a blog post from Hillary herself, a Maureen Dowd column, a tweet from Questlove, and many LOLs all around. However, we now know that the photo raised some concern about her secretive email habits years before the controversy and FBI probe and endless discussion. Just yesterday, Donald Trump referred to the email conspiracy after Hillary’s “delete your account” burn. (To be fair, though, everyone has been referring to the email conspiracy.)

Again, according to Lang’s testimony this week at the Justice Department, Finney was “told at the outset” that Hillary wouldn’t use an official email account. And then Finney followed up when he saw the now iconic photo. But imagine an alternate universe where Finney’s inquiry had been taken more seriously. Hillary had been using that private server for a while by 2011, but that’s still years of secret emails that could have been avoided. Instead, all we got was this amazing meme."


http://gizmodo.com/how-the-texts-from-hillary-photo-sparked-an-inquiry-i-1781746629

It's something that one of the most iconic photos of Hillary would spark this.

[unc70]

1. People in tech security discussed openly at time

People in tech security discussed this whole issue back when the photo came out. We had no hint at that time of how seriously insecure her whole email system was. Our discussions were more generic, about the difficulties providing secure communications to far flung embassies and diplomats in the modern world. The diplomatic pouch is a tough standard.

Clinton's frequent use in public of mobile devices seemed inherently problematic on all levels. She appeared to be using her devices on the local infrastructures, immediately making everything vulnerable to "man in the middle" attacks and to hacking. To provide her with her own portable infrastructure worldwide and thus a private access point seemed too difficult to be likely. None of our discussions on the BB considered that she could be using the BB for so much of her communications.

Some of these discussions were in public online forums. I will try to find some of them to refresh my memories of the mood back then.

[NWCorona]

2. I frequent a few tech sites and I remember some of the discussions as well

I remember when a fellow member posed the question, What if her BlackBerry connected to public cell towers? I said that would be ludicrous but boy was I wrong. It was of the shelf with everything routed through the Canadian servers and all.