Bob78164 wrote:BackInTex wrote:But the FBI says as long as you weren't intending to break the law, it's O.K.
Deliberately exposing classified data is a crime. Accidentally exposing it is not.
I've explained this before but everyone forgot. What Clinton did wrong was using her private unclassified email, instead of the State Dept. unclassified email system, for work-related messages. It violates a number of government rules, in particular that all correspondence must be archived for future historians.
When the emails were reviewed before public release, some words or sentences were redacted because they were judged to be classified, mostly in emails that she received or forwarded. If Clinton happened to notice such an infraction, she should have warned the original author to be more careful. I've seen errors like that when I worked for a defense contractor. I've heard of a few extreme cases where the server had to be wiped clean to remove all traces of the classified information, but I've never seen that myself.
Clinton was ridiculed for not knowing what portion markings like (C) and (S) mean. They identify paragraphs that by themselves have a lower classification than the document was a whole. A paragraph can't have a higher classification than the whole document, so portion markings in an unclassified email are meaningless. If somebody quotes a sentence from a classified document in an unclassified email, he should make sure the sentence isn't classified and remove the portion marking.
All these issues are exactly the same on government or private email systems. Clinton made matters worse by using a private server instead of a commercial email service like Gmail. I don't know if the private server was less secure, but it looked bad.
None of these bad practices are crimes. If Clinton had sent information that she knew was classified in her private email, or copied something from a classified document without looking it over, that could be criminal.
I'm done with my little lesson. The Bored partisans can ignore it and return to hurling insults back and forth. Social media are the same way nowadays. No wonder we end up with politicians who are good at attacking their opponents and not much else.