Why Hillary Clinton's Homebrew Email Is a Political Nightmare - Gizmodo

Gizmodo, by Adam Clack Estes

You've probably heard: Hillary Clinton used a private, personal email address for all of her official business as Secretary of State. She didn't even have a State Department email address. As a result, her email was far from secure — and that is a big problem, but it's not the only one.

The security issue is just one of many disconcerting things about Clinton's secretive email habits. Perhaps more importantly, it's politically problematic that Clinton kept all of her work emails off the books, on a private server. That means she blatantly violated President Obama's promise for better transparency in the government. (She's hardly the first Obama-appointed official to break this promise, but oh well.)

But transparency aside, the main problem is that Clinton seems to have done a pretty shitty job securing her private email server — and endangered national security as a result.

I talked to security experts at Kaspersky Lab about how Clinton made herself vulnerable to hackers by exclusively using a homebrew email system, and their answer was basically, how didn't she make herself vulnerable."From a technical perspective, a cabinet member using a homemade solution means adding an array of technologies and middlemen through whom the United States government can effectively be severely compromised," Researcher Patrick Nielsen said.

That doesn't sound good at all. Clinton's private email system added third parties into the equation, meaning that a hacker could effectively snoop on US government mail without directly hacking US government servers. Nielsen explained that the domain Clinton used for her private email service—clintonemail.com—is owned by a Florida company called "Perfect Privacy, LLC" and registered to another private company called Network Solutions. The relationship between the two companies is unclear since some details have been masked. Read more.