Blog Post

AEIdeas

We already know that Hillary Clinton’s emails contain at least 47 references to CIA personnel or matters related to the agency.

We also know that Clinton’s email server was unprotected and vulnerable to foreign hackers.

And we further know that foreign governments have successfully penetrated and read emails of top US officials.

According an August 2015 NBC News report:

China’s cyber spies have accessed the private emails of “many” top Obama administration officials, according to a senior US intelligence official and a top secret document obtained by NBC News, and have been doing so since at least April 2010. The email grab — first codenamed “Dancing Panda” by US officials, and then “Legion Amethyst” — was detected in April 2010, according to a top secret NSA briefing from 2014. The intrusion into personal emails was still active at the time of the briefing and, according to the senior official, is still going on.

And according to an April 2015 New York Times report:

Some of President Obama’s email correspondence was swept up by Russian hackers last year in a breach of the White House’s unclassified computer system that was far more intrusive and worrisome than has been publicly acknowledged, according to senior American officials briefed on the investigation. The hackers … also got deeply into the State Department’s unclassified system.

It is implausible that these foreign hackers failed to target Clinton’s private emails as well, which were far less protected than the White House and State Department unclassified email systems.

But these foreign hackers may not have known how valuable some of the intelligence information they possessed really was – until the State Department provided them with a road map.

The Associated Press reports:

Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, turned over to the State Department 55,000 emails from her private server that were sent or received when she was secretary of state. Some contained information that has since been deemed classified, and those were redacted for public release with notations for the reason of the censorship. At least 47 of the emails contain the notation “B3 CIA PERS/ORG,” which indicates the material referred to CIA personnel or matters related to the agency. And because both Clinton’s server and the State Department systems were vulnerable to hacking, the perpetrators could have those original emails, and now the publicly released, redacted versions showing exactly which sections refer to CIA personnel. “Start with the entirely plausible view that foreign intelligence services discovered and rifled Hillary Clinton’s server,” said Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who spent more than three years as an assistant secretary of the Homeland Security Department and is former legal counsel for the National Security Agency. If so, those infiltrators would have copies of all her emails with the names not flagged as being linked to the agency. In the process of publicly releasing the emails, however, classification experts seem to have inadvertently provided a key to anyone who has the originals. By redacting names associated with the CIA and using the “B3 CIA PERS/ORG” exemption as the reason, “Presto — the CIA names just fall off the page,” Baker said.

Just when you think the Clinton email scandal can’t get any worse, it does. Clinton’s dereliction of her responsibility to protect classified information, combined with State Department incompetence, may have handed foreign spy agencies the names of covert CIA assets and classified agency information on a silver platter.

So how likely is it that these CIA sources and methods were compromised? The AP writes:

The AP discovered last year that Clinton’s private server was directly connected to the internet in ways that made it more vulnerable to hackers. A recent State Department inspector general’s report indicated the server was temporarily unplugged by a Clinton aide at one point during attacks by hackers, but her campaign has said there’s no evidence the server was hacked.

In other words, highly likely.