Any email you have that is 6 months or older is free to be read by almost any law enforcement from local to federal level, without warrant.
Why do you think President Clinton setup a private email server in the first place? The law was signed just before his presidency and he was advised of this.
> The group also apparently gained access to a number of government Web portals and applications, including the Joint Automated Booking System (a portal that provides law enforcement with data on any person's arrest records, regardless of whether the cases are ordered sealed by courts) and government employee personnel records
Why is it that sealed arrest records are not actually sealed?
I've always struggled with the concept and purpose of a 'sealed" record. It's like the justice system is trying to have its cake and eat it too -- they want to keep a record that someone went through a judicial process, but the details must not be revealed? Why not just wipe the record and replace it with some sort of generic "John Doe had a legal proceeding on date X"?
Doesn't 'sealed' imply that is retrievable, just not under most circumstances? As opposed to expunged. As I understand it, a court order can allow certain parties to access a 'sealed' record as part of different investigation in the future. It's just that your employer doesn't get to see the whole thing every time they run a background check on you.
Why there isn't a proper threshold cryptosystem and chain of custody of keys for sealed records? Well, that's a different question. The answer is probably along the lines of "the justice system doesn't get tech" or "the people who could demand this don't know about it or don't care enough" or even "thus far the implementation has worked ok...".
Yeah, I know. Still, it is interesting how when it comes to catching suspected criminals everything is relatively high-tech: optical license plate recognition, fake cell towers, biometrics, drones, etc. Yet when it comes to protecting civil rights, any solution that is newer than the bill of rights itself is suspiciously absent.
Even expunged records can still be accessed by military and intelligence agencies. At a local (sometimes state) level, once an expungement order is processed the record is physically shredded, usually along with the expungement order itself. Federally the records are marked as expunged but it makes sense that if you're joining the military or applying for a job with an intelligence agency, that they should know about the court interaction, expunged or otherwise.
Here's a corporate trial. To prosecute their case that a competitor stole some of their trade secrets, they have to reveal to the court what those trade secrets are. ("They stole our secret stuff, but we won't tell you what" doesn't fly in court - even SCO got burned eventually for trying it.)
But you don't want that stuff sitting in a court record that anyone can walk in off the street and ask to see. So part of the record get sealed - not available to the public. It's still available to the judge, and to the (outside) counsel for the other side, and to the appeals judge if things go that far.
And only certain details get protected. One side has to ask for it, and the other side can protest, and the judge has to weigh the protection for the side that wants it sealed against the interest of the public to know what went on. More, a redacted version is (usually?) released eventually.
As far as I can tell the main purpose of sealing a criminal record is to free the subject from the employment discrimination that comes with having a criminal record. It can and will be opened again in future interactions with the government, but stops preventing private-sector employment.
Right after high school, a friend got into a lot of trouble. The judge gave him the option of joining the military or going to prison. If that record was open, the military couldn't consider him. It sucked for him, but it sucked way less than being an ex con.
The military knew. That record didn't need to be sealed. What you friend went through was most likely a diversionary program. Proceedings were stayed, and eventually dismissed, prior to him being formally charged (or convicted, depending on the exact procedure). So there is an arrest record, but not a conviction per se. The military doesn't take issue with arrests.
That said, someone in the military looked over the case and oked your friend. Someone knew. A judge cannot force the army to take someone they don't want, nor hide information from them. The army is also not a dumping ground for criminals. Someone saw value in your friend, something that the military could use. He probably did well. Most young recruits from such alternative enlistment paths work out great.
"Sealed" implies the record is reasonably inaccessible to the general public, but still easily accessible to law enforcement. When you are arrested, law enforcement, and especially prosecutors, will be very interested in what you have been convicted before previously, especially if your state has a "three strikes" law (where you can end up with life in prison for your third felony conviction, regardless of the seriousness of the felonies) or something similar.
Oddly, neither the anonymous hacker(adjective not group), nor a high ranking gov't intelligience officer were available to comment on this twitter picture we found on facebook after it had trickled down from 4chan to reddit.
Good. Let's have the pastebin, please. This is the same guy who lied to Congress, which lie was exposed just a couple months later, and nothing happened.
I'll be not surprised if it contains some bitching about congress trying to bring accountability. I could care less about it. These guys are in the business of finding loop holes and using it. They will lie if they can get away with it
Once you go high enough in most organisations, appointment becomes political and / or based upon leadership and vision.
Assuming senior intelligence folks practice good tradecraft is a little like assuming that the CEO of a software company is a gun programmer. Often not true, and sometimes for good reason.
More often than not, for a bad reason though. Put Ballmer vs Gates or Nadella as a CEO, or, I'd argue, Schmidt vs Page. And, in a crystal ball moment, I'd predict whomever follows Zuck won't be as good as him if he/she has no technical skill. I'd take a technical person who can follow the track of where things are headings "vision" over a bean-counting MBA or "leadership" expert any day of the week for guiding an organization based on technology.
i always expect these senior intelligence guys to have the most disciplined security around (like snowden).
When you're powerful (or rich) enough to be on the winning side of the political and justice systems, your independent and individual security is much less of a priority. The system will take care of you.
Scooter Libby was disbarred. Edward Snowden is stuck in Russia.
I dislike the word "hacked" as used here because it can mean anything and everything. I hope we get some real actionable information on what went down. There are no real details included other then they were able to access email accounts. Looks like maybe social engineering?
Perhaps you'd care to expound? I suspect you hold this opinion due to your age, though I can't be sure as I don't have much to go off of.
Hacking to my understanding is exploring a system of rules, learning them inside and out and using those rules in expected and unexpected ways to control the system to your own desired effect, which may be constructive or destructive in nature.
I grew up during a time when individuals were doing this with the phone system and computers and other technologies and this included understanding and utilizing social dynamics and interaction to achieve a desired effect, usually gaining access to information that could be leveraged towards further hacking.
No different than a con artist. It seems to me when techies do conning they call it social engineering. In other words, a social engineer is a techie con artist.
Also, AFAIK, you cannot be compelled at this point to provide a PIN/password (short of the rubber hose) but someone can just use your finger to unlock a phone. Yes, tradeoffs but the convenience factor is not worth it IMO.
The problem is that it's personal email, therefore, not the governments business or problem. That's why they aren't allowed to use their personal email for work purposes.
For the really important stuff, they don't even cell remote access. You have to do everything at a secure location.
> That's why they aren't allowed to use their personal email for work purposes
Since when?
I agree it should be the policy, but it's not. Evidenced by Hillary Clinton's scandal[1], as well as the recent Director of the CIA[2]. In neither case (so far) has the individual been punished. In Hillary's case, the State Department is even siding with her use of private email for official business (including recently discovered classified documents with the header deleted [3]).
It's easy to dismiss the contents of their personal email and social media as irrelevant but surely they represent possible attack vectors for extortion or worse.
What they need is to blacklist personal email so a compromise there doesn't grant the keys to the cattle. It shouldn't be possible for any government employee to correspond through their private a accounts.
