Hillary Clinton Dismantled State Department's Cyberdefenses

by JASmius



This story isn't even much of an extrapolation, when you stop and consider it:

The State Department was among the worst agencies in the federal government at protecting its computer networks while Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary from 2009 to 2013, a situation that continued to deteriorate as John Kerry took office and Russian hackers breached the department’s email system, according to independent audits and interviews.

The State Department’s compliance with federal cybersecurity standards was below average when [Mrs.] Clinton took over but grew worse in each year of her tenure, according to an annual report card compiled by the White House based on audits by agency watchdogs. Network security continued to slip after Kerry replaced [Mrs.]
Clinton in February 2013, and remains substandard, according to the State Department inspector general.

In each year from 2011 to 2014, the State Department’s poor cybersecurity was identified by the inspector general as a “significant deficiency” that put the department’s information at risk. The latest assessment is due to be published in a few weeks.

Part of that is simply the Foggy Bottom culture: the diplomatic mindset that requires us to be trusting in order to win the trust of our enemies, that demands we extend olive branches and beat our swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks to prove our willingness to make war no more so that our enemies will follow suit.  The inevitable result of such nonsense is all-out war on those enemies' initiative and a debilitating inability to resist that onslaught.  On a cyber level, this is what has been going on for years under the Obama Regime, and this story is just the tip of the iceberg.

It's also illustrative of how Emailgate is simply this culture, this much bigger disaster, in microcosm, and how it is not "incompetence" - not after this many years and this many inspector-general warnings - but deliberate policy choice.

To lend some perspective, remember the ChiComm plundering of Office of Personnel Management current and former employee dossiers?  OPM had higher cybersecurity standards and safeguards than Hillary's State Commissariat.

And this despite Mrs. Clinton....

....approv[ing] significant increases in the State Department’ information technology budgets while she was secretary, but senior State Department officials say she did not spend much time on the department’s cyber vulnerabilities. She was aware of State’s technological shortcomings but was focused more on diplomacy, her emails show.

i.e. Selling out our country to our enemies and demolishing America's allies, power, and influence.  And why not?  Shut down State's cyberdefenses and she doesn't even have to do most of that work herself.  For our enemies, it becomes a buffet, a cafeteria from which they can pick and choose from the whole gamut of U.S. secrets and classified intel at their leisure.  Combine that with the recent stories of top Hillary lieutenants Huma Abedin-Wiener and Cheryl Mills following their mistress's horrible emailing example and the culture of collaboration at State is revealed as universal.

And now we know another, bigger reason why the Obama Regime has (mostly) tried to downplay Emailgate right alongside La Clinton Nostra.  It's another on-ramp for grasping the full scope, reach, and magnitude of how thoroughly the Obama Regime has betrayed the United States to every foreign power and entity that wishes to supplant and/or destroy us.

Trey Gowdy's little interview with the Empress this Thursday just gained a honking bigger context, methinks.


UPDATE: This is not directly related, but it is equally unsurprising:

CIA Director John Brennan used his personal AOL account to store work-related documents, a high school student who claims to have hacked them, tells the New York Post.

The material included Brennan's application for top-secret security clearance, the Social Security numbers and personal data of American intelligence officials and a letter about "harsh interrogation techniques" used on terror suspects, according to the newspaper.

"I can't believe he did this to the head of the CIA. [emphases added]

I sure as hell do.

[The] problem with these older-generation guys is that they don't know anything about cybersecurity, and as you can see, it can be problematic," a law enforcement source told the Post.

THE F'ING DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY DID THE SAME DAMN THING HILLARY CLINTON DID.

Bloody hell.

How is it any of us are still breathing?