Hmmm... People don't seem to understand why Hillary might choose to manage her emails the way she did as SOS. But as an experienced software/systems engineer who worked on government programs, I completely get it.
For a brief outline of why, continue reading below the fold.
Ok, so we obviously all understand what it's like to have a cell phone, email, etc. But until you've been in the classified underbelly of technology, you have no clue how ugly it can be.
It is a whole 'nother world - the world where your IT department gets so spun up about security that they lose all common sense. I worked in a company that had access to classified information, and that world is very different from the world everyone else lives in, technologically speaking. In that environment, your IT folks become obsessed with security. Even when not dealing with the classified side (which is mighty ugly) they become so overly cautious about every little thing, so totally risk averse, that your tools start to decay of old age. (Oh, and don't forget that they're also understaffed, underfunded, and a bit, well, paranoid about losing their job.)
If you want to rob people of their productivity, and make them 200 times less efficient and effective, just let the security fanatics get control of your IT department. Here's one small example of what it's like in that world: IT installed automated policies for irrationally complex passwords that had to be refreshed (changed) every couple of months. We couldn't use tools to manage multiple logins through the same password, so we were constantly juggling multiple passwords for each of the multiple tool/system logins. Oh, and, just for the fun of it, there were often slightly different, conflicting, rules for password composition. (Doesn't sound so bad? Try remembering the latest set of crazy passwords after a long weekend. And no cheating: writing them down was against company security policy.) Don't think this was a long time ago, either. All this was going on in the past 4 years - during the time Clinton was SOS (not that this practice has likely changed since then).
As Hillary saw it, she had the legal option to avoid using the system provided by the IT department (probably running on a shoestring and infested with rampant security paranoia). And she chose to use her own email server (which apparently was quite secure and well managed). I understand why she might make that choice and I'm pretty certain I would have done the same thing.
I watched NBC news covering this story a bit yesterday. On the news, the reporter essentially claimed Hillary was being dishonest when she stated that emails she sent to others in the State department were in the department's official email archive. The reporter highlighted that the State department's email archiving system was fraught with problems and most emails were not backed up and saved as they should have been. The news report clearly identified the failure to properly maintain email archives as a long-term problem for the State department, not unique to Clinton's tenure. The funny part (and yes, the reporter said this with a straight face) was that the reporter implied the State department's email archival problem was just another example of this great big eGhazi Clinton scandal - as if this reinforced the claim that this was part of Clinton's big plan to defraud the American public. Oh yes, and of course they will continue digging to uncover more dirt - er, facts.
Why doesn't the media add the kind of background the general population needs to understand why our SOS would choose to use her personal server email account if it were a legal option? Maybe because that would expose the fact that this is really just a very mundane case - not worthy of so much media and public attention.