Hillary Clinton Email Scandal_ Clinton email scandal shows we don't take security seriously enough

THE HILL

July 14, 2016, 08:04 am

Clinton email scandal shows we don't take security seriously enough

By Joseph Blady, contributor



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The week following FBI Director Jim Comey's appearance before a congressional committee, the crux of the problem with Hillary Clinton's email suddenly became clear, at least for me.

In an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Mark McKinnon, a longtime political operative and strategist who has worked for politicians of both parties, made the comment that it didn't matter that former Secretary of State Clinton gave her classified emails to her lawyers, who didn't have security clearances; McKinnon was being "pragmatic," as he said, as opposed to "legal," and that it wasn't as though the lawyers would be speaking to the North Koreans.

At the same time, many of Clinton's supporters have insisted that we move off the email issue and the fact that she continues to lie about it, because we have to get on with the real issues of the presidential campaign. After all, even Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), her former rival for the Democratic nomination, said long ago that the email issue didn't matter.

For those of us who have had careers relating to national defense, it would be easy to take McKinnon's comments as approaching the idiotic and write them off as the unfortunate attitude of a single individual, but taken together with the feelings of many average Americans, one sees an interesting paradox. It is safe to say that everyone wants a secure America, but there seems to be a complete disconnect between that security and the importance of safeguarding classified information.

The fact that Clinton's lawyers aren't about to talk to the North Koreans does not make it OK to trust them with the information. Are we sure that law clerks and secretaries won't see the information? Is it inconceivable that the contents of those emails won't become conversational fodder for card games or beauty parlors? If McKinnon's logic holds, it's OK to provide nuclear weapons to "good" countries, because they'd never use them and would always keep them secure.

Our national security establishment hasn't done itself any favors by grossly exaggerating how many documents need to be classified, and we are drowning in them. A little more circumspection about what gets classified would make it harder for people as careless as the members of Clinton's staff to claim they did nothing wrong. We cannot get into the habit of distributing classified information insecurely.

The point is that a nation with diminishing appetite for doing anything difficult or bothersome wants security without the need to attend to things like security clearances and procedures. We leave babies in cars "for just a moment" while running into stores; we leave "unloaded" handguns lying around while we grab a soda; we violate enemy airspace with patrol aircraft to gather critical intelligence. All are OK "pragmatically," but statistically, all will have tragic consequences sooner or later. That's exactly why none of these actions actually passes legal muster.

It is a nuisance to sit and wait for a security clearance for many months (the current backlog of people waiting for clearances is approaching 1 million), to double-wrap secure material before transporting it and to carry email accounts on properly secured computers, but the simple truth is that information is power. Even when it is open-source, its use leads to terrorist events like the destruction of a commercial airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland, or the bombing of a passenger train in Spain or a subway station in London. Information is even more critical to safety when national secrets are involved. If we're going to be serious about our security, we will, unfortunately, have to be serious about our secure information.

People have died in every one of our wars because of well-documented sloppiness when dealing with information that got into enemy hands. (Who can forget "Loose lips sink ships"?) Someday, such sloppiness might result in the use of nuclear or biological material on American soil. When thousands of civilians, rather than just soldiers and intelligence officers, die from breaches of national security, people might finally connect the fact that those annoying rules about handling classified information might actually have something to do with keeping Americans safe. Then, maybe the casual attitude about Hillary Clinton and her emails might finally end. As my first boss used to say, things have to hit rock bottom before they change.

Blady, M.D., is a former program officer for the undersecretary of Defense for policy and senior analyst for the under secretary of Defense for intelligence.

COMMENT: 36

READ MORE: http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/homeland-security/287687-clinton-email-scandal-shows-we-dont-take-security

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