Sunday, March 22, 2015

Aliens and today's audience

I cheered.

Do they do that in theaters today? If so, I haven't seen it.

Audiences of which I was in cheered at Star Wars. They roared in approval when Reiser got his. They were in to it

I've been in quite a few movies of late that the audience clearly loved. Aliens. Avengers. A dozen others across genres, with the most recent being a more modest box-office title, "Kingsman."

It's not that I run out of the theaters early, with a well-practiced "Get off my lawn." No, I wait until the very end (and actually don't need to use the "Get off my lawn" cliche).

Either movies today do not inspire ovations of the kind found on Broadway, or people today aren't inspired to do so in general. I bet it is the former.

In Independence Day, the audience cheered and jumped up into applause when the first titan went down.

When will that happen again? And is the lack of it right now on the studios, or on us?

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

A Few Questions I Want Answered.

Mr. Halperin, let's put that to the test. Here are a few questions I have. If these are answered in an acceptable fashion, then I will consider it good enough.

  1. Why did you do this?
  2. Why did you ignore the state department manual which stated that "sensitive but unclassified information" should not be transmitted through personal e-mail accounts?
  3. Do you consider emails sent to or from you in the course of your duties as Secretary of State to be your property, or the property of the United States government?
  4. Of the emails turned over so far, why did you have them delivered in printed form, with no metadata and headers?
  5. When will you be turning over all of the emails in their original, electronic form including all metadata and the full internet headers?
  6. Given that the law requires all emails regarding "the formulation and execution of basic policies and decisions and the taking of necessary actions; records that document important meetings; records that facilitate action by agency officials and their successors in office," why had you not turned these over until you had been requested?
  7. What were the complete technical specifications of every part of the email system involved with clintonemail.com? Please include any filtering service (such as MXLogic), any software used, and what hardware was used.
  8. Was there automatic, tamper-proof archiving? If not, why?
  9. Who chose the specific ISP to use, and what information was used to make that choice?
  10. When will you be turning over any and all hardware for forensic analysis?
  11. If you have nothing to hide, why are you trying to control what to turnover and what you get to hold on to? Should that not be done by someone completely independent of you?
  12. Were there emails regarding the Clinton Foundation sent or received through any of your personal accounts? If so, will you provide those to an independent auditor who can look for potential conflicts of interest that you may have a reason to want withheld?
  13. Who was involved in maintaining this system? What security testing was performed? What was the backup schedule? Where are the backups? Which software patches were applied, and when?
  14. If there was nothing sensitive nor classified on these emails, why all the redactions when they are being released?

On a few of these, only a few answers are acceptable. For example, all of the "when will" questions need to be answered "within a few days at the latest."

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Make Legal What HRC Did

If I were a GOP Congressman, I would introduce bills to do the following:

  1. Repeal the Freedom of Information Act
  2. Forbid any part of the Executive Branch, excepting for overseas offices, from banning the use of personal emails for the conduct of official government business.

The FOIA has proven itself to be ineffective in producing a transparency when faced with determined resistance. We end up getting sanitized information from the corrupt and the unvarnished truth from the moral; the former get protected and the latter get embarrassed or worse. The cost simply is not worth it.

For the latter, a similar argument can be made. It is unenforceable, and restrains only those whose ethics do not need restraining; the dishonest simply ignore such restrictions.

This is a conversation we should be having. After all, there is nothing wrong with failing to be forthright with FOIA requests, nor in avoiding those inconvenient government email systems. At least, I hear very smart people saying this. And the voters don't care, anyways, they say. Let's get these bills on the calendar, and open the floor for debate.

[Edited to add: On second thought, let's hold up and take time in drafting these bills. The wrong time to debate something is when something is fresh in the news; that leads to rash decisions and poor legislation. No, a better approach would be to take some time and wait until the current furor wanes. Once it is all behind us, when we've moved on, when the current story is old news, then that is when we should engage in this very public debate. I am certain the press will take interest.]

Friday, March 6, 2015

But then, maybe they couldn't afford $0.85 per user per month on their small system

If Begala knows what he's talking about, then this is significant. Why?

Click this link, make sure it is on the DNS records tab, and scroll down to the MX records. Don't worry if you don't know how to read them- this isn't going to be hard. Do you see how the MX records list clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogicmx.net and clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogic.net? Those records say, "direct emails for this domain (clintonemails.com) to those servers", and those servers are mxlogic.com servers.

The Clitnonemails.com domain is set up to pipe its emails through MXLogic, which is now owned by McAfee. Their service provides email filtering-- spam removal and, more importantly, blocking of malicious email such as phishing attempts and other email-based cyber attacks.

But they also offer archiving services.

What kind of archiving services? This kind. Especially read the section on page 2 under "Document Compliance Made Easy." I screen-grabbed a few excerpts here:

Click on each picture to expand- or just read the brochure I linked. [Edited to add: It turns out it is harder to get to the images in an embedded tweet than I would like. The relevant section says, in part:

  • Tamperproof read-only storage—Messages and message metadata are protected in their original state
  • Dual data centers—Eliminates the threat of a single point of failure, ensuring that no message is ever lost
  • Automatic quality verification—Verifies that stored message copies are identical to the originals
  • Dual commit message capture—Messages aren’t deleted from your email server until accurate copies have been made and verified
  • Auditable message serialization—Adds a unique numeric identifier to each message to comply with SEC requirements that prohibit tampering or deletion of messages
  • Transport and storage encryption—Messages are transported securely via TLS or SSL, and are stored using 256-bit encryption
]

While I did not get a price quote from them directly, I did find this, which does have pricing for McAfee's services as an authorized re-seller. You can bet that these are not far from what it would be. The Email Security & Archiving Suite with Multi-Year Retention? $3.67 per user/month. Given the small number of users on the Clintonemail.com domain, it would be an inconsequential amount for the Clintons. The option without archiving? $2.82 per user/month.

If Hillary has a "non-archival compliant" system, it is because they chose not to spend an extra $0.85 per user per month. And as anyone who has ever signed up for one of these services knows, they try to up-sell you when you do; no way they didn't hear all of the benefits of the extra cost.

[Edited to add: Of course, this means there will never be an incriminating email in anything HRC's camp turns over or has turned over. They're long gone. If there was anything bad, the only way it will come out is from anyone on the other end of those emails, or anyone who intercepted one. Such a person would have some leverage, don't you think?]

{Edited again to add: Also note that the archiving service includes transport and storage encryption. This would have prevented things like a system administrator from being able to read the archived emails-- a nice bit of security that they simply chose to not spend a pittance to get.]