From The Daily Mail:
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary's email firm was run from a loft apartment with its servers in the BATHROOM, raising new questions over security of sensitive messages she held
Really? From a loft, with servers in the bathroom?
The Daily Mail article continues to quote a former employee, Tera Dadiotis, who described the company as a 'mom-and-pop' shop. Dadiotis said, "At the time I worked for them they wouldn't have been equipped to work for Hilary Clinton because I don't think they had the resources, they were based out of a loft, so [it was] not very high security, we didn't even have an alarm."
The article notes that the last time Dadiotis worked for them was 2010.
I like using the "Wayback Machine", aka The Internet Archive. Let's take a look at some things. I poked around on their website's archive circa 2013 (when the server was migrated to them), and found this description of services, originally posted in 2012 but still applicable through 2014 (or later). Notice what it says:
Offsite/Online/Data Center Backup
- Fully Automated Backups Held on Disk for Rapid File Restoration
- Secure Online Transfer of Fully Encrypted Data to an Offsite Data Center
- 24x7 Live Customer Support
- Immediate Access to Restore Data
Italics and underlining added by me for highlighting.
The company was run out of a loft, but the data center, where the [ETA: backup] information was stored, was elsewhere, not in the bathroom.
A press release from 2013 bragged that Platte River was named by Inc. Magazine as "one of the fastest growing companies in America for 2013." Further, the press release asserted them to be "a national leader in the managed services and cloud industry." That hardly sounds 'mom-and-pop' at that time to me.
All of this leaves me with a few questions. The Daily Mail tracked down "ex-employees" of Platte River, including the aforementioned Dadiotis (who was undoubtedly telling the truth about what the company was like back during her tenure). Why did they track down employees from years earlier, when the company was much smaller? Why weren't they talking to current employees who had been there merely two years ago?
Why are they publishing an article talking about what Platte River was like "At the time [Dadiotis] worked for them", 2010 and earlier, and making it sound like this was how it was when they started their involvement with the Clinton server? Why is this article pushing the false impression of the company, minimizing what they do and what their capabilities and offerings are and were in 2013?
Just sloppy reporting? Or is the false impression being deliberately pushed?
I can't help but remember back to earlier Clinton scandals, when false information would get pushed and then used as evidence of a vast right-wing conspiracy against them.
Probably just a coincidence.
Edited to add: The data center, which is where the servers were (and not just backups), was in New Jersey, as The Daily Caller reported last week.
Edited to add, again: Neil Stevens has convinced me that the Intuition brochure linked above suggests that only the backup services were in the offline data center. As such, I have struck-through the last part of the article. However, The points regarding Dadiotis being employed 3 years earlier, before the company grew to a $6M revenue company, remains as does my estimation that it was hardly 'mom-and-pop' by the time the Clinton server entered the picture.
That said, it is possible that there was a server located in a closet and I retract my confident assertion that it wasn't.
