Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday defended her use of a private email address during her tenure as the U.S.'s top diplomat, saying that it was more convenient to use one device for both her government work and personal life, though she admitted she would have done things different in retrospect.
"Looking back it would have been better to use separate phones and two separate e-mail accounts," Clinton said following a keynote address at a Women's Empowerment Principles event at the United Nations in New York. "I thought using one device would be simpler; obviously, it hasn't worked out that way."
Clinton, who is a leading Democratic 2016 presidential contender, repeatedly insisted she didn't violate any rules, and says she didn't attempt to hide her communications, as many critics have alleged.
Security experts have criticized not only her choice to use email accounts hosted from her home server, but also her decision to host her email domain through a 'consumer grade' company that was hacked in 2010. This is especially concerning due to the nature of Clinton's job, where she routinely dealt with classified information that could damage national interests, say critics.
"I fully complied by every rule I was governed by," Clinton said during her 20-minute news conference, adding that she never sent any classified material from the account, which was protected by "numerous safeguards."
There were "no security breaches," Clinton said, though hackers are often able to infiltrate and steal information without being discovered, and it's unlikely that Clinton could know whether her emails had been covertly intercepted.
Reporters from Bloomberg spoke with a few digital forensics experts who expressed concern over the configuration of Clinton's private email system.
"Although Clinton worked hard to secure the private system, her consultants appear to have set it up with a misconfigured encryption system, something that left it vulnerable to hacking," said Alex McGeorge, head of threat intelligence at Immunity Inc., a Miami Beach-based digital security firm.
Clinton spoke briefly about the 55,000 pages of emails she turned over to the State Department for review, saying that she "chose not to keep" personal emails such as those related to her family and yoga schedules. But the fact that Clinton had time to sift through emails and filter out the ones she didn't like leaves many worried that she could have easily deleted any wrongdoings.
"The only reason to use a private email system for official government communication is to keep information from becoming public and covering your tracks," Cause of Action Executive Director Dan Epstein said in an email to reporters, according to The Daily Caller. "Sec. Clinton should have known that what she was doing violated the letter and spirit of the law. This isn't a matter of poor judgment; this is a deliberate and orchestrated violation of the public trust that raises serious legal and ethical concerns."
Some have suggested that Clinton may have even violated the Espionage Act by retaining classified information, a law that the Obama administration has used repeatedly against whistleblowers.
NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake and James Hitselberger were charged by the Justice Department for sending classified documents to an archive at the Hoover Institution, and former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee was charged with 10 counts of retaining classified data for storing information on tapes, noted the Huffington Post.
Then there is former CIA director and top general David Petraus, who recently pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of mishandling classified information by storing eight notebooks of highly classified secrets in his home and giving the data to his biographer and mistress.
If Clinton stored any classified information on her personal email, she at least violated Executive Order 13526 and possibly 18 U.S.C. Sec. 793(f), according to Patrick G. Eddington, Policy Analyst in Civil Liberties and Homeland Security at the Cato Institute, reported The Daily Caller.
State Department officials have been unable to definitively back up Clinton's claims that she didn't send classified information from her personal account.
