20 years ago I graduated with a degree in Management Information Systems. I've spent my career since then, building Internet applications for companies large and small. My job is dealing with servers, encryption, email, and hosting.
I'm also a life-long Democrat, having voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Obama. I was also a volunteer, precinct captain, and delegate to my county convention on behalf of Barack Obama. Head below the fold to get my thoughts on Hillary's email scandal, and whether or not it's much ado about nothing.
If you work in IT, and ever have the opportunity to make a decision about how and where to host a server, whether for email or any other application, your choices typically boil down to four options:
Option 1: Pay another company called an Application Service Provider to provide the application you need.
Option 2: Pay a company for “Managed Hosting”, which means you are renting a server that runs at a hosting provider's data center.
Option 3: You buy a server, put your application on it, and then pay a hosting provider to house the server, which is called co-location
Option 4: Host the server running the application “In house”
All of these are valid choices, and companies may end up choosing any of them depending on their specific needs. Hillary Clinton chose option 4, but in any imaginable scenario for a company looking to host an email server, “in house” hosting means secured in a special room called a data center that is equipped with specialized air conditioning and filtration, redundant power, and other features necessary to run a highly available, secure business application, not at the company CEO's house.
A person with a background in computer science or a technically minded do-it-yourself-er may choose to run an email server at their home under their desk for personal use or maybe to experiment with, but the head of a government organization employing over 60,000 would need a reliable, and secure solution for her email. It would almost never be more reliable or more secure for an email server to be located in someone's residence, and would be an especially bad choice for the head of a federal agency that deals in highly classified information as the State department does.
People tend to acquire email addresses over time, moving to a new job or a switching to a new ISP for instance. However email servers are different. The explanation Ms. Clinton has given for her email was that it was for “convenience”. However it's not a simple or convenient matter to find yourself with an email server in your home. There are a lot of deliberate, inconvenient steps one would need to take to setup an email server in their house that would be accessible, reliable and secure.
As an example, most Internet access accounts homeowners setup with an ISP would not be well suited to such a setup, because they do not come with static IP addresses. Most people accessing the Internet from home have a dynamic IP address which is assigned on the fly by your ISP when you are actively using the Internet. When you are out of town or asleep, the ISP will recycle your address and give it to another user. Email servers generally require a static IP address, so they are reachable at all times from the Internet. Most ISPs offer static IP addresses, but typically this is an option only for “business class” Internet access which requires an upgrade over standard consumer Internet access accounts, and often an additional fee above that for the static IP addresses.
Here are summary of the bare minimum steps Clinton (or someone on her behalf) would need to take in order to run an email server from her home:
Register the clintonemail.com domain with a Domain registrar
Acquire static IP addresses from the ISP
Configure the email server
Contact the registrar to update the DNS records to point Internet traffic for clintonemail.com to the static IP address provided by the ISP
Ensure two-way email traffic was permitted to and from the server in any routers or gateways at the residence, but limit other communication for security.
Realistically, to make the email server accessible, reliable and secure, there are many other steps that would need to be taken requiring specialized expertise. Ms. Clinton didn't just fall into having her own email server in her home, and continue using it at the State department because it was “convenient”, it had to be a carefully considered and deliberate decision.
The decision to host the server in her Chappaqua home specifically, rather than hosting the server at a secure data center is troubling because the only plausible motive is to retain absolute control over the server and the data it contained in the event it became the target of an investigation. Whether she made this decision based on her history of being a target of investigations by her political rivals or for some other nefarious reason, it reflects poorly on her decision-making. It indicates that her instinct is to obfuscate and hide rather than to be open and transparent.
Platte River Networks is the hosting company that has hosted the server since the time Hillary was Secretary of State. Presumably, if the server was "wiped", it would have been Platte River Networks that did the wiping. Having dealt with numerous hosting companies on multiple projects, I can tell you that a hosting company would never wipe a customer's server on their own without explicit directions to do so.
Ms. Clinton's response to the scandal has been concerning to me. Her explanation that running a private email server was out of “convenience” is not credible, calling into question her trustworthiness, and wiping the server prior to handing it over to the FBI indicates that she does not feel accountable for her actions in office, but instead that she should be above the law. That is not a quality I want in a chief executive, and for this reason I will not support her for president.