Further to the matter of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s unsecured email server and her State Department’s handling of them.

…revelations from new court-released documents in a lawsuit by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch. They show the State Department temporarily turned off security features in 2010 so that emails from then-Secretary of State Clinton’s personal server would stop going to the department’s spam folders.

That’s not just dumb (or, in the words of Colonel with whom I once worked, the dumbest thing I ever heard), it’s got to be criminally negligent.

It’s too easy—and a very routine thing to do—to fish (as opposed to phish) out of those spam folders Clinton’s emails, both those from her and those to her.  It’s too easy—and another very routine thing to do—to adjust the spam filters to pass acceptable emails.

And: it’s too easy—and yet another very routine thing to do—to block access, any access, from an unsecured server of any purpose to State’s official business network, much less its classified network.

As Bob Gourley, former Chief Technology Officer for DIA, put it,

You’re putting not just the Clinton server at risk but the entire Department of State emails at risk.  When you turn off your defensive mechanisms, and you’re connected to the Internet, you’re almost laying out the welcome mat for anyone to intrude and attack and steal your secrets.

Of course Clinton’s State Department IT staff knew this.

Of course Clinton, who was the ultimate State Department classifying authority for this sort of thing as well as for all matters related to security, knew this.

Elections have consequences.

The AP headline reads State Department was forced to disable security features to receive messages from Clinton email server.

[E]mails, reviewed by The Associated Press, show that State Department technical staff disabled software on their systems intended to block phishing emails that could deliver dangerous viruses. They were trying urgently to resolve delivery problems with emails sent from Clinton’s private server.

These emails, obtained Judicial Watch pursuant to their FOIA request and enforced by court order because State kept trying to ignore that law’s requirements, occurred in 2010.  This also gives the lie to State’s claims that had those worthies known of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private and unsecured email server, on which she was conducting government and classified government business, they would have denied her permission to use it.  State knew.

In fact, Ken LaVolpe, Deputy Director for Security, Technical, and User Services Division in State’s Office of Information Resource Management sent this about disabling much of State’s own security software in a December 2010 email to his minions:

This should trump all other activities[.]

Tom Lawrence, Branch Chief for Technical and Security Teams in the OIRM and a subordinate of LaVolpe’s added

We view this [turning of security features] as a Band-Aid and fear it’s not 100 percent fully effective.

The AP’s headline gives the game away: State was not at all forced to disable any of its security features to troubleshoot problems with Clinton’s unprotected email server.  The Band-Aid was not at all necessary.  State could simply—and should have—cut all connections between the government’s classified networks and Clinton’s unprotected server or better, shut her server down altogether.  But this is the Obama administration’s and Clinton’s attitude toward national security and personal privilege.

Elections have consequences.