Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned about the vulnerability of personal email accounts during a 2011 speech at a time when the public had no idea that all of her State Department communications were being conducted on a private server.
“Hackers break into financial institutions, cellphone networks and personal email accounts,” Clinton said in the speech resurrected by the Weekly Standard. Clinton spoke at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in the midst of the Wikileaks scandal.
Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivers remarks during a campaign stop at Dr. William U. Pearson Community Center, Aug. 18, 2015 in Las Vegas. (Photo by Isaac Brekken/Getty Images)
Clinton spoke about broad array of Internet threats:
Finding this proper measure for the Internet is critical because the qualities that make the Internet a force for unprecedented progress – its openness, its leveling effect, its reach and speed – also enable wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale. Terrorists and extremist groups use the Internet to recruit members, and plot and carry out attacks.Human traffickers use the Internet to find and lure new victims into modern-day slavery. Child pornographers use the Internet to exploit children. Hackers break into financial institutions, cell phone networks, and personal email accounts.
So we need successful strategies for combating these threats and more without constricting the openness that is the Internet’s greatest attribute.
Addressing Wikileaks, Clinton described the need for secrecy within government.
“The United States could neither provide for citizen security nor promote the cause of democracy around the world if we had to make public every step of our efforts,” she said.
The FBI is investigating whether Clinton’s private email server contained classified information. Clinton has repeatedly asserted that she did not send or receive any classified material; federal inspectors have flagged more than 300 released emails as containing potentially classified information.
The Clinton campaign website seeks to reassure the public that the email server was entirely secure.
“The security and integrity of her family's electronic communications was taken seriously from the onset when it was first set up for President Clinton's team,” the Clinton website says. “While the curiosity about the setup is understandable, given what people with ill intentions can do with such information in this day and age, there are concerns about broadcasting specific technical details about past and current practices. Suffice to say, robust protections were put in place and additional upgrades and techniques employed over time as they became available, including consulting and employing third party experts.”
