“We have so many opinions about the Clinton email controversy, yet few of us, if really questioned about it, could adequately explain what the fuss is trulyabout.”

True. But any IT professional can.

1. The United States government spends megabucks every year on cybersecurity and redundancy. It’s not perfect, nothing is — — but its state of the art. No site outside the government firewall can match it. They can’t get their hands on the same type of software.
2. Why do they do this? Three reasons. First, security, obviously. For the head of the diplomatic portfolio, like Clinton was, virtually everything that she writes and sends pertaining to diplomacy is sensitive. Forget all the government classifications of “top secret”, “classified”, and whatever. You don’t even want it public where the US Secretary of State is going to be on a particular date until you’ve made proper arrangements for her security. EVERYTHING is sensitive.
3. The second reason is backup. You want everything backed up properly in case of system failure. Backups can be problems, because it is easy to abstract the backup from its security context. IOW, you might have the best IT security in the world, but if your backups are not ALSO secured…….what’s the point?
4. Third is governmental transparency. Everything must be preserved for the sake of history and legal review. All correspondence of the Secretary of State in her role is not her property, but the property of the US Government.

Now, you have enough information to really give this some independent thought. The US Secretary of State was transacting sensitive government business on a server which was less secure than her employer expected her to use. It was not being backed up according to governmental policy and procedure, and the US Government’s property — those correspondences — were not available to the government for legal review and the historical record.

Oh, one more thing. It was clearly against government policy to do this; in fact, it would get you fired from virtually every large corporation in America if you did something like this.

Against that backdrop, the excuses of simplicity and convenience are weak tea. The utter stupidity of thinking that this was an OK thing to do, in my view, completely disqualifies Sect. Clinton from ANY further role in the US government, not just the Presidency. It was not just a mistake, it was MORONIC……..and that can be said even without starting to discuss the FURTHER mitigating issues, the most egregious being that *officially* confidential material was found on that server, something that gets “other people” jailed for.

Do NOT minimize this issue.