Hillary Clinton's email could be far worse for national security than Edward Snowden's leaks were alleged to have been

In the months following the Edward Snowden disclosures of NSA surveillance procedures, hysterical establishment hawks chose to warn of the potential damage to national security from the leaks, instead of condemning the blatantly unconstitutional violations of American citizens’ privacy. Even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed Snowden had helped terrorists by releasing that information. As it turns out, the private email servers she was keeping for State Department communications may have been even worse.

Not only were her unarchived communications in violation of 20-year old federal records regulations, they were also terribly, horrifically unsecure.

The government typically uses military-grade certificates and encryption schemes for its internal communications that designed with spying from foreign intelligence agencies in mind. But the ClintonEmail.com setup? “If you’re buying jam online,” says Hansen, “you’re fine.” But for anything beyond consumer-grade browsing, it’s a shoddy arrangement.

Not only were the server web interfaces easily hackable, but the servers themselves were vulnerable to malware.

The invalid certificate would have also likely left Clinton vulnerable to widespread internet bugs like “Heartbleed,” which was only discovered last spring, and may have let hackers copy the entire contents of the Clinton servers’ memory. Inside that memory? Who knows: “It could very well have been a bunch of garbage,” said Hansen, or “it could have been her full emails, passwords, and cookies.”

And hacking is just the first way clintonemail.com was bad.

I think the bigger security concern here is the complete lack of visibility into who has been administering, backing up, maintaining, and accessing the Secretary’s email. If classified documents were exchanged, who viewed them? Were they forwarded? Where multiple devices (ie, mobile phones and tablets) configured to access the account? Was encryption required or optional for remote access?

We don’t actually know if Clinton’s email, which other State officials also used, was ever hacked or intercepted. But it could have been, making available every internal communication she made, as well as her entire online portfolio. Being the Secretary of State, that portfolio would contain the most sensitive information imaginable.

Edward Snowden revealed in detail how our own country goes about spying on us. Hillary Clinton’s insatiable corruption may have laid bare not only all her State Dept communications but the online identities of everyone who used her unauthorized system. She may not have to worry about wanting the public to see them now. Someone may already have.