Clinton's Emails

     Marcel Lazăr Lehel, a 40 year old Romanian hacker, known as Guccifer, is responsible for a number of high-level computer security breaches in the U.S. and Romania.  Among his targets was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Lehel has not been hailed as the greatest computer expert of the 21st century and he was undoubtedly working on a limited budget.  In addition to Lehel there numerous organizations with nearly unlimited funds dedicated to cyberwarfare.  If the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, North Koreans and others do not have every one of Hillary Clinton’s emails their intelligence organizations are not doing their job.  This means that these governments have the names of agents who have placed their lives in the hands of the U.S. government.  Several names cited in Clinton’s emails have been redacted in the State Department emails that have been released.  The reason for the redaction is a code indicating the email contains the names of covert personnel.

     Madeleine Albright has assured us, ”She (Clinton) has said she made a mistake, and nobody is going to die as a result of anything that happened on emails.”  U.S. intelligence sources often do pay a penalty for assisting the U.S.  The Pakistani surgeon, Shakeel Afridi, who helped the CIA locate Osama bin Laden, is spending his days in a Pakistani jail.  Others may not be so lucky.  Bush administration Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence General Jerry Boykin disagrees with Albright.  Boykin asserted “. . . China and Russia and even North Korea access through cyber attacks to the names of the people that are helping us and the sources and methods that we’re using to get that intelligence. People can be killed as a result of that!”

This will have a dramatic effect on U.S. intelligence gathering capabilities.  Would any sane individual provide information to U.S. intelligence knowing that his identity would quite possibly made public?  These U.S. sources may not have been rounded up by their governments.  They would not want to reveal that they have this information.  How would a future president deal with a foreign power knowing that they had this information?  Would they be subject to blackmail?

Hillary Clinton’s email scandal has been almost completely ignored by the media.  Compared to the feeding frenzy that accompanied the Valerie Plame affair there has be little or no interest in the current fiasco.