“As she was being confirmed as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton contacted Colin Powell to ask him about his use of a Blackberry while in the same role. According to a Federal Bureau of Investigations memorandum published today (PDF), Powell warned Clinton that if it became public that she was using a Blackberry to “do business,” her e-mails would be treated as “official” record and be subject to the law,” Sean Gallagher reports for Ars Technica. “‘Be very careful,’ Powell said according to the FBI. ‘I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.'”
“Clinton told the FBI that she didn’t take factor Powell’s advice into her decision to use a personal mail server—a statement that seems obvious based on the tens of thousands of e-mails now being published as the result of lawsuits, congressional and FBI investigations, and Freedom of Information Act requests,” Gallagher reports. “Just how far she deviated from that advice is evident in the detailed history gathered by the FBI. Their information on the Clintons’ e-mail infrastructure dates back to Hillary Clinton’s tenure in the US Senate, and this new release shows how that infrastructure was intertwined with the information technology used by former president Bill Clinton’s staff.”
“Perhaps Clinton’s troubles began when she switched from a Blackberry-hosted e-mail account to an account on her Clintonemail.com domain — a domain hosted on an Apple Power Mac ‘G4 or G5′ tower running in the Clintons’ Chappaqua, New York residence. The switch to the Power Mac as a server occurred the same month she exchanged messages with Powell,” Gallagher reports. “The Power Mac, originally purchased in 2007 by former President Clinton’s aide Justin Cooper, had acted as the server for presidentclinton.com and wjcoffice.com. Cooper managed most of the technology support for Bill Clinton and took charge of setting up Hillary Clinton’s new personal mail system on the Power Mac, which sat alongside a firewall and network switching hardware in the basement of the Clintons’ home. Accounts were set up for Secretary Clinton and her staff by her husband’s staff. But the Power Mac was having difficulty handling the additional load created by Blackberry usage from Secretary Clinton and her staff, so…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A “Power Mac G4” would have been discontinued, at the latest, in June 2004 and a “Power Mac G5” would have been discontinued, at the latest, in August 2006, so either Mac was already “old” at the time it was purchased for the original purpose of serving websites. The first gen. Mac Pro was released in August 2006, but perhaps the choice to go with an “old” Power Mac was made based on software considerations (PowerPC vs. Intel-based Macs).
