"Snowden did not do a PUBLIC release of capabilities, rather a private one to various Chinese and Russian depts ... which is why so many want him to be disappeared."
Well there are too many unknowns here to comment. I don't know what Snowden may or may not have given to enemy governments in private, I sure hope it was nothing, and I am still assuming none. We'll probably never know for sure, but I thought he insisted that he refused to let out assets and capabilities and was carefully screening eberything and confining his issue to spying on Americans.
I consider our eyes and ears to be two separate things. telling the world we are listening to everything is not news, telling them what we can actually see is serious business, and singlehandedly undermines retirement of all those assets that those birds replaced. *If* she slipped and let capabilities out then it will be a costly lesson financially for the taxpayers. Besides, if access to our really secret birds ( or anything of that level of sensitivity ) was directly available outside of the pentagon, let alone to a contractor sitting Hawaii, then we have a huge problem on our hands. Military Intelligence will have finally become an oxymoron ( Hillary and intelligence in the same sentence, is already an oxymoron ).
What I am saying is that the over-reaction to Snowden by DC bureaucrats, who are just angry that *they* have been exposed as spying on Americans at home and abroad and at every possible step of every possible means of communication, now gets to be tested on a real damaging case of espionage committed by accident or design by a Secretary Of State. Caveat repeated - *if* it is true. I have no clue what is in most of those redacted sections. But it begs the question, why is anything redacted at all?
"Another question arises, given so many leakers of classified material: if an erstwhile friendly foreign gov comes across info vital to US Nat Def, would they be willing to pass it on as they could be ID’d as source?And now that the FBI has a digital copy of her email, they apparently will be able to tell if her server was hacked and by whom."
Yes, this is where it gets really interesting. But they do not need the email to tell if it was hacked. They could see easily every ping to that server, if not ever single I/O to it and the ISP itself. That's "if" they want to. But why this gets interesting to me is this ... what Clinton did here was to move her communication hub into the same public space that all Americans have had to trust for years, and decades. There is so much irony here! Apologies for going off the beaten path for a second ...
Most Americans have had little clue to the extent of *domestic* electronic spying which has existed since the 1950's at least, and possibly even the 1920's. Those two eras, as far as we can tell, are distinguished by one characteristic - methodology. From World War I to the 50's it appears that most relied upon hyper-intelligent humans using cryptanalysis ( e.g., Yardley, and later Friedman ). Once the DoD consolidated everything into its bureaucracy unconstrained by rules and the Constitution itself, they exploited a new, easier methodology - inserting intravenous taps right into the desired stream like a parasitic tick or leech, and to mix metaphors, milking the cow at will.
Public knowledge tells us that they first got their hooks into telcos and related companies with sweetheart deals and/or offers they couldn't refuse. Access to networks granted, data and metadata stored, data mining at will. Naturally every possible species of communication networking needed to be penetrated, and it was, and Snowden has really only confirmed some of what we already deduced from educated guesses. Everything from consumer electronics to computer operating systems falls under their purview. Chips, networking hardware and protocols, encryption schemes, "Trusted" Computing, software/microcode/firmware backdoors, nothing has been left to chance. And if WWII and the Cold War wasn't enough impetus to ignore the Constitution, then 9/11 was the final straw.
So here in the civilian consumer space where we exist within a framework of hard facts - for any given communication technology, there is not one way but multiple ways that any given communication may be compromised. They can get it in transit in multiple ways in multiple locations, they can get it at the source or target through the chips and circuits that make up the device, they can even go to the ISP's who now have much more capability than their predecessors ever dreamed, quite likely storing complete streams rather than metadata, and storing them possibly forever.
So this is the thoroughly compromised consumer space that we are stuck in and that Hillary ( and who knows how many other bureaucrats ) utilized for their communication. We can assume that the FedGov highest levels have outrageously-expensive taxpayer-funder closed-circuit satellite comm available to themselves, yet madam Hillary shielded herself so well from impartial national security minded IT personnel that she was able to make the stoopid decision to toss secrets into the public wind.
I guess she wasn't paying attention 20 years ago when hubby was in office and things like 'Carnivore' came to light as the latest incremental attack on privacy exceeding the previous incremental attack on privacy, and the previous, ad infinitum. Or maybe she was paying attention and felt it was perfectly peachy since they were in power. Can you spell Schadenfreude.
Ironically I thought this might be another elaborate Clinton propaganda move, throwing something innocuous out there to be gobbled up by their enemies and then after expending tons of energy trying to pin it to her, they are cleared because there is no there there. It still might have been her strategic intention, but she is too unintelligent to realize that one hundred years of incremental erosion of freedom justified by the catch-all no expectation of privacy in public has made it impossible to be truly free.
Dear Hillary ...
