I wrote this last year, but it’s as relevant as ever:
Clay Johnson was not just the former director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, he also had a White House fellowship to help improve how the federal government acquires and uses technology. This is what he wrote about the Hillary Clinton email story. Please note the last paragraph: But more importantly, let’s talk about records.…
I worked for a year at Lockheed Marietta GA as a contractor in their travel office. This office was located in a WWII barracks building near Dobbins AFB. Talk about antiquated – the place was a fire trap for one thing. The government staff there were very averse to modernization – they had to be pushed kicking and screaming onto Windows and it took a year to make them do that.
Try as you might this can’t be spun. The server was her proprietary property in her house. The production was late, scrubbed by her political functionaries and incomplete. The Inspector General has this nailed. Fortunately Trump is way too ham fisted to frame the issue intelligibly. This is no more defensible than Rove’s laundering of the White House e-mail through RNC servers. I didn’t see this kind of rationalization around these parts for that illegality.
I’ve never been in any level of government. Just universities, which compared to the Fed are as nimble as mountain gazelles. And just to do my (comparatively) simple job, I was always having to come up with “illegal” workarounds for IT’s braindead BS.
I’ve yet to see an IT Department that understands they’re a service unit to help people do their jobs. They think everything revolves around them. Faculty’s real job is to make IT’s life easier. I’m sure it was the same in the State Dept.
And you *literally* cannot get your job done if you do it their way. At least at universities, this is true right up to the present day. In one place IT implemented a phone system that’s fully integrated to your desktop and allows all sorts of sophisticated messaging and settings. And only works when you’re in your office. Obviously, faculty spend all day in their offices. They don’t teach classes or labs or speak with students in conference areas or go to departmental meetings or have to use the copy machine or …. Anyway, you get the picture.
All the faculty have their new phones stored on the top shelf somewhere and use their private cellphones. In the State Dept., that would be “illegal.”