That, or the Libertarians and the Greens will pick up some more votes.

Alright, alright. Yes, I was making an assumption that when the State Department spends millions of dollars and hires the best available (not necessarily the very best, but the best available) experts to devise the most secure systems they can, that the system would be more secure than a private email server put together by one guy and maintained in Hillary's garage.

The point you made that even the Pentagon's email server - after all those layers of security - was hacked, suggests that hacking Hillary's server would have been child's play for the Russians, Chinese and Iranians, not to mention Guccifer, a Romanian hacker.

Was her refusal to use the State Department's server and use her own illegal? That appears to be a grey area. It certainly violated the security protocols of the State Department, a copy of which she signed when she became Secretary of State and the FBI briefed her on the requirements for keeping all classified information on the State's system. As we discourse, over 100 FBI agents are investigating whether her actions warrant presentation to a grand jury.

I have to defer to you as someone who deals with internet security. However, I have to ask you whether or not what I have read elsewhere is true, i.e. that a computer hack at the level of sophistication employed by the Russians and Chinese, not to mention the Iranians, Brits, French and Germans, could be done so as to leave no trace that a security log would have recorded it. If so, the fact that Hillary's security log shows no breach would not be very reassuring.

Our two parties are essentially composed of coalitions of interests each bound together by some common interests. In a country of this size, a multi-party system probably can't work, especially in a presidential system like ours. Perot's experience illustrates that.

Multi-party systems don't always work very well. Take the issue of under representation of third parties in their parliaments. In the last UK election, the Lib-Dems virtually disappeared and the UKIP won 3.8 million votes and were awarded One (1), a single, seat in Parliament. In Germany, the Free Democrats failed to reach the 5% (got 4.8%) barrier, so they lost all their 93 seats in the Bundestag, despite getting more than 2 million votes. The Front National Party in France, third strongest in France, holds 2 of 577 seats in the National Assembly.

Than there's the question of stability, where in many cases a parliamentary majority in countries like Israel are made of coalitions. Frequently, because the withdrawal of a coalition party leads to the collapse of the government, the minor partners have outsize power. Italy's experience since WWII illustrates the stability problem and Israel the outsize power of the minor religious parties.

Did. Not. Work.

For all we know, it did

Quite. Despite his protests, he does have tiny little rodent hands. So do his feral sons.

Apparently, he doesn't need big hands anyway.

So much nope in these posts

Grafted onto his head?

Holy crap, his dick must have looked like Elvis at some point

This is a lot of drama over a server that was legal during Clinton's time as secretary of state.

May I remind you of Article 1, Section 9: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." It isn't your prerogative to go on a witch hunt after the fact just because you've decided that she's a witch; it was legal to have a server, so give it a rest.

The US constitution was intended to produce a no-party system, but it had the inadvertent effect of producing a two-party system.

We have two parties due to various constitutional mechanisms, such as the process of choosing a president. The process of how things get done does not lend itself to a multi-party system.

The two party nature of the system cannot be changed without scrapping the constitution altogether. That isn't going to happen, so a multi-party system won't happen.

Ultimately, the Republicans need to purge the extremists from their ranks if they are to reinvent themselves. But for now, they need those people in order to win elections, so that probably won't happen for quite some time.

Introducing the notion that a hack could be done without trace essentially makes this a no-win argument, doesn't it. Very clever. You can never prove that space aliens did NOT visit you last night, after all; their technology is such that they avoid all detection.

The issues of computer security are very complex and multi-faceted. In my view, the biggest single thing going for having her own server is that the access can be controlled very tightly. Imagine the govt. mail server; imagine how many different people and associated devices they have to support - iphones, androids, blackberries, laptops with different browsers, etc. And because you probably have hundreds of users with old devices that can't be forcibly retired, you have to keep supporting older versions of protocols and techniques. So you end up having to make compromises. If by comparison, you have just a small number of users and associated devices, then you can lock out a huge amount of potential threats. You can also afford to take the servers down regularly for updates, for penetration tests, etc - things you can't do when you have a big user community.

My point of the '$600 iPhone' issue is that today, technology itself is quite secure. The bigger threat to most systems these days is 'social engineering', where the attacker masquerades as someone else, asking for help/information, tricking a human to reveal info that will then give them access to systems. With thousands of users, your chances of a breach are much greater (this is how the 'Target' breach occurred).

From my understanding, it was not the best of ideas but she was not the first high level govt. official to do this, so why aren't we pursuing all the others who did likewise? How can you say anything other than this is a Hillary-targeted witch-hunt?

Mystery solved

I won't disagree with your points, as you are the expert in the field. I would simply observe that we are not the ones making a big deal of the email/server issue, it is the FBI, which is supposedly nonpartisan, whose investigation is fueling the issue.

However, as long as the FBI is investigating the issue, it remains an issue in the campaign as well as it reflects on her fitness to serve as President. Bernie might be a nice guy, and personally I like him, but he missed an obvious opportunity to score heavily by not pursuing her weakest point in the debates. You can't expect Trump to pull a Romney on it. Politics has always been a blood sport in this country and a clear plurality of Republican voters want a street fighter as their nominee, not a high-minded loser. I'm still on the fence, leaning to Cruz, but not happy about that either.

If the FBI issues her a clean bill, then that's the end of that story. At least I would accept it as the end of the email/server story. They're also investigating her on public corruption charges, i.e. whether favourable State Department rulings followed in the wake of Bill's speeches to the recipients of the good rulings. I have no idea where that's leading, and we'll just have to see whether that's a blind alley.

I would still like you to tell us whether sophisticated national entities like the Russian and Chinese cyber experts can penetrate a server without leaving a trace that a security log would record. What is your opinion?

If so, then use of a private server for sensitive government communications that is accessed via commercial channels (using a .com address) may not be the best due diligence in protecting those communications.

If those same Russian/Chinese agencies could hack US government servers, that is still no excuse to increase the likelihood of compromise by going it alone - for "convenience?" Or more likely so that she could effectively fend off FOIA requests.

As for the cell phone, as I understand it the phone uses a system where after a certain number of failed password entries, it wipes its hard drive. McAfee said that given three weeks he could hack in and retrieve the info therein. I'm surprised the FBI didn't accept his offer, although it would be better to have the creators of the phone's system do the hack. Problem is they didn't approach Apple on the QT, although maybe they did.