Do any of us honestly have any idea how serious the Hillary Clinton email scandal was? I haven’t got a clue. Her actions could have been a neglectful oversight or a heinous criminal act. We don’t know.
Clinton was an avid BlackBerry user and, on becoming secretary of state, claimed she didn’t know how to handle email on the desktop computer the government provided. When the National Security Agency was unable to find a secure way of sending classified information via her BlackBerry, Hillary simply continued using it, along with the old email address and server she had used while out of office. She never had an @state.gov email address: you emailed hdr22@clinton-email.com.
My inclination is to give Hillary the benefit of the doubt — and put her actions down to technological cluelessness. Most people pay little or no attention to IT except when it’s not working, and Hillary may barely have known there was a server in her basement. But it still seems suspicious that nobody in the administration raised the issue of her email address. I mean you’d think it odd if you were told to contact the Prime Minister via Number10-Tessa@gmail.com.
But the really interesting thing about this story, as with many modern scandals, is that technology makes it dangerously easy for people to claim they don’t know what’s going on. Once a story involves a sufficient level of technical complexity, it is often too boring or complex to become a proper scandal and our usual instinct for moral outrage switches off. Libor does not arouse the same desire for vengeance we feel when someone breaks into our car. We really only know these things are scandals when the press occasionally makes a big deal of one of them.
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