/dev/null 0

I haven’t paid much attention to the Hillary Clinton email scamdal because I knew from the git-go that it was yet another Republican lie in a long parade of lies about the Clintons, a parade reaching back to and beyond the Republican fever dream that the Clintons somehow murdered Vince Foster.

One does not have to be a fan of the Clintons to be disgusted by the Republican lies.

Now Cynthia Dill has sacrificed her time to plough through the bureacratise of the report on Hillary Clinton’s email scamdal so we don’t have to. Her findings come as no surprise. As with an email sent to /dev/null, there’s no there there.

Here’s a bit (emphasis added):

This was no covert operation, for heaven’s sake. It’s not like Clinton was secretly selling arms to Iran and funding the Contras. The Clintons paid out-of-pocket for a few techies to work in their basement keeping this server humming and free from cyber breaches. Staffers from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security inspected the email system, looked at the logs and communicated with these people on a regular basis. The bureau even refused to help fix it when Hurricane Sandy disrupted power “because it was a private server,” according to the report.

Clinton reasonably believed her private server was allowed because the bureaucrats in charge of security allowed it. This present-day conviction for violating rule 12 FAM 544.2 after the fact means nothing of any consequence. Nobody was hurt. No security was breached. Who cares?

I think one reason that this particular scamdal has had some staying power is that, to most persons, an email server–hell, a computer–is a dark magic box, mysterious and alchemical.

An email server is, actually, nothing more than a program that relays mail from the persons who write it to the recipients over a network and from a network to the recipient(s).

You too can have your own email server, if you wish. I know folks who do. It’s a bit complex, but it’s not magic, it’s not alchemy, it’s not voodoo; it’s just a computer program. (If you think government servers are somehow magically more secure than other servers, think again. Governments don’t do security better than anyone else, except possibly Sony.)

(Be sure to check your ISP’s terms of service before setting up your own mail server; most US ISPs forbid public-facing servers–news, web, database, mail–unless you have a business-class account. That’s why I don’t run my own mail server–my ISP’s TOS forbid it for my level of account. Otherwise I’d set one up just to see whether I could make it work. I like crossword puzzles too.)