Clinton says she relied on State aides for classification decisions

[pnwmom]

57. There was a whole separate system, called a SCIF, used to send classified documents.

She had a SCIF system set up at her home and at the State department.

There are lots of articles that mention it but this is the first one I ran across. In Hillary's case, her SCIF was guarded by the Secret Service who were already in her home.

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/02/19/colin-powell-emails-hillary-clinton-424187.html

But Powell and Rice’s aides did nothing wrong. (I’m going to focus on them so that partisans who say Clinton broke the law have to attack respected Republicans first.) Start with this: Powell and Rice, like all modern secretaries of state, each had at least two email accounts—one personal and the other for communications designated as highly classified at the time of their creation . For classified information, both of them—and their aides with appropriate clearance—had a sensitive compartmented information facility, or what is known in intelligence circles as a SCIF. Most senior officials who deal with classified information have a SCIF in their offices and their homes.

These are not just extra offices with a special lock. Each SCIF is constructed following complex rules imposed by the intelligence and defense communities. Restrictions imposed on the builders are designed to ensure that no unauthorized personnel can get into the room, and the SCIF cannot be accessed by hacking or electronic eavesdropping. A group called the technical surveillance countermeasures team (TSCM) investigates the area or activity to check that all communications are protected from outside surveillance and cannot be intercepted.

Most permanent SCIFs have physical and technical security, called TEMPEST. The facility is guarded and in operation 24 hours a day, seven days a week; any official on the SCIF staff must have the highest security clearance. There is supposed to be sufficient personnel continuously present to observe the primary, secondary and emergency exit doors of the SCIF. Each SCIF must apply fundamental red-black separation to prevent the inadvertent transmission of classified data over telephone lines, power lines or signal lines.





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And if you really care more about transparency than anything else, you should applaud Hillary for saving her emails on her private server. During the same period of time, almost nothing was preserved on the State Dept's .gov system. A March 2015 OIG report stated that in 2011, only 61K emails were preserved out of a billion. That means .0006% were saved. Hillary, by contrast, saved almost all of hers.