Private Emails Reveal Ex-Clinton Aide’s Secret Spy Network

[Octafish]

11. Unbelievable story about how Amb. Scott Gration lost his POST for using secondary email account.

Seems the bosses didn't like not knowing what the guy was saying and to whom he was saying it to, and hearing it from.

The Ambassador who worked from a Nairobi bathroom to avoid State Dept. IT

If you think Clinton's e-mail scandal is unbelievable, you haven't heard about Scott Gration.

by Sean Gallagher
Ars Technica, Mar 8, 2015

The current scandal roiling over the use of a private e-mail server by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is just the latest in a series of scandals surrounding government e-mails. And it’s not the first public airing of problems with the State Department’s IT operations—and executives’ efforts to bypass or work around them. At least she didn’t set up an office in a restroom just to bypass State Department network restrictions and do everything over Gmail.

However, another Obama administration appointee—the former ambassador to Kenya—did do that, essentially refusing to use any of the Nairobi embassy’s internal IT. He worked out of a bathroom because it was the only place in the embassy where he could use an unsecured network and his personal computer, using Gmail to conduct official business. And he did all this during a time when Chinese hackers were penetrating the personal Gmail inboxes of a number of US diplomats.

Why would such high-profile members of the administration’s foreign policy team so flagrantly bypass federal and agency regulations to use their own personal e-mail to conduct business? Was it that they had something they wanted to keep out of State’s servers and away from Congressional oversight? Was it that State’s IT was so bad that they needed to take matters into their own hands? Or was it because the department’s IT staff wasn’t responsive enough to what they saw as their personal needs, and they decided to show just how take-charge they were by ignoring all those stuffy policies?

The answer is probably a little bit of all of the above. But in the case of former ambassador Scott Gration, the evidence points heavily toward someone who wanted to work outside the system because he just couldn’t stand it.

Take this IT and flush it

Shortly after his arrival in Nairobi, Gration “broadcast his lack of confidence in the information management staff” of the Embassy, the State Department Office of the Inspector General noted in an inspection report on the embassy that precipitated Gration’s resignation:

Because the information management office could not change the Department’s policy for handling Sensitive But Unclassified material, he assumed charge of the mission’s information management operations. He ordered a commercial Internet connection installed in his embassy office bathroom so he could work there on a laptop not connected to the Department email system. He drafted and distributed a mission policy authorizing himself and other mission personnel to use commercial email for daily communication of official government business. During the inspection, the Ambassador continued to use commercial email for official government business.

CONTINUED...

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/the-ambassador-who-worked-from-nairobi-bathroom-to-avoid-state-dept-it/

IT, or it, shows it's getting harder and harder to know who to trust -- just the opposite of how, um, things should be.