Irony-Free Zone?

I know we’ve become inured to hypocrisy, but here we go anyway.

According to the IndyStar, then-Governor of Indiana Michael Pence used an AOL account for some government business.  He sometimes discussed sensitive government actions, including Homeland Security issues.

This isn’t exactly the sin that Pence excoriated Hillary Clinton for, during Trump’s Presidential campaign. It’s much worse.

Hillary maintained her own, physically separate email server. While there’s evidence that other people sent her email that included classified data, which was bad, there’s no evidence she included anything classified herself. Foreign nationals were not allowed access to the server, and there’s no evidence her server was ever compromised.

Pence used AOL, that long-time bastion of technical mediocrity. (I admit, I didn’t know AOL was still in the email business.) He included sensitive data on his own.

Emails released to IndyStar in response to a public records request show Pence communicated via his personal AOL account with top advisers on topics ranging from security gates at the governor’s residence to the state’s response to terror attacks across the globe. In one email, Pence’s top state homeland security adviser relayed an update from the FBI regarding the arrests of several men on federal terror-related charges.

Even better, Pence used that AOL account for government business he wanted to hide.  He appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court trying to shield secret political white papers he received on his AOL account.

So, yeah, his account got hacked in June, 2016.  Because, you know… AOL. Not a dig on them (this time). AOL was built from the ground up as a free, consumer-level service. The architecture highlights ‘cheap’, not high security.

A little technical background. We don’t even know in what country Pence’s emails were stored.  Might have been several. AOL uses standard email protocols, so all his email was transmitted in the clear, unencrypted.  If it crossed international boundaries, it was filtered through each country’s intelligence monitoring programs every time. Even if it never left the US, AOL doesn’t guarantee his data wasn’t accessible by foreign nationals hired to maintain the AOL systems. And AOL may still data-mine their email and sell the data to marketers. I just can’t remember.

Because AOL account security is way over at the ‘easy’ end of the scale (again, it’s consumer-level stuff), so most accounts are pretty trivial to hack using the security questions.  (“What High School did you graduate from?” For Pence, ‘Columbus North High School in 1977’ is just a Google search away.) And that’s just the beginning.  There are a ton of reasons why the State Department doesn’t run their email on AOL free accounts.

So Pence got hacked in June, 2016.  We know Pence traveled to his first formal meeting with Trump on July 1, although they may have talked earlier. The hacking had to be fresh in Pence’s mind when he sent this tweet:

.@realDonaldTrump and I commend the FBI for reopening an investigation into Clinton’s personal email server because no one is above the law.
— Mike Pence, @mike_pence, 7:46 PM – 28 Oct 2016 · Smithfield, NC

So, ‘hypocrite’ much?