It is quite likely former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails on her private server were read by Asian intelligence agencies, a former Homeland Security official writes at
The Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy Blog.
Though Clinton began using her home server as early as January 28, 2009, just after being sworn in, she didn't have a digital certificate supporting encryption installed until late March, writes Stewart Baker, assistant secretary of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush.
While it is possible the two-month lag in getting encryption was "just a mistake," Baker says, "There now seems to be a very real probability that Hillary Clinton rushed to install an encryption certificate in March 2009 because the U.S. intelligence community caught another country reading Clinton’s unencrypted messages during her February 16-21, 2009, trip to China, Indonesia, Japan, and S. Korea."
Among correspondence of the staff of Assistant Secretary Eric Boswell is a message that says during a conversation between Clinton and Boswell, "her attention was drawn to a sentence that indicates we [the diplomatic security office] have intelligence concerning this vulnerability during her recent trip to Asia."
Baker said the "mix of delicacy and insistence in that phrasing" was interesting. "It seems likely that Clinton’s attention was drawn to that sentence because the intelligence was about Secretary Clinton’s own communications security, something a discreet diplomat would not want to say directly in written communications. Clinton certainly acted like the intelligence concerned her."
While the whole thing could be coincidence, Baker concedes, "the most likely scenario is that the secretary’s Asia trip produced an intelligence report that was directly relevant to the security of Clinton’s communications. And that the report was sufficiently dramatic that it spurred Clinton to make immediate security changes on her homebrew server."
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