While there's no evidence to date that Hillary Clinton's personal, in-home email server was ever hacked, it's also possible that cyber-thieves did get in and grab sensitive government correspondence without the former secretary of state even knowing, says a former U.S. security and intelligence official.
"Given the amount of attention that someone like the secretary of state of the United States gets from intelligence agencies, it's sort of hard to believe that many … didn't take a whack at that server," Stewart Baker told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on Newsmax TV Thursday.
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Clinton is defending her use of personal email on a private server at her house to conduct business as secretary of state.
In her press conference on Wednesday to address the email controversy, she said the server "had numerous safeguards" and "there were no security breaches."
Baker, former Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary for policy and former general counsel to the National Security Agency, doubted that Clinton could be so certain.
If a breach did occur, he said, "It's highly likely that she didn't know it.
"She says there's no evidence that she was hacked, but it is still quite possible that she was hacked and is not aware of it," said Washington, D.C., lawyer and lobbyist Baker.
He also questioned whether Clinton's at-home security measures were adequate.
"Frankly, I don't have a lot of confidence, and she hasn't provided a lot of reason to believe that the defenses that she had on that thing were equal to the task," said Baker.
"It would be very hard to do that," he added, "because many of the things that people do to watch for or prevent intrusions are enormously expensive."
"You can't just run anti-virus [software] and be comfortable that you're not going to be hacked," said Baker. "You actually have to have a set of machines in front of your email server that will actually open every single one of the attachments to see if they do anything unusual. I'm quite confident she didn't spend $1 million or whatever it would cost to adopt such a technique to protect her server."
Baker also took note of Clinton assuring reporters that the server was "on property guarded by the Secret Service."
"Those guns are not going to help at all if somebody hacks that computer," he said, "and that's a very real risk."
"The good news," he quipped, "is it's possible that if she really needs all of those emails, she'll be able to get them from the North Koreans or the Israelis."
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