http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/the-ambassador-who-worked-from-nairobi-bathroom-to-avoid-state-dept-it/
By Sean Gallagher
Ars Technica
March 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.
[...]
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