Email wars: Hillary vs. Ivanka

The reader may already know of and perhaps even used Mohawk Internet for their email back in the day when there was no public email such as Gmail or Yahoo. We built our own servers and hosted thousands of users. We charged for the service, but there were no advertisements, ever.

At any time we could have peeked in on your email. It was our company policy not to do so. But on occasion a customer would have a problem and we would have to go in and track down the errant email and delete it so as to free up the user’s mail spool and return it to normal service.

It is true that email has become more complicated, and the bad guys have become more devious, but the fact is that your email service is completely open to access by your email provider. I will bet dollars to doughnuts that certain companies who depend on ad revenues for their obscene profits do in fact scan all incoming email looking for search words they use to refine their targeted advertising model. They are not providing email out of the goodness of their hearts and they are charging you by selling your data for their service. How else could they make vast sums of money if they were not harvesting all the data they can get from you?

Let’s take a moment to consider this obvious reality. Ivanka used a Gmail account. She says it was just for scheduling and other benign and trivial matters. But the bad guys out there can infer far more information from the presidential daughter’s email than she might realize, such as who is going to be where and when. They are also far more likely to find a way to hack a Gmail account than might be suspected.

Then we have to look at Hillary. I will remind the reader that all the hacked emails having to do with Hillary came from the presumably government-supplied account of Leon Panetta, and not from Hillary’s private server locked away in her guarded basement. Her private server was never hacked.

The bad guys out there are always carefully looking for ways to gain entry into our government servers, and clearly they sometimes do. But an obscure and well-fire-walled private server physically guarded by the U.S. Secret Service is going to be hard hack, if not impossible, while the (presumably) government account of Leon Panetta was certainly guarded, yet still hacked.  

I keep my mail on a private server as per the old Mohawk Internet days and, while I have no security detail, I also have no data of any world interest. It has never been hacked. I get more junk mail than I like, but I have a delete key. So I trade having an inordinate amount of junk for the privacy I gain by not storing my mail where some other company can harvest whatever they please without even giving me notice that they have done so.

It is my opinion that Hillary’s email was safer than government-supplied email, and blatantly more secure than Ivanka hanging her personal clothing out to dry on a clothesline in a potentially public venue.

If one takes a wider view of this email battle, one can see the absurdity and the reversed order of the exposure to danger from the email methods used. Hillary is smart woman. I will refrain from passing judgment on the others involved in the battle of the emails. I leave that to the readers to judge for themselves, but I do wonder why the media has completely missed this obvious point.

Philip Truax built Sharon Computer and Mohawk Internet. His four sons all attended Housatonic Valley Regional High School. He is a third-generation resident of Sharon.