Category Archives: FBI

Hillary’s Email Pals Included the WH and SCOTUS Judges

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Sheesh…..now what about the 30,000 emails about ah yoga and wedding plans…yeah, yoga sure Hillary. What about the emails from the White House to Hillary…ah all this transparency is well infectious eh?

Ever wonder why a Secretary of State needed to email, confer and be email pals with selected Supreme Court justices?

Hillary’s email account an open secret in Washington long before scandal broke

WashingtonTimes: Hundreds of people — from White House officials and titans of the mainstream media to senators, Supreme Court justices and many of her top colleagues at the State Department — could have known about Hillary Clinton’s secret email account, if only they’d cared to look closely enough.

Listed on some of the more than 28,000 messages Mrs. Clinton released so far are several White House chiefs of staff and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, much of the rest of official Washington, and a number of people who had oversight of the State Department’s key operations and open-records obligations. President Obama was also on a series of messages, though the government is withholding those.

But just how widely disseminated Mrs. Clinton’s address was became clear in a single 2011 message from Anne-Marie Slaughter, who appeared to include Mrs. Clinton on a message alongside Supreme Court Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan, reporters Jeffrey Toobin, David Brooks, Fred Hiatt and Evan Thomas, CIA Director David H. Petraeus, top Obama aide Benjamin Rhodes and former White House counsel Gregory Craig.

 
Computer specialists said they would have had to know what they were looking for to spot Mrs. Clinton’s address, but it was there for anyone who did look — raising questions about how her unique arrangement remained secret for so long. It came to the public’s attention when news broke in March 2015 in The New York Times — after it was uncovered by a congressional investigation into the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack.

The State Department has since acknowledged that it did not search Mrs. Clinton’s messages in response to open-records requests filed under federal law, and federal District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan is prodding the department about how the situation got so out of hand.

“We’re talking about a Cabinet-level official who was accommodated by the government for reasons unknown to the public. And I think that’s a fair statement — for reasons unknown to the public,” the judge said at a hearing last week, where he decided to approve conservative legal group Judicial Watch’s request for discovery to pry loose more details about who approved the odd email setup and how it ducked the rules.
“All the public can do is speculate,” Judge Sullivan told the government lawyers who have been fighting to drag out the release of the messages Mrs. Clinton has turned over, and to prevent her from having to relinquish thousands of others. “You want me to say it’s done, but I can’t do that right now.”

The final batch of messages the State Department has in its custody — 2,000 of them — is due to be released Monday.

The facts have changed dramatically since the emails were first revealed and Mrs. Clinton insisted that she set up her unique arrangement out of “convenience” for herself and insisted no classified material was sent on the account.

Already, 1,782 messages have been deemed to contain classified material, and 22 of those messages contain “secret” information. Another 22 messages contain “top secret” material so sensitive that the government won’t even release any part of them, meaning they will remain completely hidden from the public.

Mrs. Clinton’s arrangement set off public policy and security debates. Analysts said her server was likely unprotected against any moderately sophisticated attack.

Although details remain sketchy as to what protection Mrs. Clinton used, analysts said having one person maintaining her server is no way to protect sensitive information from a hack. Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, said there is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton was having her server tested by independent specialists — a major oversight.

“You cannot secure your server with one guy working part time,” Mr. Soghoian said.

That one person, Bryan Pagliano, who reportedly worked for Mrs. Clinton at the State Department and on the side as her server technician, asserted his Fifth Amendment right against incriminating himself in testimony to Congress last year.

Even if the server itself wasn’t compromised, Mr. Soghoian said, Mrs. Clinton was sending email over the broader Internet, where an enterprising opponent could have intercepted messages. If she had been using a State.gov account to email others within the government, that wouldn’t have been possible, he said.

There is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton was hacked, but analysts said that’s of little comfort. Even if the FBI doesn’t find evidence, it is not conclusive.

“Clinton’s use of unencrypted email left her vulnerable to nation states. There’s no amount of investigation the FBI can do to prove that didn’t happen,” Mr. Soghoian said.

Bob Gourley, co-founder of cybersecurity consultancy Cognitio, said the government has to assume Mrs. Clinton’s server was compromised, and he said it begs the question of why she declined to use a State.gov account and instead set up her own off-site server.

“All indications are this was not just a matter of convenience,” he said. “There’s no reason why she should have used her own server and go to all the trouble to do that unless she wanted to hide something.”

That something, Mr. Gourley believes, is the negotiating she did on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, founded by her husband, former President Bill Clinton. She helped lead the foundation as soon as she stepped down from the secretary’s job.

The security analyst said he suspects details of those negotiations are part of the 30,000 messages Mrs. Clinton indicated she sent during her time in office but that she declined to turn back to the State Department. The former secretary said those messages were personal business, such as scheduling yoga classes or arranging her daughter Chelsea’s wedding.

Judicial Watch is trying to get Mrs. Clinton to turn over those messages to the State Department, and that’s the case pending before Judge Sullivan.

“The big story on Monday is, wow, now we have reviewed about half of Mrs. Clinton’s reported records. Where’s the other half?” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “That’s what our discovery is about. Where’s the other half, and how can we find out so they can be retrieved and reviewed and released to the public?”

Mrs. Clinton says the Obama administration is overclassifying her messages. She says she would like all of the messages she returned to the government released, including presumably the 22 the government deems so “top secret” that they can’t be shared even in part.

She and her campaign have questioned the political motivations or conclusions of the inspectors general who have pushed for classification, to Judge Sullivan, whose order of discovery could force her aides to answer tough questions and could eventually lead to her having to return the rest of her emails.

Mr. Fitton said the questions Judicial Watch will ask during discovery include how the government supported her email server, why the folks who handled Freedom of Information Act open-records requests weren’t made aware of it, who else used it, what security precautions were taken and who approved it.

A Washington Times analysis of the more than 28,000 messages that have been released show dozens of State Department employees, from the lowest to the highest levels, were aware that Mrs. Clinton was using her unique arrangement to conduct government business.

The extensive awareness within the department struck Judge Sullivan.

“How on earth can the court conclude that there’s not, at a minimum, a reasonable suspicion of bad faith regarding the State Department’s response to this FOIA request?” he said at a hearing last week.

Mrs. Clinton’s successor, current Secretary of State John F. Kerry, was one of those who emailed with Mrs. Clinton on her secret account during his time in the Senate. He was one of a handful of senators The Times found who were pen pals with Mrs. Clinton.

Last week, Mr. Kerry tried to explain how he missed Mrs. Clinton’s behavior and told Congress he simply mailed the address he was given.

“I didn’t think about it. I didn’t know if she had an account, or what the department gave her at that point in time, or what she was operating with. I had no knowledge,” he told Rep. Darrell E. Issa, a California Republican who prodded him on the matter.

Stories about odd email practices have continued to dog Mr. Obama’s tenure. His former administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa P. Jackson, used a secret agency email address to conduct government business, but the EPA says those messages were searched in open-records requests.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter used a private address to conduct some government business in the first months after taking office. He said the practice was wrong and apologized for it.

Mr. Gourley, the cybersecurity specialist, said Mrs. Clinton’s practice went beyond that. He compared it to a phone, saying everyone has a home phone or personal cellphone, and even top government officials occasionally use it for official business. But in Mrs. Clinton’s case, she rejected an official government email account and used only her secret account.

“Those kinds of rules were just totally flouted by Clinton,” he said.

It’s Friday, TWO Hillary Dumps

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Townhall: The department on Friday posted 1,589 pages of Clinton’s emails on its website, bringing to 48,535 the number of pages released as part of its ongoing release of the former secretary’s correspondence. The last batch of the roughly 55,000 work-related emails Clinton turned over to the department is scheduled to be released on Monday in accordance with a court order.

In the latest release, portions of 88 documents were deemed to be classified at the “confidential” level, the lowest classification category. The department said none of those emails was marked classified at the time they were sent. More here.

#1   

State Dept. Hands 1,600 Documents From Hillary Clinton’s Office To Benghazi Committee

Alex Plitsas/Opinion: The U.S. State Department Friday afternoon turned over 1,600 pages of never before seen documentation from the Office of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding the Benghazi terrorist attacks to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Benghazi CommitteeVerified account ‏@HouseBenghazi 2h2 hours ago

: Today the State Dept turned over more than 1,600 pages of new documents related to former Secretary Clinton and Libya.

Sources from the Select Committee say it first asked for these records related to Benghazi and Libya nearly a year ago, and is the first to receive them now — four months after the hearing with former Secretary Clinton. In a court filing in response to a FOIA suit filed by the watch dog group “Judicial Watch”, dated January 8, 2016, the State Department claimed it only recently, “located additional sources of documents that originated within the Office of the Secretary that are reasonably likely to contain records responsive to Plaintiff’s request.”

The State Department defines the “Office of the Secretary” as being “comprised of the Secretary’s Chief of Staff, the Counselor of the Department, Deputy Chief of Staff, the Secretary’s secretary, the Executive Assistant, two special assistants, the Secretary’s scheduler, staff assistant, and two personal assistants. This staff handles all of the day-to-day matters of the Secretary, including meetings at the Department, functions in Washington and throughout the country, and travel around the world.”

This latest revelation once again proves that the investigation into the terrorist attacks against the U.S. state Department Complex in Benghazi, Libya is not over and that Democrats who claim that the event has already been investigated in its entirety are just plain wrong. It also speaks to the professional and meticulous manner in which Rep. Gowdy has conducted this investigation and should give confidence to the American people that he will get to the bottom of what actually happened before, during, and after the terrorist attack in Benghazi – to include what role Hillary Clinton played in the Administration’s failures.

According to the Select Committee, the State Department has still not turned over other records it has been requesting for more than year. The fact that the Obama Administration has withheld these records until this time, and is still withholding more, is suspect given the timing of the U.S. presidential election. What else is the Obama administration hiding from the committee and the American people?

#2 

Feds release more Clinton emails on eve of South Carolina primary

TheHill: The State Department on Friday released 881 new emails from Hillary Clinton’s personal server, a day before Democrats in South Carolina head to the polls.

The new release brings the total number of classified emails on the former secretary of State’s machine up to more than 1,800. The vast majority of those classified emails were listed at the lowest level, that of “confidential,” but nearly two dozen were classified as “secret” and another 22 were deemed “top secret” — the highest level of classification.

Those top secret emails were deemed too dangerous to release to the public, even in a redacted form.

None of the 88 classified emails in Friday’s dump were classified at the time they were sent, a State Department official said.

Friday’s release is the second-to-last from the State Department, which has been laboring to make Clinton’s emails public since last May.

Under the terms of a court order earlier this month, the department will need to publish the very last of the roughly 35,000 supposedly work-related emails on Monday.

Federal officials planned to work through the weekend to reach that goal, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said earlier in the day.

“We’re still reviewing them – a lot of them, frankly,” Toner told reporters at the State Department. “Going to be working hard through the weekend.”

On Saturday, Clinton’s presidential campaign is hoping to cement its front-runner status with a strong showing in South Carolina, where polls show her with a significant lead over rival Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Sanders has repeatedly refused to attack Clinton over her emails, but Republicans have been less kind. Critics of Clinton allege that her unconventional use of a personal email account on a private server throughout her time in office posed a major threat to national security and skirted federal recordkeeping laws.

After Ukraine, DHS Warns Domestic Utility Companies

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Feds advise utilities to pull plug on Internet after Ukraine attack

WashingtonExaminer: The Department of Homeland Security advised electric utilities Thursday that they may need to stop using the Internet altogether, after the agency found that a cyberattack that brought down Ukraine’s power grid in December could have been far more devastating than reported.

The Dec. 23 cyberattack forced U.S. regulators to place utilities on alert after unknown attackers caused thousands of Ukrainian residents to lose power for hours by installing malicious software, or malware, on utility computers. But the Department of Homeland Security said Thursday that the attack may have been directed at more than just the country’s electricity sector, suggesting the attackers were looking to cause more harm than was reported.

In response, federal investigators are recommending that U.S. utilities and other industries “take defensive measures.” To start with, they need to best practices “to minimize the risk from similar malicious cyber activity,” according to an investigative report issued Thursday by Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team.

But the team is also recommending more drastic action, such as keep control-system computers away from the Internet.

“Organizations should isolate [industrial control system] networks from any untrusted networks, especially the Internet,” the report says. “All unused ports should be locked down and all unused services turned off. If a defined business requirement or control function exists, only allow real-time connectivity to external networks. If one-way communication can accomplish a task, use optical separation.”

The findings show that the power outages were caused by three attacks using cyberintrusion software to attack electric power distribution companies, affecting about 225,000 customers. It also reveals that once power was restored, the utilities continued “to run under constrained operations,” implying that the damage to grid control systems was profound.

The team also learned that “three other organizations, some from other critical infrastructure sectors, were also intruded upon but did not experience operational impacts.” That suggests the attackers were going after more than just the power grid, and may have been planning a much more economy-wide attack. The team does not disclose what other sectors of the country were targeted.

The team said the attack was well-planned, “probably following extensive reconnaissance of the victim networks,” the report says. “According to company personnel, the cyberattacks at each company occurred within 30 minutes of each other and impacted multiple central and regional facilities.”

The attackers were attempting to make the damage permanent. The report says the attackers installed “KillDisk” malware onto company computers that would erase data necessary to reboot operations after a cyberattack.

There is also a mystery to the attackers’ actions.

“Each company also reported that they had been infected with BlackEnergy malware; however, we do not know whether the malware played a role in the cyberattacks,” the report says. The malware was delivered using an email embedded hacking technique known as “spear phishing” that contained a number of malicious Microsoft Office attachments.

“It is suspected that BlackEnergy may have been used as an initial access vector to acquire legitimate credentials; however, this information is still being evaluated,” the team says.

The investigation was done with Ukraine authorities and involved the FBI, Department of Energy and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.

*** 

New research is shining a light on the ongoing evolution of the BlackEnergy malware, which has been spotted recently targeting government institutions in the Ukraine.

Security researchers at ESET and F-Secure each have dived into the malware’s evolution. BlackEnergy was first identified several years ago. Originally a DDoS Trojan, it has since morphed into “a sophisticated piece of malware with a modular architecture, making it a suitable tool for sending spam and for online bank fraud,” blogged ESET’s Robert Lipovsky.

“The targeted attacks recently discovered are proof that the Trojan is still alive and kicking in 2014,” wrote Lipovsky, a malware researcher at ESET.

ESET has nicknamed the BlackEnergy modifications first spotted at the beginning of the year ‘BlackEnergyLite’ due to the lack of a kernel-mode driver component. It also featured less support for plug-ins and a lighter overall footprint.

“The omission of the kernel mode driver may appear as a step back in terms of malware complexity: however it is a growing trend in the malware landscape nowadays,” he blogged. “The threats that were among the highest-ranked malware in terms of technical sophistication (e.g., rootkits and bootkits, such as Rustock, Olmarik/TDL4, Rovnix, and others) a few years back are no longer as common.”

The malware variants ESET has tracked in 2014 – both of BlackEnergy and of BlackEnergy Lite – have been used in targeted attacks. This was underscored by the presence of plugins meant for network discovery, remote code execution and data collection, Lipovsky noted.

“We have observed over a hundred individual victims of these campaigns during our monitoring of the botnets,” he blogged. “Approximately half of these victims are situated in Ukraine and half in Poland, and include a number of state organizations, various businesses, as well as targets which we were unable to identify. The spreading campaigns that we have observed have used either technical infection methods through exploitation of software vulnerabilities, social engineering through spear-phishing emails and decoy documents, or a combination of both.”

In a whitepaper, researchers at F-Secure noted that in the summer of 2014, the firm saw samples of BlackEnergy targeting Ukrainian government organizations for the purposes of stealing information. These samples were nicknamed BlackEnergy 3 by F-Secure and identified as the work of a group the company refers to as “Quedagh.” According to F-Secure, the group is suspected to have been involved in cyber-attacks launched against Georgia during that country’s conflict with Russia in 2008.

“The Quedagh-related customizations to the BlackEnergy malware include support for proxy servers and use of techniques to bypass User Account Control and driver signing features in 64-bit Windows systems,” according to the F-Secure whitepaper. “While monitoring BlackEnergy samples, we also uncovered a new variant used by this group. We named this new variant BlackEnergy 3.”

Only Quedagh is believed to be using BlackEnergy 3, and it is not available for sale on the open market, noted Sean Sullivan, security advisor at F-Secure.

“The name [of the group] is based on a ship taken by Captain Kidd, an infamous privateer,” he said. “It is our working theory that the group has previous crimeware experience. Its goals appear to be political but they operate like a crimeware gang. There have been several cases this year of which BlackEnergy is the latest. The trend is one of off-the-shelf malware being used in an APT [advanced persistent threat] kind of way. The tech isn’t currently worthy of being called APT, but its evolving and scaling in that direction.”

Within a month of Windows 8.1’s release, the group added support for 64-bit systems. They also used a technique to bypass the driver-signing requirement on 64-bit Windows systems.

In the case of BlackEnergy 3, the malware will only attempt to infect a system if the current user is a member of the local administration group. If not, it will re-launch itself as Administrator on Vista. This will trigger a User Account Control (UAC) prompt. However, on Windows 7 and later, the malware will look to bypass the default UAC settings.  

“The use of BlackEnergy for a politically-oriented attack is an intriguing convergence of criminal activity and espionage,” F-Secure notes in the paper. “As the kit is being used by multiple groups, it provides a greater measure of plausible deniability than is afforded by a custom-made piece of code.”

In 2014 from the Department of Interior and DHS:

Summary: Investigation of NPS-GCNP SCADA SYSTEM

Report Date: August 7, 2014

OIG investigated allegations that the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system at Grand Canyon National Park (Park) may be obsolete and prone to failure. In addition, it was alleged only one Park employee controlled the system, increasing the potential for the system to fail or become unusable.

The SCADA system is a private utilities network that monitors and controls critical infrastructure elements at the Park. Failure of the system could pose a health and safety risk to millions of Park visitors. Due to potential risks that system failure posed, we consulted with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) and asked that they assess the overall architecture and cybersecurity of the Park’s SCADA system.

ICS-CERT conducted an onsite review and issued a report outlining the weaknesses it found at the Park’s SCADA system, including obsolete hardware and software, inadequate system documentation and policies, insufficient logging and data retention. We provided a copy of ICS-CERT’s assessment report to the National Park Service for review and action.

 

 

The Wilful Reckless Handling of Classified Docs in DHS too?

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Okay, so we have had the issue at the U.S. State Department and now the Department of Homeland Security, so it begs the question, what other agencies? Further, Iran, Russia, China and North Korea are likely loving this.

Security? Heh….

Homeland Security Is Spilling a Lot of Secrets

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Bloomberg: The Department of Homeland Security suffered over 100 “spills” of classified information last year, 40 percent of which came from one office, according to a leaked internal document I obtained. Officials and lawmakers told me that until the Department imposes stricter policies and sounder practices to better protect sensitive intelligence, the vulnerabilities there could be exploited. Not only does this raise the threat that hostile actors could get their hands on classified information, but may lead to other U.S. agencies keeping DHS out of the loop on major security issues.

A spill is not the same as an unauthorized disclosure of classified information. A Homeland Security official explained that spills often include “the accidental, inadvertent, or intentional introduction of classified information into an unclassified information technology system, or higher-level classified information into a lower-level classified information technology system, to include non-government systems.”

Examples include: using a copier not approved for the level of classified information copied; failing to properly mark a classified product; transmitting classified information on an unclassified system like Gmail; or sending classified information to someone who, while having the proper level of clearance, is not authorized to read a section of information sent to them, the official said.

There were 119 of these classified spills reported throughout the Homeland Security Department in fiscal year 2015, according to the internal document, which itself is unclassified. The section with the most spills by far was the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, headquartered at building 19 of the Nebraska Avenue Complex in Washington, led by retired General Francis Taylor. This office is composed mostly of intelligence analysts assigned to produce and review classified reports that are often the work of other intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

One senior Homeland Security official told me that the intelligence and analysis office at DHS suffers from lax enforcement of the established policies and practices to protect classified information. This official said the numbers of classified spills in the internal report only represents those incidents that were officially reported, and the actual number is much higher.

S.Y. Lee, a department spokesman, told me that DHS does not comment on reports of leaked information, but that the department is currently having mandatory employee training sessions on the handling of classified and sensitive information.

“We take any report of mishandling of information very seriously, and when violations are discovered, the Department takes immediate, appropriate actions to address the situation,” he said. “DHS takes the protection of all our assets very seriously, and will continue to evolve our training and remediation efforts to address security needs and accountability to the American public.”

Experts on government secrecy and classified information handling told me that the number of spills alone does not directly prove that there is a larger cultural or policy problem at DHS. But there is a history of carelessness with e-mail at the department, and this new finding combined with anecdotal reports of bad practices indicate that there should be more investigation the intelligence and analysis division in particular.

“At a minimum, this raises a question about what’s going on at this corner of the agency,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the program on government secretary at the Federation of American Scientists. “If it is happening disproportionally in one part of the agency, that may mean that remedial measures are needed there, including security training, better oversight and similar steps.”

Spillages are a normal part of the classification system at the DHS and elsewhere, and there are formal procedures for addressing them because it’s understood that you cannot eliminate human error, he said. But if one intelligence shop is mishandling information from another part of the government, that could cause real problems in the interagency cooperation and intelligence-sharing.

“If they have a reputation as a shop with unreliable security, other agencies are going to think twice about sharing their most valuable information with Homeland Security,” Aftergood said. “It can hurt other agencies and it can rebound on them. It’s bad all around and should be corrected.”

Johannes B. Ullrich, dean of research for the SANS Technology Institute, said that it’s probable most of the classified spills were unintentional and the result of sloppiness more than anything else. But lax enforcement of policies meant to protect sensitive information also presents an opportunity for exploitation by malicious actors.

“If it’s accepted practice that you print documents and scan them in, for example, then it’s much easier for an insider to take advantage of that,” he said. “By reducing the unintentional spillage you make it easier to find the intentional ones.”

The House Homeland Security Committee is currently pushing DHS to implement new systems for monitoring employees who handle classified information. Last November, the House passed the DHS Insider Threat and Mitigation Act, which was sponsored by Representative Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee’s subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence. The bill would require Taylor, among other things, to develop a timeline for deploying workplace monitoring technologies, employee awareness campaigns, and education and training programs related to potential insider threats to the department’s critical assets. The Senate Homeland Security Committee marked up a companion bill earlier this month.

“In recent years, the department has made progress installing limited monitoring technology, but much more needs to be done,” King said in a statement. “Results from the existing systems demonstrate the need for more auditing and education for DHS employees.”

Classified spills are a government-wide problem and there’s no way to know if the incidents at the DHS intelligence shop have been exploited. But unless that office and the government as a whole does a better job of protecting classified information, it’s just a matter of time before real damage is done to U.S. national security

Lew Alcindor aka Eric Holder….But Its Okay?

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While US Attorney General, Eric Holder Used Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Birth Name as His Official Email Address

Leopold/Vice:

Former US Attorney General Eric Holder is a huge fan of NBA hall of famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

So much so that Holder used Abdul-Jabbar’s birth name, Lew Alcindor, as an alias for his official Department of Justice (DOJ) email account, raising more questions about the email practices of top Obama administration officials, and about the ability of US government agencies to track down correspondence in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The Lew Alcindor revelation was made in a February 16 letter that DOJ sent to VICE News and Ryan Shapiro, a historian and doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in national security research.

“For your information,” the letter said, “e-mails in the enclosed documents which use the account name ‘Lew Alcindor’ denote e-mails to or from former Attorney General Holder.”

The letter was part of about 500 pages of heavily redacted emails and other documents given to VICE News and Shapiro in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed in late 2014. The documents show that Justice Department officials sent emails to Lew Alcindor regarding calls from lawmakers for a federal investigation into claims that CIA personnel spied on Senate staffers while the Senate was drafting a report about the CIA’s torture program. Holder’s name does not appear anywhere in his Lew Alcindor email account.

The responses from Lew Alcindor, notably one about Senator Ron Wyden’s demand that the DOJ “reopen” an investigation into the CIA after the agency’s own internal watchdog upheld the spying allegations, are virtually all redacted. DOJ declined to launch a criminal probe into the matter, claiming there was insufficient evidence. (Earlier this month, Wyden confronted CIA Director John Brennan about the spying incident and tried to get him to acknowledge it was improper and would not happen again.)

Other documents center around messages sent to the DOJ by David Grannis, the former staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, about authorizing Senate staffers to return to a secure facility leased by the CIA so they could finish fact-checking and writing the torture report. Grannis brings up the DOJ’s subsequent “odd” request, communicated to Grannis through the CIA, that Senate staffers “receive a security refresher beforehand, highlighting especially the computer system’s audit feature.”

“Can you cast any light on what DOJ personnel meant by this, or why they said it? Seems odd for DOJ to get involved in the security procedures between the Agency and the Committee, so I wanted to make sure we understood DOJ’s recommendation,” Grannis wrote, suggesting that the DOJ gave credence to CIA claims that Senate staffers inappropriately gained access to a coveted internal CIA document that sparked CIA spying.

There are vast swaths of redacting black ink throughout the emails — including DOJ’s response to Grannis.

Last March, a week after the New York Times revealed that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email account to conduct official business while she was Secretary of State, Holder’s chief spokesman, Brian Fallon, disclosed that his boss had used three different aliases — all of which had a usdoj.gov domain — during his tenure as the nation’s top law enforcement official.

‘Will members of the public reviewing the records of Eric Holder’s tenure as attorney general understand emails purporting to be from Lew Alcindor are actually from him?’

Fallon made the disclosure less than a week before he announced that he would serve as lead press secretary for Clinton’s presidential campaign. Fallon identified two of the email accounts Holder previously used, but they weren’t the names of any known living person. Fallon declined to identify Holder’s third email alias other than to say that it was “based” on an athlete. (Before leaving the DOJ in April 2015, Holder had still been using the Lew Alcindor email address.)

Fallon, who exchanged many of the emails in the cache with Lew Alcindor, explained the rationale for the practice: to combat spam and to avoid being inundated with correspondence from the public.

A Justice Department spokesman told VICE News there was nothing improper or legally questionable about Holder using the identity of a living person for his email account. Nor was it in any way an attempt, he said, to thwart FOIA or the Federal Records Act, which requires government agencies to preserve federal records. DOJ officials who handle FOIA requests and congressional inquiries, the spokesman said, knew of Holder’s email aliases.

Yet DOJ and many other federal agencies, the State Department and FBI in particular, have been harshly criticized (including by VICE News) for poorly performing searches meant to capture emails from officials who use their true identities. Experts in FOIA law said Holder’s Lew Alcindor identity calls into question the ability of FOIA staff to locate all emails from an official who uses an alias.

Laura Sheehan, a spokeswoman for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), said the email alias practice appears to be fairly common among agency heads in large government departments.

“There is no prohibition against it, so long as they can be linked to the actual name,” Sheehan said.

A few years ago, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, came under fire from conservative lawmakers and open government advocates — and was accused of attempting to thwart open records requests and federal records retention laws — after it was revealed that she used the email alias Richard Windsor when conducting official business. An inspector general review into the practice concluded that EPA lacks “internal controls to ensure the identification and preservation of records when using private and alias email accounts for conducting government business.” The disclosure lead NARA to issue policy guidance to the heads of federal agencies on email management, which say:

Agencies must ensure that the name of an individual employee is linked with each account in order to comply with FOIA, discovery, and the requirement to transfer permanent email records… to NARA. In most cases, this requires the full name or readily identifiable nickname that is maintained on a distribution list.

In a Q&A with the Washington Post shortly thereafter, NARA’s chief records officer, Paul Wester Jr., said that while there is no prohibition against using email aliases, the practice makes it difficult to locate and turn over records in response to FOIA requests, and NARA does not condone it.

“We’ve been pretty clear with agencies it is not a good practice to follow, and we don’t recommend that they authorize the use of personal e-mail accounts or alias accounts to conduct their business,” Wester said. “There’s a higher probability the emails wouldn’t be documented properly with their broader record keeping systems.”

Anne Weismann, the executive director of good government group Campaign for Accountability, and an expert on FOIA, told VICE News that even though the DOJ has acknowledged that Holder used an email alias, and that DOJ’s FOIA staff is aware, “it still raises a question about whether the agency is properly documenting its work and preserving records under the Federal Records Act.”

“Will members of the public reviewing the records of Eric Holder’s tenure as [attorney general] understand emails purporting to be from ‘Lew Alcindor’ are actually from him?” Weismann said. “An investigation clearly is warranted.”

Several years ago, Weismann inquired with the DOJ about the number of email accounts associated with Holder and his deputies. The DOJ responded to her inquiry by saying Holder’s email address does not use his name.

“This protects his privacy and security and allows him to conduct official business efficiently via e-mail,” DOJ attorney Vanessa Brinkman wrote in a September 30, 2013 letter addressed to Weismann. (Brinkmann also signed the February 16 letter turned over to VICE News and Shapiro.)

Holder, who returned to his old law firm Covington after he left the DOJ, did not return a call for comment.

A DOJ spokesman said Attorney General Loretta Lynch uses an official DOJ email address to conduct government business, but “to help guard against security risks, the Attorney General does not use her given name in the handle of her email address.”

Douglas Cox, a law professor with the City University of New York School of Law whose research focuses on the intersection of information policy and national security, said he believes there is a “legitimate problem” with alias emails, “especially in the way agencies appear to be administering them.”

“Agencies are unnecessarily creating risks of undermining FOIA responses, subpoena responses, and discovery disclosures,” Cox said. “I also think alias emails are inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the federal record keeping laws.”

Cox said he understands why Holder would want to avoid being spammed and receiving unsolicited emails from the public, “but I don’t see what the justification would be for not configuring [[email protected]] so [Holder’s] actual name appears in internal emails.”

“Is there some reason why the identity of the sender has to be masked internally? And if so, then they must be tightly controlling who knows the alias, which in turn invites, if not guarantees, FOIA and record keeping problems,” Cox said. “When you consider the possibility, if not likelihood based on what we know, that alias emails are common practice among high-ranking officials across dozens of agencies, the risk of undermining FOIA searches and discovery requests within the various agencies approaches certainty.”

Meanwhile, Abdul-Jabbar, who legally changed his name in 1971, was unaware that Holder used his birth name for his official government email account. A spokeswoman for the former Los Angeles Lakers great declined to comment about the issue. Last year, Abdul-Jabbar interviewed Holder for a documentary he is producing on race. And in an interview with Politico around the same time, Holder said he idolized Abdul-Jabbar growing up and that the basketball legend had become a friend.

 

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