Hillary’s email server IP address 64.94.172.146 (mail.clintonemail.com) which I traced and verified (SSL Certificate was clintonemail.com)  as actually her email is unlikely to be a home IP address, but not impossible. The IP address is in a range of IP addresses assigned to data centers, not home users. It is possible to set up tunneling from her home to the data center but if you have equipment at a data center already it would make more sense to leave the server there. I personally have over a dozen email servers and none of them are at home.

What’s more interesting about her IP address is that it has no Reverse DNS. (RDNS) which identifies the IP address to the world. It’s not unusual to have IP addresses without RDNS – but if she were sending email from that IP it would likely get caught in the recipients spam filters or just rejected because spam filters don’t like servers with no RDNS. So if she were sending email directly from her server – a lot of her email would have bounced and it would have been unusable. Even for personal account usage.

So for outbound email she probably used a “smarthost” which would likely be MxLogic’s outbound service. I don’t know if it actually is – but if anyone ever got and email from Hillary and still has the email then they can look in the Received lines in the message headers to see where the message has been. If it says something.mxlogic.com then she is using their outbound. This is worth looking into because every received line is another server where Hillary’s outbound email could have been tapped. Yesterday I talked about Hillary’s inbound email, today I’m talking outbound.

The important point here is – whether you are a friend or state department employee – if you have an email from Hillary then you can tell where that email went. And I think that would be interesting because for national security purposes we would want to know where out there in the world might have had access to tap her communications.

Since my post yesterday there has been a lot of technical discussion about different aspects of email. Some people saying things like “none of her email had classified information”. I find that hard to believe. As the Secretary of State you are by definition going to get classified email and if you say you aren’t you’re not only lying but you’re insulting my intelligence. You can’t be SOS and not have classified emails.

So why is this such a big deal that she didn’t use the State Department email system? First, I would assume (and who knows if I’m right) that the State Department servers are more secure that servers out in the wild. That is in itself a compelling reason not to use private servers. But one of the main reasons is government transparency, so we as citizens can determine if people working for the government are doing their job. They passed laws about government email archiving so that government officials – like Hillary – can’t destroy evidence. The government servers archives all email in and out and if congress or the public needs access to these emails they are there to be had.

Now Hillary claims that she turned these emails over to the State Department when they were requested of her. It is true that she turned over some of them and it is through trust alone that anyone can believe they are all turned over. The purpose of the archiving system is specifically to eliminate the “trust” issue so that we know that the emails were all archived.

But – and this is a very important point – is HOW the emails were turned over. She printed each one out on paper one by one and handed over boxes of paper with the email printed. Thus those email can’t be searched electronically. So if someone wants all emails to some individual or emails about a subject then someone has to hand search these emails and they are likely to miss something.

It would have been far easier to copy all the emails onto a thumb drive and hand that over to the State Department where they could be electronically imported into the system and electronically searchable like all the other emails are. But she chose to go to great trouble to deliberately make things difficult for the State Department to process those emails.  And that indicates an act of bad faith. She’s just giving all of us the virtual finger.

Another important issue is – where are the backups? If you have a computer you have to make backup copies so that if your hard drive fails or you get hacked or you accidentally delete something important you can go to the backup and recover. So if there are backups then all the emails including the ones she deleted are still recoverable. So – with regard to backups, the possibilities are:

1. There are backups – meaning the emails can be recovered.
2. There were backups but they are destroyed – meaning that she is really making sure no one sees the originals.
3. There are no backups – which is a level of extreme incompetence. You don’t store sensitive information without backups. What if her hard drive crashed then all emails would have been lost.

So – if you are a news reported reading this then one of the questions you should be asking is – where are the backups?

Here’s what confuses me. All her emails came from hdr22@clintonemail.com. So how was it than no one noticed this was not a state department email domain? (i.e. didn’t end in .gov) So everyone knew and no one cared? Or are they so stupid that no one knew? If I were in the news media I would want to interview someone from the IT department at State and ask them – WTF?

So – why is this such a big deal other than the above good reasons regarding national security and government transparency? What does it mean politically?

I have come to expect this kind of behavior from Republicans. If Carl Rove did it or Dick Cheney, I’m not surprised. Ollie North shredding documents – no surprise. And isn’t that just a little sad. But the only thing that Democrats have to run on is that they aren’t Republicans. And isn’t that just a little sad too. Democrats haven’t been doing a very good job lately of not being Republicans. W Bush was clearly the worst president ever. Obama is in second place. If Obama were a Republican he would be considered greater than Reagan. Hope and Change has become Nope and Same.

In the past Republican have broken the law with impunity. Democrats also break the law but they are at least embarrassed about it when they get caught. And even when Republicans lie they come up with some sort of plausible excuse so that I don’t feel like they are insulting my intelligence. Hillary’s excuses aren’t even plausible. I am an email expert and a tech genius so I happened to know a lot more about this issue than the average person. But this isn’t that complicated. Had Hillary just followed the rules and used the State Department email account we would not be here having this discussion. So I would like to at least here the truth because I’m just f…ing tired of all of them lying to me over and over again.

Here’s what the ACLU says about Clinton’s email cover up and they explain it so well.