The Hillary Clinton email controversy began in March 2015, when it became publicly known that Hillary Clinton, during her tenure as United States Secretary of State, had exclusively used her family's private email server for official communications, rather than official State Department email accounts maintained on federal servers. Those official communications included thousands of emails that would later be marked classified by the State Department. Debate continues as to the propriety and legality of various aspects of Secretary Clinton's arrangement. Some experts, officials, and members of Congress have contended that her use of private messaging system software, a private server, and her deletion of nearly 32,000 emails that she and her lawyer regarded as private, violated State Department protocols and procedures, as well as federal laws and regulations governing recordkeeping. In response, Clinton has said that her use of personal email was in compliance with federal laws and State Department regulations, and that former secretaries of state had also maintained personal email accounts. Nearly 2,100 emails on the server have been retroactively marked as classified by the State Department. They were not marked as classified at the time they were sent. This includes 65 emails deemed "Secret" and 22 deemed "Top Secret". Government policy, reiterated in the non-disclosure agreement signed by Clinton as part of gaining her security clearance, is that sensitive information should be considered and handled as classified even if not marked as such. After allegations were raised that some of the emails in question fell into this category, a probe was initiated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) regarding how classified information was handled on the Clinton server. The controversy continues against the backdrop of Clinton's 2016 presidential election campaign and hearings held by the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi. In 2008, before Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, managed the system. Cooper had no security clearance or expertise in computer security.[36] Later, Bryan Pagliano, the former IT director for Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, was hired to maintain their private email server while Clinton was Secretary of State.[37][38] Pagliano had invoked the Fifth Amendment during congressional questioning about Clinton's server. In early 2016, he was granted immunity by the Department of Justice in exchange for cooperation with prosecutors.[39][40] A Clinton spokesman said her campaign was "pleased" Pagliano was now cooperating with prosecutors.[41] As of May 2016, the State Department remained unable to locate most of Pagliano's work-related emails from the period when he was employed by that department under Secretary Clinton.[42] Security experts such as Chris Soghoian believe that emails to and from Clinton may have been at risk of hacking and foreign surveillance.[43] Marc Maiffret, a cybersecurity expert, said that the server had "amateur hour" vulnerabilities.[44] For the first two months after Clinton was appointed Secretary of State and began accessing mail on the server through her Blackberry, transmissions to and from the server were apparently not encrypted. On March 29, 2009 a â??digital certificate" was obtained which would have permitted HTTPS encryption.[1] Former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael T. Flynn,[45] former United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates,[46][47] and former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael Morell[48][49] have said that it is likely that foreign governments were able to access the information on Clinton's server. Michael Hayden, former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency said "I would lose all respect for a whole bunch of foreign intelligence agencies if they weren't sitting back, paging through the emails." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary... Category Education