On Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey announced that his agency would not be recommending charges over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, telling reporters that the bureau's investigators had concluded that "no reasonable prosecutor would try such a case." The announcement attracted harsh words from Clinton's political opponents, like House Speaker Paul Ryan, who wrote that "no one should be above the law," but it almost certainly frees Clinton from the lingering threat of prosecution that has hung over her campaign like a dark cloud.
While Comey acknowledged that the FBI "did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton's personal email domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked," he also scolded Clinton for being "careless." The FBI's investigation found that 110 individual messages in 52 email changes contained classified information—and eight of those chains were considered "Top Secret," a category reserved for information that, if unintentionally released, "could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage" to national security.
In his statement to reporters, Comey suggested that beyond the issue of Clinton's emails, the State Department in general has been too cavalier in its handling of government secrets. While this was not the focus of the FBI's investigation, he said, the agency found "evidence that the security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified email systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government."
To learn more about what effects Clinton's apparently lax security protocols could have, I called up Justin Cappos, an assistant professor of computer science at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering and commentator on cybersecurity issues. The conversation below has been edited for clarity.
Related: Why Clinton's 'Extreme Carelessness' With Classified Emails Isn't Criminal
VICE: Does it look to you like Hillary Clinton jeopardized national security by being "careless"?
Justin Cappos: In general, it doesn't seem like this is immensely horrendous. the bike lock.
So on the whole, do you think it's conceivable that these emails could still have some kind of impact for national security?
The issue really comes down to what's in those messages. And that's information that isn't publicly available.
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