At the Washington Post, Stewart Baker raises questions about whether Hillary Clinton’s emails could have been intercepted by a foreign government during her trip to Asia in February 2009.
Although Clinton began using her private email server after becoming secretary of state in January 2009, the server reportedly did not get an encryption certificate until the end of March. Unencrypted messages are particularly vulnerable to hackers.
Baker questions why Clinton decided to get an encryption certificate in March, after apparently going months without it. He notes that Clinton traveled to Asia in mid-February, and that security officials raised concerns about vulnerabilities after the trip, according to internal State Department emails:
But what’s fascinating and troubling is something else in the correspondence. One staff message says that during Clinton’s conversation with [Assistant Secretary Eric] Boswell, "her attention was drawn to a sentence that indicates we [the diplomatic security office] have intelligence concerning this vulnerability during her recent trip to Asia."
I am struck by the mix of delicacy and insistence in that phrasing. It seems likely that Clinton’s attention was drawn to that sentence because the intelligence was about Secretary Clinton’s own communications security, something a discreet diplomat would not want to say directly in written communications. Clinton certainly acted like the intelligence concerned her. She asked Boswell to get her "the information." On March 11, Boswell is told by his staff that the report is already on the classified system, and he is reminded that he had already been briefed on it. Presumably he conveyed it to Clinton soon after March 11. …
I suppose this could all be coincidence, but the most likely scenario is that the Secretary’s Asia trip produced an intelligence report that was directly relevant to the security of Clinton’s communications. And that the report was sufficiently dramatic that it spurred Clinton to make immediate security changes on her homebrew server.