The Ambassador who worked from Nairobi bathroom to avoid State Dept. IT

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/the-ambassador-who-worked-from-nairobi-bathroom-to-avoid-state-dept-it/

By Sean Gallagher
Ars Technica
March 8, 2015

The current scandal roiling over the use of a private e-mail server by 
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is just the latest in a series 
of scandals surrounding government e-mails. And it’s not the first public 
airing of problems with the State Department’s IT operations—and 
executives’ efforts to bypass or work around them. At least she didn’t set 
up an office in a restroom just to bypass State Department network 
restrictions and do everything over Gmail.

However, another Obama administration appointee—the former ambassador to 
Kenya—did do that, essentially refusing to use any of the Nairobi 
embassy’s internal IT. He worked out of a bathroom because it was the only 
place in the embassy where he could use an unsecured network and his 
personal computer, using Gmail to conduct official business. And he did 
all this during a time when Chinese hackers were penetrating the personal 
Gmail inboxes of a number of US diplomats.

Why would such high-profile members of the administration’s foreign policy 
team so flagrantly bypass federal and agency regulations to use their own 
personal e-mail to conduct business? Was it that they had something they 
wanted to keep out of State’s servers and away from Congressional 
oversight? Was it that State’s IT was so bad that they needed to take 
matters into their own hands? Or was it because the department’s IT staff 
wasn’t responsive enough to what they saw as their personal needs, and 
they decided to show just how take-charge they were by ignoring all those 
stuffy policies?

The answer is probably a little bit of all of the above. But in the case 
of former ambassador Scott Gration, the evidence points heavily toward 
someone who wanted to work outside the system because he just couldn’t 
stand it.

[...]

--
Evident.io - Continuous Cloud Security for AWS.
Identify and mitigate risks in 5 minutes or less.
Sign up for a free trial @ https://evident.io/