U.S. defense chief’s email practices come under spotlight

On February 2, 2013 Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter delivers his remarks while participating in a panel discussion on Pooling and Sharing during the 49th Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has made a surprise visit to Afghanistan to assess the fragile security situation.

The same practice by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has drawn intense criticism and led to an FBI investigation into two emails that are now considered top secret.

“Someone in my position should have known better”.

The lull in the fighting season that winter in Afghanistan typically brings will be an opportunity for Afghan forces to “reset and refit” as they prepare for the fighting season next year, a said a senior defense official.

Cook said in the statement that Carter has used a personal email account mainly to correspond with friends and family.

In September, The Times filed a Freedom of Information request for all emails from the personal account that Carter exchanged with his chief of staff at the time, Eric Fanning, during the month of April.

McCain says it’s “hard to believe” that Carter would exercise the same error in judgment after all the attention on the issue.

McCain said the committee has requested copies of the emails and will conduct a review “to ensure sensitive information was not compromised”.

Hackers have probed the email accounts of USA officials for vulnerabilities, and Iranian hackers recently broke into the social media and email accounts of State Department officials, according to another Times report. The Defense Department said all his messages, which appeared to be largely about meetings and speeches, were backed up for record keeping on the department’s email system. Clinton has turned over some 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department. In contrast to Cook’s statement, a former Carter aide said the defense secretary used the personal account so frequently that members of his staff feared he would be hacked and anxious about his not following the rules.

The political controversy over Clinton’s use of a private email server has hardly waned in the nine months since the arrangement was revealed.

Fueling those concerns is a new Pentagon report saying that the Taliban has been emboldened by the reduced US military presence in Afghanistan and attacks increased this year. “I believe in that it would be appropriate for him to ask for the DOD Inspector General’s assessment in that no classified material was transmitted over unsecured channels”, he stated.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook also called it a mistake, but emphasized the practice has stopped.