Wolff: Hillary Clinton and the Snapchat defense

I don't know any significant player in the technology industry who does not use a personal e-mail account, nor anybody of any sense in any other kind of job who does not circumvent his or her company's server and e-mail oversight.

Putting aside Hillary Rodham Clinton's excuses about convenience, and the burdens of maintaining multiple devices, we can reasonably assume that she did not use her government e-mail account precisely because she wanted to maintain maximum control over who saw her e-mails. Indeed, it is exceedingly likely that before she began the secretary of State job she sought out some careful advice about technological norms. That advice would have been as follows: to whatever extent possible, don't use the company e-mail system. If you don't want your e-mail controlled by somebody else, don't use somebody else's e-mail server. Period.

Despite protestations now that maybe she should have used her official address, I'm sure she understood the stakes. Whatever blowback she might get from bypassing the internal system (and, indeed, it was not a bad gamble that nobody would actually hoist her for this), that would in no way equal the certain pain and legal troubles of having random e-mails coming back to haunt her.

The issue here may be, as it so often is, about the Clinton lack of transparency — in addition to eternal questions about Clinton's level of entitlement — but it also should be about how we function in a world of inevitable e-mail surveillance. (Corporate surveillance is surely a larger individual threat than NSA surveillance.)

Here's a responsibly paranoid thesis: if you run afoul of the company or institution that employs you, or even if your interests merely diverge, and if you've used its e-mail server, those e-mails will be read and used against you. Count on it.

If your name is Clinton, and you're a high-ranking public official in one of the most politically polarized moments in U.S. history, it would be impossibly naive not to assume that conflict would arise and that, even if you were cunningly circumspect in your e-mails, that something damaging would not slip through.

Why not two accounts? John Kerry surely maintains a personal account as well as his office account. But the best advice to the surely vigilant Clinton was probably that it never works out that way. That's not the nature of e-mail. The very reason e-mail is so incriminating to everyone is that the form defies calculation. Its very nature is to make a record of thoughts, moods, doubts, irritability and backstabbing, that no one would want to make a record of, and that — when and if those e-mails return to you, sometimes years later — it will present a reality that you can't defend against because, actually, it's not reality. Or it was a parallel reality.

It's e-mail! And while everybody understands that e-mail is actually different from real life, try to explain that in the media or in court.

There is certainly an argument — especially from political opponents, hostile media and dedicated schadenfreudeists, as well as do-gooders — that government ought to be different. That such a transparent record is exactly what government needs. That finally nobody can hide.

But that, of course, is vastly disingenuous.

Nobody is a hero to his valet; and nobody is a straight shooter in his or her e-mail. Everybody incriminates himself or herself. (This is why, in my experience, bankers, Hollywood agents and real estate salespeople still talk on the phone.) An academic studying the difference between what people say in an e-mail and what they actually do might make a small fortune as an expert witness.

It's a gotcha medium. It is the particular gotcha tool of the press and lawyers, hence why "e-mailgate" is such a storm: What if everybody took control of their e-mails? Much harder to get somebody.

Perhaps the best strategy is to use office e-mails only when they are written by an assistant or secretary — how's that for a reversion — and your own account when you're writing it yourself.

Indeed, this entire discussion, as so often happens in politics and media, is behind the curve. Technology understands the emotional and literal limitations of e-mail. Big, new fortunes are now being built on the promise of separating what we want to say from what we want people to know we've said: Hello, Snapchat.

Hello, Hillary. If her minute-by-minute e-mail trail had emerged to annotate the Benghazi business — and to further provide the Republicans with new avenues of disputed meaning and conjecture — that might fairly seem to indicate a lack of astuteness on her part and a grievous failure to learn her lessons.

She cannot now say in her defense, "of course, I didn't use office e-mail, are you crazy?" And she doesn't have that lightness of touch and bit of humor to do the wink-wink that every reasonable person would understand. But she did the necessary, intelligent and common-sense technology workaround that is the minimum we ought to expect for someone who is asking us to place our trust in her foresight and competence.