Secret of a perfect crime: Be boring
Do any of us honestly have any idea how serious the Hillary Clinton email scandal was? I haven’t got a clue. Her actions could have been a neglectful oversight or a heinous criminal act. We don’t know.
Clinton was an avid Black Berry user and, on becoming secretary of state, claimed she didn’t know how to handle email on the desktop computer the government provided. When the NSA was unable to find a secure way of sending classified information via her Black Berry, Hillary simply continued using it, along with the old email address and server she had used while out of office. She never had an @state.gov email address: you emailed hdr22@clinton-email.com.
My inclination is to give Hillary the benefit of the doubt. Most people pay little or no attention to IT except when it’s not working, and Hillary may barely have known there was a server in her basement. But it still seems suspicious that nobody in the administration raised the issue of her email address. I mean you’d think it odd if you were told to contact the Prime Minister via Number10-Tessa@gmail.com.
But the really interesting thing about this story, as with many modern scandals, is that technology makes it dangerously easy for people to claim they don’t know what’s going on.
If I were advising aspiring young criminals, I would advise them to get into a really boring field of crime, ideally creating financial instruments so tediously complex that most people would fall asleep after two minutes hearing about them. Then make sure you do nothing at all in your private life which makes you remotely interesting; do not, for instance, buy an outrageously large yacht. If you do, the press has material for a story.
As the old joke goes, there are two ways of becoming a top judge. One way is to work hard at university, attend one of the Inns of Court, join a leading set of chambers and work hard for 30 years. Then you may be a judge. The other solution is to become a minor local magistrate and be caught having sex with a goat. Every tabloid newspaper the following day will then have a banner on its front page: “Top Judge in Goat Sex Horror”. By arrangement with the
Spectator