Hillary Clinton has finally spoken out about the controversy that has dogged her for a week since it came to light that she used a personal email server for her activities as secretary of state.
Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, Clinton implied that she prioritized her personal convenience, since she didn't want to carry two devices on her: one for personal email, and one for her official business
"It would've been better for me to use two separate phones and two email accounts," she said. "I thought using one device would be simpler, and obviously, it hasn't worked out that way."
A dual-device existence is familiar to almost anyone who had a professional career in the 2000s. After the rise of the iPhone and the phenomenon of "bring your device to work" took over, most people migrated to a single-device solution, where work and personal messaging coexist, not only on the same device, but sometimes in the same app.
Clinton's run as secretary of state began in 2009. Even back then, most smartphones could accommodate more than one email account, so Clinton's excuse for not wanting two devices for two email addresses may not ring true to many people.
However, the question of multiple accounts is separate from that of security. The reason many people needed to carry around multiple devices is because work and personal data co-mingling on the same device is frowned upon by most IT departments. There's a real concern of attack vectors on the personal side (where strict adherence to best security practices is rare), but there's also the concern that IT would suddenly have dominion over all your personal data, with the ability to read it, secure it and even wipe it at will.
Most people don't want that, and honestly, your IT department doesn't either — they don't want to waste their time policing your downloading of games and looking at porn on your own time. Hence the two-device situation.
It's only in recent years that mobile devices have addressed the multiple-device issue with more sophisticated solutions. On iPhones and some Android devices, many IT departments have been content to simply manage specific messaging apps like Good (or use Microsoft Exchange), with varying levels of security.
Clinton famously carried a BlackBerry, the device of choice for government work because of its emphasis on security. BlackBerry engineered BlackBerry 10 (which debuted in 2013, just as Clinton left office) to specifically address the two-device problem with a feature called BlackBerry Balance. BlackBerry 10 is natively able to accommodate not just two email accounts, but two entirely different device profiles. Normally it's your personal phone, but it's always a passcode away from becoming your work phone. You still get notifications whether you're logged in or not, but you can't see the contents of those alerts until you log in.
BlackBerry actually keeps the two profiles separate at the chip level, meaning there is no possibility of co-mingling data, and one can be remote-wiped while leaving the other alone.
Prior to 2013, though, there was no standard way to secure a BlackBerry like Clinton's with two email accounts, at least not without giving the IT person in charge complete dominion over all the data on the phone. To fulfill the criteria that Clinton demanded — secure email that's not sitting on a cloud service, plus a single-BlackBerry solution — she had just one option: Set up her own email server.
Politically, it was probably not the best choice. But for what she wanted to do, it makes total technical sense.
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