If you don’t know that “private email” is an oxymoron, then stay off the Internet!

Email is not a secure means of communication.

This simple fact has been known since there was email.

This is so obvious that there really should be no need for me to say it, and it ought not require serious commentary.

Here’s why:

Email could be intercepted and accessed by an unauthorized party

Email could be shared inappropriately by the recipient

Email could be compromised for as long as it is retained by you or the recipient

There are no retention controls over the recipient’s system

Accessing your email over an insecure network (i.e., Internet Cafe or open wireless network) can expose your user account information

Although encrypted connections can mitigate the risks of having ones’ authentication credentials compromised, email itself is still plain text when traveling between the sender and the recipient and can be easily intercepted

Regardless of the provider, email is not a secure method of communication. This applies to our current campus email systems as well as most third-party email providers

There is nothing new about any of this. When I first started using the Internet in the 1980s I learned an abiding Internet truth:

Nothing that goes out on the Internet is private.

Doh.

So why does this need to be restated? Because, apparently there are still people in this day and age who are so moronic — so non-Internet savvy — that they are actually shocked to discover that their email is not secure.

Other than the fact that he suddenly wants the election results undone because Russian hackers accessed his gmail account, just who the hell is this John Podesta, anyway?

He is anything but an innocent naif!

Podesta served as both an Assistant to the President and as Deputy Chief of Staff. Earlier, from January 1993 to 1995, he was Assistant to the President, Staff Secretary and a senior policy adviser on government information, privacy, telecommunications security and regulatory policy. In 1998 he became President Clinton’s Chief of Staff in the second Clinton Administration and executed the position until the end of Clinton’s time in office in January 2001. Podesta encouraged Executive Order 12958 which led to efforts to declassify millions of pages from the U.S. diplomatic and national security history.[12]

Wow, so he goes way back. He’s not merely an experienced Internet user, he was a policy adviser to the White House on government information, privacy, and telecommunications security.

Got that?

And now we are now told that this poor, hapless man — never mind that he’d have been among the top five people in a Hillary Clinton administration — was a victim of email hacking.

Wow, for a guy like that to have been hacked, it must have been an incredibly sophisticated operation. Right?

Uh, wrong!

Here is what happened to Podesta:

SecureWorks concluded Fancy Bear had sent Podesta an email on 19 March 2016 that had the appearance of a Google security alert, but actually contained a misleading link—a strategy known as spear-phishing. (This tactic has also been used by hackers to break into the accounts of other notable persons, such as Colin Powell). The link—which used Bitly, a URL shortening service—brought Podesta to a fake log-in page where he entered his Gmail credentials.[1][6][7][8]

Huh? You’ve got to be kidding! Unless the Russians hacked the Wiki entry, I’m dumbfounded.

Seriously, I can’t imagine how a man at that level would fall for something as mundane as an attempted phishing attack! I get them all the time!

I get fake FedEx delivery notifications, fake insurance company notifications, fake bank notifications, fake notifications from my email server, etc., etc., etc. I get so many it’s almost tedious deleting them, and I have given up on emailing the companies at abuse@fatcatz.com and receiving their useless replies. I’m on my own, as is everyone else.

Admittedly, I am a bit more sophisticated than some of the poor schleps online, and I realize that many people have to be constantly reminded to “never click on a link that comes to you in an email, even if you think it’s from a trusted friend.”

I honestly feel sorry for the elderly people who fall for these phishing attacks.

But — I have a lot of trouble feeling sorry for a man who almost became one of the most powerful men in the world, yet who was dumb enough to click on the sort of link we warn children and elderly rest home patients about.

Forgive me if I feel just the opposite.

I don’t know who hacked Podesta’s email account, but the very fact that it happened makes me think he really wasn’t the right man for either the job he had, or the job he would have had if Hillary Clinton had won.

(I’m not saying the hackers did us a favor, mind you. But I am old enough to remember when the argument was made that by exposing vulnerabilities, hackers did just that.)