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Hillary Clinton's Latest Court-Mandated Email Dump Illustrates Her Team's Conflicting Relationship with Tech

"Pls print."

Image via Flickr user Mark Nozell

Last night at 9 PM, the State Department made public over 7,000 of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's previously unreleased emails.

In May of this year, it was ruled that the State Department was to release all of Clinton's nearly 30,000 emails on a rolling basis as a result of a FOIA request filed by VICE News. Less than three months earlier, the New York Times revealed that Clinton had used a personal email address operated on a private server in Clinton's home to conduct all official business. It is suspected that Clinton's use of the private server was to keep her correspondences from being subject to FOIA requests: had Clinton used a State Department email address, her correspondences would have been considered government records and kept on State Department servers. Clinton, however, has claimed she merely used a personal email address because of "convenience."

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The latest batch of emails cover 2009 and 2010, and are accessible at the State Department's FOIA Reading Room (The Wall Street Journal has created a more sophisticated search engine for the emails). Of the 7,000 emails, approximately 125 were modified because they were deemed to contain classified information.

If you're familiar with the Clinton email scandal, the presence of classified info is a big deal—last month, VICE News reported that Clinton "reportedly denied that she sent or received classified information over her email account."

Topics that warranted redaction included EU foreign policy chief Cathy Ashton's conversations with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman and the proposed relocation of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Japan. Other emails, such as one from April 24, 2010, was all but stripped of context, noting only that Clinton's Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills needed to hop on an urgent call within the next three hours.

Another is an email from Larry Schwartz, Minister Counselor for Public Affairs at the United States Embassy in Pakistan, with the subject line, "Facebook Freed in Pakistan." The contents of the email have been completely redacted. An email with the subject line "Lavrov" is redacted, save for Clinton's request, "Can you run the traps."

Meanwhile, some of the emails illustrate Clinton and her team's relationship with technology both publicly and privately. In a 2009 email, Clinton commented on a draft of a speech, "This looks fine and makes me sound like a techie (which is good, albeit a stretch)."

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It turns out calling Clinton's tech-savviness "a stretch" might have itself been a stretch. One email from 2010 finds her asking an aide to teach her how to use her new iPad—dubbed the "hPad." Another one finds her asking an aide, "Do I need to charge it? If so, how? I have no cords." Many email chains conclude in her forwarding the correspondence to an aide saying, "Pls print."

Multiple email chains are concerned with the possibility of using social media to manipulate public perception in foreign countries. Below is an excerpt of an email from Alec Ross, Clinton's Senior Advisor for Innovation to fellow Clinton advisor Cheryl Mills:

In that same email, Ross wrote, "We will work through Stanford to indirectly launch an innovation competition for the best apps and programs that provide tools for circumvention of politically motivated censorship." Additionally, he noted that Clinton staffers Maria Otero and Bob Hormats were planning on speaking with "major, relevant technology companies" with the intent of urging them to "make more carefully considered decisions about the deals they cut with foreign governments."

In a Ross email from September 2010, he noted that he and Clinton Advisor Jacob Sullivan had recently taken a trip to Syria, noting that the country's young, tech-savvy population would inevitably lead to "disruptions… that we could potential (sic) harness for our purposes."

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