Snowden: Hilary Clinton's personal email server likely exposed sensitive national intelligence

If anyone else at the State Department made use of a personal email server to discuss sensitive information, they would have been fired and prosecuted, says Edward Snowden in a scathing attack on Hilary Clinton.

The former NSA worker hit out at the Democratic presidential candidate in an interview with Al Jazeera. He said that Clinton was probably aware that using a personal email address had exposed sensitive national intelligence, describing it as 'a problem'.

Hilary Clinton has faced heavy criticism after it was discovered that she had used a personal email server in the State Department. Batches of email have been published, but large swathes have disappeared making it impossible to know exactly what sort of correspondence the server was used for. In an interview that is due to air tomorrow, Snowden said:

If an ordinary worker at the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency [...] were sending details about the security of the embassies, which is alleged to be in her email, meetings with private government officials, foreign government officials and the statements that were made to them in confidence over unclassified email systems, they would not only lose their jobs and lose their clearance, they would very likely face prosecution for it.

He says that Clinton really should have known better, suggesting that "anyone who has the clearances that the Secretary of State has, or the director of any top level agency has, knows how classified information should be handled". Controversy sprung up around the revelation that Clinton had been using a personal email server for a number of years, and this was further stoked when thousands of emails described as 'personal' were deleted. She is currently under investigation to determine whether classified information ended up in her email account, and her poll ratings have been gradually sliding as her campaign progresses.

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