In the midst of the ongoing Hillary Clinton email scandal, a new survey found one-third of government employees have used their personal email for official business.
Alfresco, a California-based software company, looked into how employees use technology to collaborate in the workplace, and the results show Clinton isn’t the only government employee potentially compromising national security by choosing not to use their official government account.
The FBI recently took control of Clinton’s personal server, used during her time as secretary of state, as part of an “extremely serious” investigation into the security of classified information and federal records contained in the presidential hopeful’s emails.
Like the former first lady, the survey found 9 percent of the roughly 150 federal employees polled solely used their personal accounts for work purposes. And just 56 percent of government workers said they always take data security and privacy into consideration while sharing information with external stakeholders and clients.
According to The Washington Post, Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, wasn’t surprised by the findings.
“The record keeping rules are unfortunately not known by everyone at an agency,” he told the paper. According to Baron, while many government employees use personal emails, in Clinton’s case, it’s more probable official records wouldn’t be properly preserved due to the nature of having an exclusive server.
Personal emails aren’t the only problem with potential breaches in national security.
In a separate survey conducted by cybersecurity company Lookout, Inc., just under 50 percent of federal workers said they aren’t allowed to keep work-related information on their personal mobile devices, yet 30 percent do anyway.
A large portion of the 1,000 federal workers polled said they were willing to compromise security for the sake of personal convenience.
“Nearly 40 percent of employees are willing to sacrifice government security to use a personal mobile device at work despite being aware of cybersecurity concerns,” the survey concluded.
At least 125 of the 7,000 pages of the emails released by the State Department Monday night have been deemed classified, putting the total at over 210.
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