The Clinton e-mail fight reinforces just how slowly the government adjusts to new technology

[Commentary] The politics of Hillary Clinton's e-mail use as secretary of state will not be budged one inch in any direction by the just-released inspector general's report evaluating that decision. Part of what's being sussed out in the e-mail issue is the huge gulf between the technological capabilities of the rest of the world and that of the US government.

Clinton's arrival at the State Department and President Obama's arrival in the White House happened in 2009 -- well after the Internet was pervasive in the United States, but only shortly after the emergence of social media and, more important, smartphones. The government wasn't ready for this. Like any other massive institution (including some newspapers), adoption of new technologies includes a lot of consideration of the ripple effects through entrenched processes. For a few centuries, with technology evolving at a slower pace and a smaller scale of government, that integration was culturally different. (Rutherford B. Hayes installed the White House's first phone in 1877 -- phone number: 1 -- but it wasn't until 1929 that a phone was installed in the Oval Office.) With the advent of the Internet, the pace of private-sector adoption -- and public-sector pressure to keep up -- accelerated. Even if employees are fully adherent to the rules, government must almost necessarily operate in a way that's much more cumbersome than what you would find in the private sector.