Latest Clinton emails show frustrations at State Dept.

Aides to Hillary Rodham Clinton at the State Department complained about the limitations of using email to discuss sensitive diplomatic information, according to the latest batch of emails released by the agency from Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.

The State Department made public roughly 7,121 pages of Clinton's emails late Monday night, including at least 125 emails that were censored prior to their release because they contain information now deemed classified.

The department does not know for sure if any information in the 125 emails was classified at the time the emails were sent or received on the private email server Clinton used for work, department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters.

"It's not an exact science," Toner said in a media briefing.

Among the emails released are some from federal employees noting the constraints of discussing sensitive subjects outside the government's secure messaging systems. Alec Ross, a senior adviser, in a February 2010 email intended for Clinton, cited "the boundaries of unclassified email" in a message about an unspecified country, which Ross referred to as "the country we discussed."

The email appears to focus on civil unrest in Iran during the period preceding the Green Movement, when Iranian protesters used social media and the Internet to unsuccessfully challenge the re-election of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ross's email proposed circumventing Iranian government-imposed firewalls and using technology to enable better communications between resistance organizers and protest participants.

Government employees are instructed not to paraphrase or repeat in any form classified material in unsecured email, which includes both the official state.gov email system and the private server that Clinton set up at her home to use while serving as the nation's top diplomat.

In total, the State Department has now released 13,269 pages of Clinton's emails, more than 25 percent of the total that she turned over from her private server, said Toner. Clinton provided the department some 30,000 pages of emails she classified as work-related late last year, while deleting a similar amount from her server because she said they were solely personal in nature.

Toner said none of the censored information was identified as classified when the emails were sent or received by Clinton, noting the redactions were made subsequently and only prior to the release of the emails under the Freedom of Information Act.

However, the Democratic presidential front-runner now says her decision to use a personal email account to conduct government business was a mistake, and government inspectors have pointed to exchanges they said should not have been sent via such an unsecured channel.

Clinton's use of her own private email may have also created logistical problems communicating with State Department aides.

After Clinton aide Lauren Jiloty, who used an official State Department email address, missed some emails, a top aide mused that the conflicting systems were part of the problem.

"Well its clearly a state vs. outside email issue," Huma Abedin, who also had an address on the private server, wrote to Clinton on Aug. 24, 2010. "State has been trying to figure it out. So lj is getting all your emazils cause she's on her personal account too," Abedin wrote, referring to Jiloty.

The Associated Press