Calling geeks about the White House emails
Dear Geeks,
Never mind about the pressing matter of whether the White House should be required to turn over records about a stash of possibly missing e-mails.
No my question is purely technical, but pertinent, me thinks, to all of us who are hunting information in the digital era, (as well as to those of use who are trying to hide our tracks.)
So, please say it ain’t so that the White House could lose any e-mails. Let alone e-mails from when Bush decided to go to war with Iraq, and White House officials decided to leak the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame and the Justice Department began a criminal investigation into who leaked that classified information.”
Please, please, say it ain’t so. Because if it is...then surely, the electronic ground rules just changed?
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Comments (3)
Yes, you are correct.
I maintain a number of email systems and servers for small companies as a technology consultant.
I will tell you and the senate and the congress and the court that the statements the white house makes about "loosing emails" is inconsistent with everything I know and any of my 20 plus years of experience.
In fact, even without the safeguards, policies and practices legally imposed on such a system; that serves the white house or any government agency, it would take such a large, concerted and well coordinated effort to eradicate all instances and records of emails that it would be nearly impossible.
And even if the effort was successful, there would almost certainly be record of the effort itself, ie., evidence of the "cover-up".
AND.. not complying with such policies and legal mandates (regarding back-up, redundancy and archival) would be criminal in itself and easily determined.
This is BS to largest extent. It makes the 18-minute-gap look like a child's prank. It is certainly possible that BY NOW, much if not most of the files have been erased. But I would bet that somewhere, someone missed something and evidence remains.
Shame on the congress and the justice dept for not seizing every laptop, desktop and server HD the minute this extraordinary lie came to the surface.
Posted by joey mele | June 16, 2008 07:37 PM
As I recall, about 20 years ago, the actors in the Iran-Contra affair had erroneously thought that deleting emails in their systems would get rid of the emails. They found out that that was wrong as the email system archived everything that had been sent. One wonders how that functionality would suddenly go away and there is no secondary backup of emails received by their system.
Posted by Manish | June 16, 2008 08:46 PM
Norton wipefile does wonder for e-mails you want to permanently get rid of. However, it has to be applied to all computers that e-mail showed up on. Maybe if they looked into every computer of everyone involved, they may find one where someone hit delete instead of wipefile.
Posted by tomsfork | June 17, 2008 08:04 AM