Today, I listened to Cain, Rush, Hannity and Erikson drone on about the elfin’ hard drive. Its gone, forget about it. However, in the places I’ve worked, that all used Microsoft Office, all use Microsoft Outlook. Which, archives everything for 7 years, unless you go in there and take it out. I have a hard time believing that the Feds use anything else, but who knows.
Have a friend that does that computer forensics stuff. He stated that even the deleting of the files would show up with a date and time stamp.
To my point, the easiest way to get everything is simple. Get the computer geeks and go to every agency that they know she sent emails to at this point. Have them dig into those computers, servers and files and I’m quite sure they’ll be a treasure trove. Once they get one email and see all the people in the distribution list, then they go after those peoples files.
Its soooo damn easy, but I guess when you’re dealing with the feds, everything is difficult. And of course, how we can we trust any of these clowns to actually do their job, anyway.
I know a lot about email systems and servers having designed and installed systems for the past 25 years. The IRS it appears uses Microsoft Exchange, by its very nature a client server email system, meaning that ALL emails for a person are housed on a server and synced up with the local client application (usually Outlook). A client in today’s multi device world can access their emails via laptops, desktops, smart phones all which BTW can keep an isolated local copy of the emails. If the agency uses blackberry as many do for email, there usually is an entirely SEPARATE email subsystem that is synced with the main Exchange server. A modern server environment consists of sophisticated redundant arrays of hard drives that are backed up on tape (tapes that are rotated and shipped off site for safe storage) or currently some systems are backed up in a cloud. Also in terms of disaster recovery often large enterprises will have an entire fail over system of servers that have actively updated copies of the Exchange files ready for use in case of a catastrophic server/system failure. So there are likely multiple copies of email files for these scoundrels from tapes to multiple hard drives to blackberries even home PC’s....and from what we know of the NSA any cellular data traffice like blackberries are likely to be on their servers too.
Actually, deleting the email would not have actually deleted the email. The delete action would have just have returned the disk address back to the address free list and would have allowed any other application running on the server to have written over that location on disk.
This is why we have diskcrashgate. Saying that the harddrives crashed allowed them to be removed from the machines and, ooooopsssie, allowed them to be recycled. Our Bad.
If this was you or I or any small business and they were under investigation by congress, wouldn't they come in the middle of the night with a swat team and warrants and seize everything you own? Seize your computer, to prevent tampering with evidence, isn't that what the lawman says why they take peoples computers that are under investigation, then why did congress allow them to tamper with evidence?
Could it be different law for them than you and I?