RNC Bast*rds Deleted Their Email!!!!

[Cheney Killed Bambi]

OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

he White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.

Congressional investigators looking into the administration's firing of eight federal prosecutors already had the nongovernmental e-mail accounts in their sights because some White House aides used them to help plan the U.S. attorneys' ouster. Democrats were questioning whether the use of the GOP-provided e-mail accounts was proof that the firings were political.

<snip>

<A White House spokesperson> could not say what had been lost, and said the White House is working to recover as many as they can. The White House has now shut off employees' ability to delete e-mails on the separate accounts, and is briefing staffers on how to better make determinations about when and when not to use them, Stanzel said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070411/prosecutors-white-house

:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

[C_U_L8R]

1. seize the wh & rnc computers now

these things don't delete themselves... there is a crime in progress

[Canuckistanian]

9. I said this weeks ago

Seize their machines, subpoena their network managers and all of the IPs involved in this.

They've had enough time to cover up their trails IF they've had a competent tech "fixer".

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. "Deleted" e-mail is seldom really deleted.

It lurks on the hard drives of the sender and the receiver and on the server(s) as well. It's harder to get rid of e-mail than herpes -- try as you might.

[Solo_in_MD]

17. Nonsense...easily done, easily lost forever, esp if you are using something other than Micro$hit

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

32. Nonsense.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x632110

[electron_blue]

37. No, there are ways to get it short of someone torching the motherboard or

other lengthy steps they are unlikely to have done.

[marmar]

3. Watergate redux....

I just watched "All The President's Men" last night, so I'm geeked for a scandal. :popcorn: with butter in the middle and on top, and a box of Sour Patch Kids for me.

[youthere]

20. Sour Patch Kids? Philistine!

JuJuBees are the choice of truly geeky scandal mongers.

[RevCheesehead]

4. Cyber-shredding.

They have forensic experts who can retrieve this stuff, right?

[itsrobert]

5. The FBI have people who sole job is to recover deleted email

Seize all RNC computers NOW!

[bdamomma]

6. oh this is truly disgusting, we can't let them get away with this shit.

god, we are dealing with some treasonous criminals. For some reason I can see Rove with a smirk on his face. SOB's all of them.

[Eugene]

7. Seize the servers, desktops, laptops, and any backup tapes.

Scan all hard drives. Salvage deleted tracks.
Low-level scan the media as necessary.

It's time for a full-blown forensic examination.

[Ganja Ninja]

34. Seize all the hard drives not just the White House hard drives.

Round them all up. They sent and someone else received. Those e-mails are still around even if the White House destroys their hard drives. There's a record on some computer somewhere.

[Wilber_Stool]

8. The dog ate my e-mails.

I don't know what to say.

[aquart]

10. Send in the guys Fitzgerald used.

[Solo_in_MD]

15. Done right, they would still find nothing

and it would all be legal.

A server operator does not have to keep logs or archive. Couple that with secure erase options on disk management software, and there could easily be NOTHING to find.

[aquart]

18. When has BushCo ever done anything right?

Their hallmark is arrogance. Their hiring qualification is loyalty, not competence.

[Solo_in_MD]

27. I am not willing to count on the incompetence of my enemies

[aquart]

29. And I am not willing to elevate them to the status of inerrant popes.

The one thing I absolutely knew I could count on from the day the Florida decision came down was that they would trip on their own arrogance and publicly destroy themselves. That's what I'm watching now.

What do we know? They try to do everything on the cheap. The disk scrubbing? The fancy encryption? Too cheap to do it. Too sure of their invincibility.

[Solo_in_MD]

30. Nor do I, but I would rather be pleasantly surprised that unpleasantly caught unprepared.

They try to do everything on the cheap. The disk scrubbing? The fancy encryption? Too cheap to do it. Too sure of their invincibility.

Its actually free or nearly so. All it takes is a competent sysadmin who understands the issues.

[NewJeffCT]

36. There were still emails in the plame case that were never recovered

if I recall correctly.

[whistle]

11. Evidence tampering, throw all those bastards in Federal prison

[Solo_in_MD]

16. Not Necessarily

If the logs and records were never kept there is nothing to be seized. Its not contempt nor evidence tampering.

[aquart]

21. Welll, there is a records act.

This does seem to be a total and complete violation of that.

[Solo_in_MD]

25. Does not apply to private servers even if official business was done on them

The onus is on the user, not the server operator.

[frogcycle]

12. hell, even if they DON'T recover everything

this is priceless

it's like they have chocolate icing all over their faces and in their hair and are saying "cake, what cake? I didn't eat the birthday cake!"

[C_U_L8R]

13. who? us ? what ?

[crappyjazz]

19. Holy crap!

:rofl:

[sutz12]

24. More like "American Pie" don't you think?

:evilgrin:

[Solo_in_MD]

14. Computer Forensics are well overblown

Any competent sysadmin can set things up so that there is nothing to grab and nothing to recover on a server except that which is currently in the inbox. Easy as pie. Same things with connection logs. Its also not illegal since there is no legal requirement for private servers to keep logs. Its not evidence tampering, its not contempt, its fully legal.

The TV show computer forensics seen on CSI/NCIS/Criminal Minds is TRIVIAL to defeat. Find a pro and ask them.

The recent splash on this on Daily KOS is absolutely embarssing.

[Oilwellian]

22. "competent" is the keyword here

The Bushies aren't known for hiring competency....loyalty is number one with them. Just as a crime family should be. And yanno, they're having a hard time finding new criminals to take the old criminals positions. And the heat is so hot, I betcha anything there are DoJ birdies singing their little hearts out right about now. And I betcha a few of them kept copies of those emails and turned them right over to Senators Leahy & Schumer. The trap is being set as we speak.

PS: A girl can dream. :D

[Xithras]

26. There's a lot of mythology about computer forensics

Files, once overwritten, are incredibly hard to recover. The purpose of a "DOD Wipe" isn't to destroy the data in an overwritten cluster, but to ensure that non-contiguous clusters which may not be overwritten don't contain bits of data that might be useful to a snooper. A solo cluster that HAS been overwritten may be recoverable after one write, but that's about it. If a complete file is located in a series of contiguous clusters (very rare), it may be recoverable after two or three overwrites, but that's about the extent of it (and you'll need some incredibly expensive equipment to do it). This mythology that has people believing that files are recoverable after five or six overwrites is nonsense. Perhaps, if the drive were brand new, had one file put on, and then had that one file overwritten with random noise a few times, it MIGHT be possible to recover the original file, but I've never seen that situation in any kind of real-world recovery scenario.

A deleted file can be recovered right away if the computer hasn't been used much since the delete. But recovering a deleted file from an active server months or years after the delete? That's the realm of Hollywood, not reality.

[frogcycle]

35. all true, but

the question is whether they have been deleting and not backing up or archiving, and have fairly active drives that get rewritten promptly - or if they just last night went thru their out- and inbaskets "deleting" incriminating stuff - which could be not yet really gone. That's why you seize it immediately. If someone deleted an email months ago and it isn't sitting on someone else's pc or on an intermediate server, then it's basically gone. All the high-tech retrieval in the world might find various sentence and word fragments that can't even be identified as to which ones go together. It'd be like trying to put together documents that have been shredded, with 2/3 or more of the shredded paper missing, and all the paper identical, the type/color identical - and not knowing what you're looking for in the first place. Oh, and if you did reconstruct an email message, chances are you'd not have the from/to header, so could not do much with it.

But if some butthead just cleaned out yesterday, then grab it and see what you can come up with!

[Xithras]

43. Very good point.

But a lot of the discussion about this has centered around reconstructing a historical email trail, and people have claimed that if a "DOD wipe" wasn't done, the files are recoverable. That's simply not true.

I'll have to remember your shredder analogy, because it's a very accurate description of what data recovery actually involves. There's a lot of mythology about what is actually possible, primarily fueled by Hollywood and internet conspiracy theorists.

[frogcycle]

44. yep

I just love watching the magic they can do with computers in movies! :)

Like when some message pops up on the screen saying "I found almost what you were looking for, but not quite; is this close enough, sir?"

and the super-nerd forensic geek types in "try looking on Joe Blow's Blackberry"
and the computer comes back with "ah, there it is! let me just enhance the 12-kb image to 40 brazillian megapixels so you can count the guy's nose hairs (even though it is a satellite view and he's under a tree)"

shoot, even HAL wasn't that smart!

:)

[sutz12]

23. You say that like you're surprised.

:shrug:

[tom_paine]

28. RAID the criminal organization and seize the evidence.

Like terrorists hiding among civilians, the Loyal Bushies are banking that the raid of the headqaurters of a major national political party, even though 100% warranted, would be considered more fascist (and could be spun so by the Bushevik party-Loyal Sub-Media in a heartbeat) than the fascist felonies going on within.

And they might be right.

[Solo_in_MD]

31. What makes you so sure that there is evidence to be had?

The certainty of some of the non-techies here on things they clearly know nothing about is scary.

[w4rma]

33. As a techie, I ask the reverse of you.

What makes you so sure that there is no evidence to be had?

[NewJeffCT]

38. Precedent

Back in 2000, Katherine Harris' staff uninstalled Windows 2000 on all their computers in order to "upgrade" to Windows 98. Nothing recovered.

There were also emails from the Plame case that were never recovered, either.

The RNC purges their system every 30 days.

[Solo_in_MD]

42. The default way servers are run is to minimize logs and remove D/Led mail

Its preferred practice for reasons having nothing to do with hiding data.

[tom_paine]

45. #1) The absolute, demonstrable repeated criminality of the Bushies

#2) Perhaps the hundreds of other e-mails which have ALREADY forced Gonzales to perjure himself (even though I strongly suspect our Dems won't have the guts to impeach even Gonzales) indicates that there is more...MUCH more to be revealed.

Means. Motive. Opportunity.

#1 is clearly a circumstantial point, however it has been demonstarted to my satisfaction (not to mention how easily torrents of incriminating evidence have already come loose after the mildest shaking of the tree, so to speak.

[The Backlash Cometh]

39. You do realize that these e-mails would also tell you who was bonking who?

[quiet.american]

40. How do you like their term "mishandled."

Misspoke = LIED. Mishandled = OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE.

[progressoid]

41. Well, they did learn a few things from Nixon...

What did you expect?