Follow the e-mails - Sidney Blumenthal on Salon.com

[JohnWxy]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/03/29/attorney_firings/print.html

Follow the e-mails
The discovery of a previously unknown treasure chest of e-mails buried by the Bush administration may prove to be as informative as Nixon's secret White House tapes.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Mar. 29, 2007 | The rise and fall of the Bush presidency has had four phases: the befuddled period of steady political decline during the president's first nine months; the high tide of hubris from Sept. 11, 2001, through the 2004 election; the self-destructive overreaching to consolidate a one-party state from 2005 to 2006, culminating in the repudiation of the Republican Congress; and, now, the terminal stage, the great unraveling, as the Democratic Congress works to uncover the abuses of the previous six years.

Richard Nixon and George W. Bush both invoked secrecy for national security. Both insisted war -- the war in Vietnam, the war on terror -- justified impunity. And both offered the reason of secrecy to cover political power grabs.

In Watergate, "Deep Throat" counseled that the royal road to the scandal's source was to "follow the money." In the proliferating scandals of the Bush presidency, Congress is searching down a trail of records that did not exist in the time of Nixon: Follow the e-mails.


The discovery of a hitherto unknown treasure-trove of e-mails buried by the Bush White House may prove to be as informative as Nixon's secret White House tapes. Last week the National Journal disclosed that Karl Rove does "about 95 percent" of his e-mails outside the White House system, instead using a Republican National Committee account. What's more, Rove doesn't tap most of his messages on a White House computer, but rather on a BlackBerry provided by the RNC. By this method, Rove and other White House aides evade the legally required archiving of official e-mails. The first glimmer of this dodge appeared in a small item buried in a January 2004 issue of U.S. News & World Report: "'I don't want my E-mail made public,' said one insider. As a result, many aides have shifted to Internet E-mail instead of the White House system. 'It's Yahoo!, baby,' says a Bushie."

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. The real action...

Won't even be found on the servers enumerated in Mr. Blumenthal's article. The real action surely is on servers yet undiscovered.

Some of them, most likely, hosted in Knoxville TN. But not all. With modern hosting being what it is, setting up an email infrastructure is trivial. Start an innocuous website on some obscure hosting company in this country or another, and you have email. If that doesn't work, grab a copy of a Linux distro and roll your own, on a DSL line. Wanna make it real secure? GNUPG encryption.

It's all easier than falling out of bed. And really cheap.

[kineneb]

2. but, I'm willing to bet

the BushCo folks are all using Microsoft products...Linux co.s don't give much for political donations... so those servers may not be secure as they would like to believe...heh, heh.


just my thoughts