'Delete' Doesn't Mean 'Disappear'

[LiberalFighter]

'Delete' Doesn't Mean 'Disappear'
Washington Post 4/14/2007

This might not seem obvious when you're struggling to locate the e-mail somebody sent you last week, but it's not easy to make an e-mail message vanish for good. A lot of the time, it's outright impossible.

Some executives at Enron found that out the hard way a few years ago. Some people in the White House -- who seem to have deleted important messages that they shouldn't have -- may be on their way to making the same discovery.

The secret life of e-mail isn't obvious from looking at your mail program. It sensibly simplifies things, presenting a message as a single object you can open, read, and then delete. Once you empty your mail program's trash, no trace of the message remains.

But under normal circumstances, nothing you delete on a computer vanishes immediately. The computer clears its own record of where it put the file, but the file itself won't disappear until enough other data gets written to that same spot. Given the vast size of most new computers' hard drives, that can take years.

[LiberalFighter]

1. How easy it is

So even if both the sender and recipient strive to make a message disappear, "data forensics" companies can dig it up. Brian Karney, the director of product management for one such firm, Guidance Software of Pasadena, Calif., bragged about how easy it is to unearth a long-buried message from the database file created by Microsoft Outlook -- the software used by many businesses and organizations, including the White House.

"Anybody can recover an e-mail," Karney said. "You just need to know how to look and find that stuff."

[Solo_in_MD]

3. It quite well know how do to it, and how to prevent it is also well known.

It all depends on how the system was configured and used.

[Horse with no Name]

2. Well to be fair

They deleted it first, now they have to try to make them disappear.