NYT: Foley's Digital Memory: What might be saved on hard drives?

[DeepModem Mom]

"The Caucus" political blog, October 2, 2006
Foley’s Digital Memory
By Tom Zeller Jr.

....Foley was no Internet newbie — and on his now-defunct Congressional home page, which can still be viewed in older forms at the Internet Archive, he discussed legislation he co-sponsored on behalf of children, including bills aimed at eliminating “child pornography and exploitative child modeling Web sites.”

And he was well aware that Internet chat rooms are a predatory lever that can be used to gain advantage over young people, having discussed with NPR in 2002 the case of a Florida rabbi who used Instant messaging to engage in a sexual tryst with a young
person.

“The Internet is a very powerful tool,” he said in that interview. “It’s a positive tool for education, but it also has some unintended consequences.”

Those consequences might include the resurfacing of chat logs that Mr. Foley might have figured were digital dust. But chat logs are in fact, commonly saved - sometimes as a default setting - to the hard drives of users.... Indeed, with most modern chat programs nowadays - from A.O.L.’s Instant Messenger, Microsoft’s Windows Messenger, Yahoo Chat, Google Talk, and any number of third-party software suites that group these networks into one application — saving the transcripts from chats is usually a simple preference option.

A user can also just select “file” and “save” from an active chat window and save the current chat session as a text document - no rocket science there - or even just highlight all the steamy banter in the chat window, and copy and paste it into a document for safekeeping. Or e-mail it to the Feds....

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=240

[Lone_Star_Dem]

1. If that HD is the original one

Pretty much everything is still retrievable. There is no real way to clean one of it's history.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

2. What's on Hastert's, Shimkus's, Reynolds's, Alexander's, Boehner's, and

Blunt's hard drives, that's the question for investigating the coverup.

Are there records of who knew what, when, and from whom?

And I can't believe that Blunt doesn't know, for blackmail purposes, every last dirty little secret every House member is trying to hide. Blund must have inherited quite a torve of blackmail files from former Republican Whip Tom DeLay.