What I want from Leahy, Conyers and Waxman is a strong response, along the lines of ‘emails don’t just “vanish”, and if the White House or RNC can’t find them, we’ll just have to help them out.’

Pat Leahy, today:

“They say they have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy shouted from the Senate floor.

“You can’t erase e-mails, not today. They’ve gone through too many servers,” said Leahy, D-Vt. “Those e-mails are there, they just don’t want to produce them. We’ll subpoena them if necessary.”…

“E-mails don’t get lost,” Leahy insisted. “These are just e-mails they don’t want to bring forward.”

I love you, Senator.

WASHINGTON — The White House said Wednesday that it may have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by political guru Karl Rove and at least 50 other top officials, an admission that stirred anger and dismay among congressional investigators.

http://www.latimes.com/news/na…..-headlines

Michael in PS: one difference is that Dems do a lot more criticizing of their party. Republicans I know rarely disagree with their own. When some inconvenient fact comes up, suddenly the topic is changed to something entirely different and/or it’s the democrats are to blame.

I agree that we’re a whole lot more self-critical. But there are other (sort of related) problems on our side, which I think we could do without. For instance: political correctness. O/T but, for instance, in the RIGHTLY deserved criticism of Imus by e.g. Al Sharpton, one forgets the Reverend’s shortcomings in terms of, say, tolerance.

I know that this is not a very good comparison when we are talking about POLITICAL talking points, but I think it illustrates the concept which I have in mind. BTW, just how many republicans DO you know? The ones I have in mind are, for the most part, chance acquaintances. Anyhow, no doubt that, basically, democrats are the party of introspection, if for no other reason than we’ve got (basically) nothing to hide! Or so I see it…

-MS

Cranky Observer @ 173

> I would agree with other comments here that
> yes, much if not most of the data thought to
> have been deleted can be retrieved.

And I would humbly disagree. Big big data systems are not the same things as individual disks with FAT filesystems. Many comments of this type are being made on all the liberal blogs, and they are essentially all based on thinking that what happens on the Microsoft desktop scales linerally to the datacenter. It does not.

Cranky

I’m not sure the RNC servers constitute a data center (and I’m a data center guy). With server files, local copies, backups, and archives – there could be numerous areas where the e-mails may reside. Sometimes the issue is knowing to look and doing so.

Checking the inbox, sent, drafts, and deleted folders on the senders local, senders server, sendee’s local, and sendee’s server files would be where I’d start. I’d also ask about backups and archives of those systems also.

Watch/read posts by luaptifer at ePluribus Media — they’ll have most of the info on the network structure.

Jay @ 167
Badwater,

Think about the possibilities though if they wanted to communicate without leaving a record.

A generic mail account that was accessible only by a few.

Backup “exclude” lists, that leave out backups of said accounts.

Only sending critical mail between the hours of x and y (so they never get to tape) and being sure that the target account is configured “not” to leave the mail on the server.

I guess my point is that data goes missing all the time (including email), and if it didn’t, backups wouldn’t be necessary. Leaving no fingerprints in the world of electronic communication is not difficult if you know what you’re doing.

Doing this meticulously can be a real pain in the neck. If you really, really don’t want a trail, you don’t e-mail it. You meet the person and have a conversation.

_________________

Yes!

Welcome to the club, oddball! I am never NOT moderated. (Take THAT double negative, you mods you.)

Actually, I don’t think it’s the mods at all. I think it’s The Big Red Dot In Texas adding blog comments to their email surveilance program.

Allow me to explain. I created several websites with hit counters that also tell me where in the world the hits are from. Even before I gave out the web addresses, The Big Red Dot In Texas would appear within 24 hours – on every one of my sites. I was highly skeptical so I contacted the administrator of the hit counters. He assured me the counters were accurate and that it could only mean that my sites were popular with someone in Texas – around Crawford to be exact. LOL. Hi George!

Jay @ 174

Pat_AlexVA,

Agreed, but apparently they decided to go with email anyway. Here’s hoping that the techies at the RNC don’t know what they’re doing. My guess is that they can afford to hire the best…

They’re not that smart, Jay.

You know what they’re doing, now that the world knows about their use of the RNC accounts?

They’re using text messaging.

Seriously.

These people are clueless. Luckily.

At the same time Abu is asking for ISP data preservation? Eg. Must store text messaging logs for n days? The irony here…

Pat_AlexVA,

Agreed, but apparently they decided to go with email anyway. Here’s hoping that the techies at the RNC don’t know what they’re doing. My guess is that they can afford to hire the best…

They’re not that smart, Jay.

You know what they’re doing, now that the world knows about their use of the RNC accounts?

They’re using text messaging.

Seriously.

These people are clueless. Luckily.

I’ve supported UNIX mail infrastructures for years so I wouldn’t attempt to speak to an Exchange server, et al. I promise that what I’ve stated above is absolutely true for UNIX/Linux.