This is a bit OT, but my understanding has always been that this is incorrect. What is true is that simply deleting some data on a computer does not really delete it. But my impression has been that the data could be deleted forever if it’s overridden by new data, as might happen if the computer ran out of space. I’m not any sort of computer expert, so I’m curious as to which is correct.
The idea is that people are less circumspect about emails they’re sending at the time they send them than they are years later after those emails are known to be related to investigations.
People get caught all the time based on searches of their work emails finding incriminating results. Why didn’t they use more private means? Because at the time, they didn’t think someone was eventually going to be going through their emails. But it’s a lot different after they already know that investigators are going through their emails.
Nothing is perfect of course. But there’s a big difference between the two situations.
Mrs. Clinton, born in 1947, is certainly savvy enough to have an employee set up a server for her. Or do you imagine her playing World of Warcraft on her laptop while she’s waiting for Unix to install?
You continuously want to drag this back into a court of law, while you wave away her “judgment” as if it were nothing more important that the color of her suit. Her judgment and intent is critical to someone who is running for the Presidency - at least it is to most of us.
Do you really think the oval office would be incapable to determining if an email that said “Hillary Clinton” came from her personal server, a .gov email or from North Korea? Are you kidding me? In the few emails I receive from a high level with DoD, with one click of a mouse, I can determine the full email address of the person sending the email. If this wasn’t the case, I hope the rest of the world doesn’t figure our how amazing easy it is to send a fake email to the President and have phony discussions with him.
No matter. Ms. Clinton and the President could have put some action into his “most transparent Administration ever” even after the fact. As uncomfortable as I am with Ms. Clinton using her own email account, I’m equally uncomfortable in her telling us what we are allowed to see and what we aren’t while she was fulfilling those duties. YMMV on this, as it does.
For myself, I know that I don’t care whether the president has this skill, and I don’t particularly want him futzing around with checking every email’s domain name. He’s got more important things to do.
It is possible to really and truly delete data from a hard drive or other media by overwriting the space with new data. This gets complicated, though. In the case of email, depending on how the service is set up, the email may be present in multiple locations (e.g., the sender’s local machine, the sender’s server, the recipient’s server, the recipient’s local machine, possibly any intervening servers that provide services such as spam filtering, etc.). Many of those machines may also have backups stored god-knows-where. So finding and deleting an email completely and permanently is pretty tough.
Heh–your quote link goes back to the same post. How’d you even do that?
Regardless, I’m not sure how exactly you see this going down. If you’re not expecting the president to do this, who among his staff do you expect also to be reading his emails and futzing around with domain names?
Because I don’t contend that Mrs. Clinton set up her own server personally. She was savvy enough to find, vet, and hire someone to set up her server. I am quite certain she did not personally re-image a HP DL 380 G5, install CentOS and Dovecot, and generate the requisite CSR to order an SSL cert from Verisign.
In contrast, we appear to be discussing Mr. Obama’s failure to personally notice the address to which he was personally responding with e-mail.
You’re correct in a general sense, although even ordinary overwritten data can potentially be recovered. However, multiple overwrites that use the drive’s firmware commands is extremely secure, although even then tiny misalignments might theoretically allow the recovery of data. From a practical standpoint, no. And this theoretical possibility may be mitigated by subsequent physical destruction of the drive media in lava.
Not IMO. It does not seem to be so much a failure of Obama as of his SecState in not following policy so that kind of worry would not arise.
As often seems to happen, HRC is doing her best to make something moderately trivial look as dodgy as possible. “Sure, you can look at my e-mails. Right after I delete all the ones I don’t want you to see.”
Perhaps she did. How is the possibility of it reduced by using your own private server?
I suppose that could explain why Hillary kept government files offsite, in her home, during and after her term as Sec of State. Doesn’t explain why she didn’t turn them over to the many committee investigations. Maybe Hillary didn’t know they were holding investigations into her State Dept’s activities?
The What difference does it make now defense wasn’t convincing before, and it isn’t convincing now.
Then there is this FORM OF-109 issue. Did Hillary sign them or didn’t she? Do they actually carry any weight or are they simply some worthless piece of paper?
http://www.gsa.gov/portal/forms/download/115326
Bottom line is that Hillary’s emails haven’t been part of the investigations. Just because she’s gotten away with hiding them from the public for this long, doesn’t mean she get’s a free pass to keep hiding them. And Hillary is not the one who gets to decide what should be released.
Left Hand of Dorkness, my concern on if the President knew this or not isn’t my biggest concern in this who matter. But to finish this of:
I’d bet that between say, 3 to 10 people if not more have access to the President’s email account. And many more are copied in an email sent from her to the President, VP, CoS, executive assistant etc. And at the very least, the first time she emailed him, someone had to check and verify that this person who sent him an email that had Hillary Clinton @ something.that.doesn’t.end.in.gov was actually the Secretary of State, right?
I mean how do you see this going down? If you get your own server, and you send Obama an email from Hillary.Clinton@Lefthandofdorkness.com, do you think you are Barack are just going to trade emails, talk about your wives and if we should bomb Tehran tomorrow without any question? Just no concern will be asked if it has “Hillary Clinton” written somewhere? Just no security in the Oval Office at all?
I’m not saying that the President stays up late going though emails to check this stuff. But his staff must have at some point. And like it or not, he’s responsible for his staff. So when I say the Oval Office, I mean his staff, not necessarily him. But in many ways, it’s one and the same.
Not sure what point of yours I’ve supposedly “proven”. Somewhere very early on in this thread I said that I have no doubt that Hillary set up her own server for entirely self-serving reasons, which can be reasonably assumed to be control over the information. Yes, they are both conniving politicians, and Bill lied because he thought he could get away with it, and in a strict technical sense he wasn’t actually lying (not that that’s a defense, but I appreciate his wonderful nuances – and the meaning of “is” is certainly not the same as, say, “was”). But Bill lied about getting a blow job while being one of the best Presidents in a very long time. Which was more important? Look at the tragic disgrace that came after him, and the import and consequences of those lies. This is all about keeping things in perspective. If your only criterion for the leader of the free world is “doesn’t get blow jobs from interns” then you may end up with Rick Perry or Ted Cruz. None of the supposed “scandals” that have plagued Bill or Hillary ever happened to George W. Bush. But what will history remember?
That it is silly to suggest that HRC would not have done this because it was an obvious blunder and she is the consummate political animal. Why did she deny knowledge of subpoena’ed documents for years, only to have them found on her library table with her fingerprints on them? Why, when asked about her health care plan’s impact on small business, would she reply sneeringly that she couldn’t be expected to save every under-capitalized entrepreneur in America? Why would she suggest that SAHMs are sitting at home baking cookies?
People, even really smart people, do dumb things sometimes. And when those dumb things come to light, some people think they can stall and prevaricate and hope it goes away before the next news cycle.
*What is GSA’s role in governing the Federal government-wide Standard and Optional Forms program?
GSA’s role was assigned by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and is contained in 41 CFR 102-194, Standard and Optional Forms Management Program. The program was established to achieve government-wide economies and efficiencies through the development, maintenance, and common use of conventional forms. Furthermore, the program achieves federal goals to replace paper forms with electronic versions to enable electronic completion and transmittal of form data and to reduce the information collection burden to the public to the maximum extent possible.*
It’s still not clear if Hillary was required to fill out a form OF-109 when she left government service, and it’s not clear if Hillary filled out such a form.
*Judge Napolitano: Hillary Clinton May Have Violated Same Law Petraeus Was Prosecuted For
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: There are two forms that she had to sign, she had to sign one on day one in which she took an oath to preserve in the government’s possession bovernment records. If she signed it and two weeks later, diverted the government records to her husband’s server in Chappaqua, New York, she probably committed perjury.
Second one, the one that you’ve identified that Megyn revealed last night, you signed in your last day in office, in which you say, I have returned to the government already, it’s in the past tense, the government’s records. If she signed that and did so under oath, as the document requires that you swear to it, she probably committed perjury. We don’t know if she signed this, but we do know no one in the government would be authorized to exempt her from these documents.
…BRET BAIER: OF-109.
NAPOLITANO: Is the one that is the basis of the prosecution of General Petraeus, who signed the same document the day he left the CIA and, he says, forgot that he had loose leafs in a drawer in a desk in his home and when the FBI raided his home, they found them there and that’s what he is going to plead guilty to – the possession of documents that belong to the government in his home.*
