Hillary Clinton Used BleachBit To Wipe Emails (neowin.net) 569
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neowin: The open-source disk cleaning application, BleachBit, got quite a decent ad pitch from the world of politics after it was revealed lawyers of the presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton, used the software to wipe her email servers. Clinton is currently in hot water, being accused of using private servers for storing sensitive emails. "[South Carolina Representative, Trey Gowdy, spoke to Fox News about Hillary Clinton's lawyers using BleachBit to wipe the private servers. He said:] 'She and her lawyers had those emails deleted. And they didn't just push the delete button; they had them deleted where even God can't read them. They were using something called BleachBit. You don't use BleachBit for yoga emails or bridesmaids emails. When you're using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see.'" Two of the main features that are listed on the BleachBit website include "Shred files to hide their contents and prevent data recovery," and "Overwrite free disk space to hide previously deleted files." These two features would make it pretty difficult for anyone trying to recover the deleted emails.
Slashdot reader ahziem adds: The IT team for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used the open source cleaning software BleachBit to wipe systems "so even God couldn't read them," according to South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy on Fox News. His comments on the "drastic cyber-measure" were in response to the question of whether emails on her private Microsoft Exchange Server were simply about "yoga and wedding plans." Perhaps Clinton's team used an open-source application because, unlike proprietary applications, it can be audited, like for backdoors. In response to the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013, privacy expert Bruce Schneier advised in an article in which he stated he also uses BleachBit, "Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software." Ironically, Schneier was writing to a non-governmental audience. Have any Slashdotters had any experience with BleachBit? Specifically, have you used it for erasing "yoga emails" or "bridesmaids emails?"
Too secure for insecure? (Score:4, Insightful)
I really can't find something to bitch about here. Sure, Clinton sucks, but the big knock against her and her email server was that she wasn't secure enough with it. Then, when she does do something secure, the knock is "See, she is so secure she must be hiding something!" Sorry, you can't bitch when she isn't secure and then bitch when she is. Was she hiding stuff? Most probably, since all politicians are. Do I trust her? Not a chance. But you can't set up a now in scenario as your reason for not liking her. You can't bitch about insecurity and then bitch about too much security at the same time.
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Insightful)
All indications are she wasn't very careful while actively using the server. However, once she started getting requests to produce data from it, then she suddenly got very careful. Even if she did do nothing wrong, that is a very stark change in behavior that just happened to coincide with legal requests to hand over data.
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Insightful)
Destruction of evidence is itself a crime. The difficulty is always in proving that's what happened - by definition you're missing a key piece of evidence.
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Destruction of evidence is itself a crime. The difficulty is always in proving that's what happened - by definition you're missing a key piece of evidence.
I'm less concerned about the destruction of evidence and more concerned that even though we know she's committing criminal acts, people are still supporting her for President. What does that say about them? We see criminals get away with things all the time, but usually they don't have a cheering section, and even if they do they're not trying to vote for them as President of the United States. Trump may be all the things they say about him, but Hillary is a criminal NOW, so what is she going to be like as President? If something does happen, it would be a giant SHE TOLD YOU SO.
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:4, Funny)
Destruction of evidence is itself a crime.
Destruction of evidence of a crime is a crime.
If you destroy evidence that you took a poop yesterday morning, that is not a crime.
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It is if a judge ordered you to submit your poop for inspection.
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Insightful)
It does not count if Congress declares any one of these emails classified after the fact for political effect.
You're begging the question here. Information is classified based on the content, markings are irrelevant. There's explicitly statutory language that indicates that someone who Should Know that data involved Should Be classified should be treating it as classified, *regardless* of any markings or lack thereof.
Joe Blow on the street may not know that certain info is classified and might pass it along. The Secretary of State is expected to know that something is classified information and has a duty to take care of it responsible. That's something you're "read into" before you ever receive any clearance at all.
If the emails are considered classified retroactively, then someone in her position should have realized they contained sensitive data. Nothing is being classified "for political effect"... and if something is, then that's a scandal in and of itself.
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Unless they were retroactively classified for political reasons?
I'd say the chances are pretty slim on that, with all of the attention this is getting. There are dozens, if not hundreds of FBI and intelligence folks working on this, and surely any decision to classify (or re-classify) is getting multiple layers of review as a result of the fallout everyone knows it would be getting.
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Insightful)
either the emails were classified or not when they were stored or sent from the private server.
According to the DNI, the FBI, the DoJ and the State Department IG, they were classified. Not even the Clinton campaign is pushing classified-after-the-fact anymore.
It does not count if Congress declares any one of these emails classified after the fact for political effect.
Congress has no say in what is classified.
In 1947, they couldn't figure out how to create a unified classification system. So they passed a law which basically said "Hey Executive branch! You come up with it". Thus, the Executive branch gets to decide what is and is not classified. And it's codified in a series of Executive Orders and classification guides.
This is why the whole email "scandal" is much ado about nothing.
Says the person who thinks Congress classifies documents at all, much less after-the-fact.
Those of us who had security clearances know we'd be in prison if we did this. In fact, several people are in prison for negligently handling classified information. But they had the misfortune of not running for president at the time.
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These are actually, real life people in actual, real life prison. Right now.
If you insist Clinton should get a pass, why should they not get a pass?
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No their name wasn't Clinton. If it were any other candidate in any political party right now, they would have been on trail right now.
She is on trail right now. On the campaign trail.
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:4, Insightful)
That whole 'we little people would be in prison if we did this' meme is such bullshit.
You used the wrong tense. It's not "would be". It's "are".
There are "little people" currently in prison for negligent handling of classified. Right now. Actually in prison.
She didn't do anything, beyond send and receive stuff she was cleared to see.
Which means she broke the law. Being "cleared to see it" doesn't mean you can see it anywhere you want, any time you want. There are requirements for handling the information.
And a server in her basement that did not use encrypted connections for months, and then had the default VPN keys on the VPN appliance once they started using encryption, and an Internet-connected printer on the same network is nowhere near close to meeting those requirements.
Petreus is brought up endlessly. Y'know, the guy who gave classified stuff to his journalist girlfriend
His journalist girlfriend had a clearance.
According to your gross misunderstanding of our classification system, what crime did Petraeus commit? He had a clearance, and his girlfriend had a clearance. If "had a clearance" is good enough to excuse Clinton, then why was it not good enough to excuse Patraeus?
but you ought to at least acknowledge that it was a tiny percentage of the traffic
Please cite where the statute states the percentage of allowable leaks.
and that stuff probably would've been sent on the unclassified DOS server had she been using that
First, government servers are regularly scanned for classified, so it would have been caught long before there were thousands of classified in her email.
Second, the unclassified DoS server is far, far, far more secure than her basement server. For example, they don't have default VPN keys installed.
What we have here is a witch hunt for something - anything - about Benghazi that could paint Clinton in a politically unfavorable light.
No, this has absolutely nothing to do with Benghazi. But shouting "Benghazi!!!!" does a great job getting people like you to turn off their critical thinking and accept this week's excuse.
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There are "little people" currently in prison for negligent handling of classified. Right now. Actually in prison.
There are also several that aren't. Administrative punishments are common, depending on the material in question, and the circumstances. In some cases, absolutely nothing was done.
For example, all of the people who accessed the early Wikileaks stuff and those people who accessed the Guardian articles that contained the Snowden material. There was an entire PR campaign directed at Executive Branch Agencies reminding people that "until officially declassified, just because it is published in public doesn't me
Lies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lies (Score:4, Insightful)
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There is a Navy person who facing 20 years to life for disposing of a phone which had his picture while inside the sub.
A quick Google search tells me that you're not representing the situation accurately.
The sailor isn't facing charges for simply having taken pictures of himself while on the sub; he had several pictures of classified engineering spaces: "The photos that raised red flags at NCIS and the FBI included images of various control panels, a panoramic view of the reactor compartment and a panel that showed the condition and exact location of the submarine at the time the photo was taken." (source [usatoday.com])
Damn Lies (Score:3)
Which code (law scheme) are you talking about? Being in the Navy, the sailor in question was under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the rules of which are very different than for private citizens. For example, the US Constitution does not apply, except when the Supreme Court intervenes, which is rarely.
Even as Secretary of State, Ms. Clinton was a private citizen, under different laws.
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Intent comes to play in guilt or acquittal in accordance with the charge. Intent to kill marks the difference between murder and manslaughter, for example. Holding some coke and possessing with intent to sell are wholly different charges, applied well before the penalty phase, turning on the question of intent, which is a question for the fact-finder (don't confuse this with plea-bargaining).
Intent is important in some charges. I don't know whether or not it is relevant to the Clinton case or not, and frankly I don't care to bother trying to sort it all out. However, it is clear the "negligence" or "gross negligence" can result in conviction for mishandling classified information, regardless of intent.
And as long as it's literally a Web Search away (shill?), howabout a link to this story about that Navy person who facing 20 years to life for disposing of a phone.
I'm not sure whether this is the case or not (I don't follow such cases), but literally the first hit that came up in a web search is this one [theguardian.com], where a navy sailor has now been sentenced to a ye
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Insightful)
The wiping just means that she is very secure from her own state interfering with her. But it doesn't say anything about how easy it was for third party states to gain information from her email server before it was wiped. So her servers might be secure from the justice system, but not secure from third parties. Both these aspects are how it shouldn't be.
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The "justice system" is a third party.
If it was easy for third party states to gain information from her e-mail server then the "justice system" could have gained it just as easily. Maybe foreign states did hack her server. It's just as likely that the NSA or some other US government entity hacked her server.
Or is the claim that she wiped the server in such a way that it is no longer readable by the US government or even "God", but somehow can still be read by foreign governments?
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The "justice system" is a third party.
No. Members of a government need to be auditable. Thats why there are so strict laws and regulations about government communication preservation. Both for historians, and more importantly, the press. Just look at brazil how well it works there (compared to the US), only possible because the press has hard proof about the corruption.
This auditability is ensured on infrastructure that is given to government officials. Although it can be manipulated inside the government, that's much harder as if it were on a
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Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the Freedom of Information Act? Don't secretary of state emails have to be archived?
The big knock against her email server is that any other state employee that ran such a thing would be locked up in jail.
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You might want to think about this a minute. The Bush Administration wiped 22 million emails.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Insightful)
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A similar situation: The tea party folks were incredibly upset that Obama ran a big deficit. You wouldn't know it to listen to them now, but for many years the deficit was the most important thing in the political world and proof that Obama was trying to destroy the USA.
But the deficit under Obama shrunk every year, while the deficit under Bush Junior grew every year. Yet the tea party folks never made a peep of complaint when Bush grew the deficit.
So the most likely explanation is that the tea party folks never really cared about the deficit; they are just whining partisan idiots.
I'm neither a fan of Bush nor Obama, but what you've stated here is incredibly misleading (as well as factually inaccurate).
According to the non-partisan CBO data, the on-budget deficit under Bush began at $32 billion in 2001, ballooned to $568 billion in 2004, then decreased again until 2008 (the 2007 deficit was "merely" $342 billion), after which it spiked (due to the financial crisis, bail-outs, etc. with 2008 concluding with $642 billion deficit).
Under Obama, the deficit began at $1.55 TRILLION in
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You're building a strawman; you made a fake argument designed to be easily knocked down. The actual argument being made is: If you complain that Clinton used a non-governmental email server, but you did not complain that Bush+ did the same thing (and "lost" a lot more email), then you are not concerned about the potential email-server crime; you're just a whining partisan idiot.
Bush did the same thing? Then where's the evidence? Here's the problem. You're just wrong here. Bush+ didn't use a private email server (and conveniently, successfully evade both FOIA requests and laws about public records). Bush+ didn't then proceed to destroy evidence when presented with FBI and Congressional inquiries. And there's no evidence for a several hundred million dollar pay-to-play scheme involving a Bush presidential library.
This is the usual outcome. You claim "But Bush did it too!" without
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:4, Informative)
No sir, they were not.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/... [politico.com]
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We need to fix campaign finance in a big way. We need to overturn the citizens united case.
This is an invalid statement from anyone who says Clinton should not be in jail. Clinton took $600 million in bribes selling State Department favours while in office (Including approving a sale of uranium to Russia for $145 million). Not to a campaign, which you say you would want to stop, but to her foundation and herself personally. The only reason you bring this issue up is you believe in censorship of people you don't like, there is no other reason to possibly have this viewpoint AND say Clinton did
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The big knock against her email server is that any other state employee that ran such a thing would be locked up in jail.
This is a very common misconception.
Comey spent hours in front of Congress explaining, very patiently, over and over, that the reason he could not recommend prosecution against Clinton is because all of the suspected crimes required proof of intent, which the FBI did not have.
In fact, Comey talked in detail about the FBI's treatment of Clinton versus the treatment of a "John Doe" suspect. Comey specifically said that a "John Doe" would in fact not be charged in this case -- again, because the relevant stat
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Interesting)
Comey spent hours in front of Congress explaining, very patiently, over and over, that the reason he could not recommend prosecution against Clinton is because all of the suspected crimes required proof of intent, which the FBI did not have.
Transcript of Gowdy questioning Comey. Lots of context, but note the bolded section:
Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said "I did not e-mail any classified information to anyone on my e-mail there was no classified material." That is true?
Comey: There was classified information emailed.
Gowdy: Secretary Clinton used one device, was that true?
Comey: She used multiple devices during the four years of her term as Secretary of State.
Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said all work related emails were returned to the State Department. Was that true?
Comey: No. We found work related email, thousands, that were not returned.
Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said neither she or anyone else deleted work related emails from her personal account.
Comey: That's a harder one to answer. We found traces of work related emails in — on devices or in space. Whether they were deleted or when a server was changed out something happened to them, there's no doubt that the work related emails that were removed electronically from the email system.
Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said her lawyers read every one of the emails and were overly inclusive. Did her lawyers read the email content individually?
Comey: No.
Gowdy: Well, in the interest of time and because I have a plane to catch tomorrow afternoon, I'm not going to go through any more of the false statements but I am going to ask you to put on your old hat. False exculpatory statements are used for what?
Comey: Well, either for a substantive prosecution or evidence of intent in a criminal prosecution.
Gowdy: Exactly. Intent and consciousness of guilt, right?
Comey: That is right?
Gowdy: Consciousness of guilt and intent? In your old job you would prove intent as you referenced by showing the jury evidence of a complex scheme that was designed for the very purpose of concealing the public record and you would be arguing in addition to concealment the destruction that you and i just talked about or certainly the failure to preserve. You would argue all of that under the heading of content. You would also — intent. You would also be arguing the pervasiveness of the scheme when it started, when it ended and the number of emails whether They were originally classified or of classified under the heading of intent. You would also, probably, under common scheme or plan, argue the burn bags of daily calendar entries or the missing daily calendar entries as a common scheme or plan to conceal.
Two days ago, Director, you said a reasonable person in her position should have known a private email was no place to send and receive classified information. You're right. An average person does know not to do that.
This is no average person. This is a former First Lady, a former United States senator, and a former Secretary of State that the president now contends is the most competent, qualified person to be president since Jefferson. He didn't say that in '08 but says it now.
She affirmatively rejected efforts to give her a state.gov account, kept the private emails for almost two years and only turned them over to Congress because we found out she had a private email account.
So you have a rogue email system set up before she took the oath of office, thousands of what we now know to be classified emails, some of which were classified at the time. One of her more frequent email comrades was hacked and you don't know whether or not she was.
And this scheme took place over a long period of time and resulted in the destruction of public reco
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Two wrongs do not make a right.
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:4, Interesting)
retroactively classified has a different flavor, and apparently, rice didn't use email period. her assistant did.
if you read the link you linked at least.
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Remind me when the law went into effect?
You might find out that it was legal for them to use private servers....
Powell is not the prototype ! (Score:5, Informative)
Powell used an aol account.
He did NOT put a private server in his house!
Same for Rice. Powell used it for non-state NON-classified business.
Hillary has lied so many times about this server, is is clear to any hones observer that she was hiding activities of corruption with the Clinton foundation and did not want FOIA to discover her activities.
Hillary was supposed to have government archivists sort through the mails, not her personal attorneys. That was a violation of the federal records act.
She had classified information on the server, despite assertions that she did not- caught in another lie.
She said all work related mails were turned over. Another lie- the FBI found thousands of work related mails not turned over, including classified.
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There is a difference, They talk about email that were sent to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and didn't have any classified markings, Not that they sent classified emails. Big difference in that Hillary send Classified documents that had classified markings in them.
This is blatant trying to say someone else did it also, when the facts are different.
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:4, Insightful)
account != server.
Slashdot should know better.
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is even worse. They did not use a private server, they used a server run by some unknown third party. There is even less control of the security of those emails than the emails on Clinon's server.
LOL. Does anyone believe that? Not even a private email account in 2009? Really?
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I can't wait to read slashdot during her presidency. "Truman dropped two bombs, I don't see you complaining about that!"
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... the knock against her is that they were shredding documents that a federal prosecutor might see. she's not being secure now, secure doesn't mean destroy the files so that the people that can check or look for corruption cannot now.
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Because of who the 'security' was against and when it was applied.
The server was insecure to the Russians, Iranians, and any 16 year old that figured out how to get in.
The server's data was secure against being used against her.
Had she had a secure server but never wiped it but just kept the hard drives in her basement I doubt that the Russians or Iranians would have been able to get to it.
It's like wearing a condom while tight rope walking. You're protected against *one* thing that may happen during the ti
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Two wrongs don't make a right. If I install an application to protect the data I "ILLEGALLY" stored, that doesn't automatically make things all right.
I think you're missing the angle here....when was this software installed/used? Because I have a hunch it was when the FBI first began probing.....
This has been an entertaining election, i'll give it that.
Re:Too secure for insecure? (Score:5, Insightful)
My quibble was the blatant arrogance of the act. That private server was clearly a move to preserve final editing rights of her tenure at the State Department and evade any future FOIA requests that may crop up during her next run for the presidency; and was there ever any doubt that she would run again? The fact that she thought she could get away with it after experiencing the fallout from the exact same move by members of the Bush administration while she was a sitting Senator in Washington reinforces the feeling that her arrogance knows no bounds. She took a page out of the neocon playbook and figured she would show them how it's done.
You're being willfully ignorant (Score:5, Informative)
1. She put classified info on a private unsecured server where it was vulnerable, contrary to the law which she was fully advised of upon taking office.
2. She did all her work through that server, hiding it from all 3 government branches (congressional oversight, executive oversight, and the courts) and public FOIA requests.
3. When the material was sought by the courts and congress, she and the state department people lied under oath claiming the material did not exist (perhaps Nixon cronies should have all lied about tapes existing).
4. After her people knew the material was being sought, the server's files were transferred (by private IT people w/o clearances) to her lawyers (no clearances).
5. She and her lawyers deleted over 30000 e-mails, claiming they were only about yoga and her daughter's wedding dress (Nixon cut a few minutes of tape).
6. They then wiped the files with bit bleach (a step not needed for yoga or wedding dress e-mails). (Nixon did not degauss all his tapes)
7. They handed the wiped server to the FBI, and hillary publicly played ignorant with her "with a CLOTH?" comment (absolute iin-you-face arrogance against the rule of law) (Nixon did not hand tape recorders with erased tapes to the FBI)
Prove you are sincere, and not a total unprincipled partisan hack:
Are you a Nixon supporter?
Would you accept this behavior from Donald Trump or Dick Cheney?
Former DoD sysad (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Former DoD sysad (Score:5, Funny)
Never that specific program (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't have any yoga emails .... (Score:5, Insightful)
But I can say that something like this isn't too surprising, assuming you hired a lawyer with a brain in his/her head. They really like the idea of deleting evidence that could be used against you in a court of law, if they're hired to work FOR you.
This is why businesses are being pushed to start purging all of their employee's email on a regular basis. They want to preserve that plausible deniability and ensure some former employee didn't say something in a company email you weren't aware of that winds up costing you $'s in a lawsuit.
If this is an attempt to discuss if Clinton is guilty of anything or not with running her own private mail server? I think the answer to that is really pretty obvious.... Yes, of course she is. If any of us worked for an employer who provided us with a company email system for use with company-related things and we just decided to conduct business via our personal Gmail accounts, or some home-brew Linux server? How long do you think we'd stay employed there once that was realized? In a case like hers, it's only magnified as a problem because we KNOW she was allowed to handle classified content in her mail. So the hunt is on to prove she actually possessed some of that on this unofficial server. And if her lawyers did their jobs properly, there won't be much concrete proof that she did so, or at least that she ever accessed it once it was sent out. That doesn't make her less guilty though .... just smart enough to dodge some legal repercussions for her behavior.
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In a case like hers, it's only magnified as a problem because we KNOW she was allowed to handle classified content in her mail. So the hunt is on to prove she actually possessed some of that on this unofficial server.
It was already determined that there was. What was lacking was provability of intent per the FBI.
I tried using that excuse when I missed a speed limit sign. I was pretty shocked when intent didn't matter there.
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There is a difference in how the laws are written. The speed limit law simply says you can't go over the posted speed. Whether you intended to or not is beside the point. The espionage act, on the other hand, specifically says in the text of the law that you may not intentionally disseminate classified information to anybody not cleared to see it.
FYI, the other half of the relevant law states that you can't negligibly allow classified information to fall into the wrong hands. But the FBI's investigation fou
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>>it's only magnified as a problem because we KNOW she was allowed to handle classified content in her mail.
This is incorrect. Neither Clinton nor anybody else in the department was allowed to handle classified content in unsecured email. Every case of classified information leaking into email on an unsecured network is a violation, @state.gov email addresses are not for classified material either. That material is sequestered on a completely separate network. Anybody who sent Clinton classified
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And you know that accounts are not servers, right?
For example I have my own e-mail *account* hosted on *google's* servers.
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At this point, what difference does it make?
Free space wiping controversial? (Score:2, Insightful)
If the server used an SSD, the trim or SSD internal cleanup routines would have scrubbed the empty blocks too. Would that also be news?
This is fantastically low quality shit for a Slashdot post. Really. It's an SC Republican talking to Fox news about Hillary, hoping to stir up a Benghazi 2.0.
This isn't tech news. It's to bait.
Re:Free space wiping controversial? (Score:4, Insightful)
They intentionally destroyed data while an investigation was underway. If it was a Republican that got caught doing it, you'd probably go nuts about it. As it is, it's disgraceful for Slashdot to post this in the late afternoon on a Friday when people are going to be less likely to see it.
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Everything on that server is part of the investigation. She chose to have her own server and she chose to mix personal emails in with government emails. She shouldn't be the one to decide what the investigators get to see. For all we know, she didn't have any personal email on there and she's been having her people wipe sensitive info that would impact her electability or land her in prison.
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I haven't seen any evidence that the wiping was done during the email investigation; do you have a citation that says otherwise?
It wasn't done during the FBI investigation, but it seems to have been done after the State Department requested her emails pursuant to an investigation by the House about Benghazi.
According to Clinton's lawyer, the emails must have been deleted sometime between December 5, 2014 and March 27, 2015 [politifact.com]. That article is from last year, so perhaps they've managed to narrow the window further.
As discussed in the New York Times timeline [nytimes.com] on the investigation, the select committee in the House to investigate Beng
She's just following protocol (Score:2)
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Any Evidence that this story is correct? (Score:2)
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Just like a woman ... (Score:3)
FBI Email dump source? (Score:2)
If they used BleachBit, then where did they FBI get its last batch of emails from?
What are Americans smoking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just how blatantly obviously criminal does Hi-liar-y have to get before enough of the brainwashed American masses finally start to figure it out and she becomes unelectable?
I mean at some point even her levels of dirty money can't pay off the obviously corrupt US legal system to keep her out of jail any longer right?
Backup appliance and server have all emails (Score:4, Interesting)
Hillary Clinton's IT guy purchased an MS Exchange hosting contract from Platte River. The standard package came with a periodic backup to a Datto appliance, which takes snapshots of the Windows disk image several times a day. The appliance copies the snapshot to Datto's data center in real time. You can erase or even destroy the Windows machine drives and still use the snapshots to restore the disks to the snapshot of the time and date of your chosing.
The FBI confiscated the appliance from Platte River and seized the server from Datto. They have all the emails she sent and received since the start of her State Department tenure.
Re:Responsible? (Score:5, Insightful)
no, the responsible thing to do is to turn it over to the justice department and let them fucking shred it.
Re:Responsible? (Score:5, Insightful)
we're also not the ones who mixed her personal and professional lives. she is.
she's the public face of the state department, which has policies in place to make sure that their correspondence are both secure and archived... so people can go back and look into them to make sure everything is aboveboard.
she sacrificed her right to privacy on her private correspondence when she conducted professional business on the same server.
i don't want to see her fucking wedding photos, but i want someone to make sure that she wasn't selling access to the office of the secretary of state of the united states. and if someone with clearance in the justice department needs to comb through 4 years of "private" emails to make sure, then she has only herself to blame.
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Got any evidence that she was selling access? The stuff I've seen seems to say that donating money to the Clinton Foundation may have gotten you access to Bill, but not the State Department.
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You realize that John Podesta, the founder of ThinkPrigress, and Hillary's campaign chairman, took a bunch of money from Russia that he failed to disclose?
Re:Responsible? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.pbs.org/weta/washin... [pbs.org]
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because she is in violation of the FOIA and can't provide any evidence whatsoever that the emails she deleted were personal. There is no innocent until proven guilty here, in this case she is ALREADY in violation of the FOIA, so the right thing to do is turn ALL emails to a neutral third party to filter out what is personal and what is not.
Right now there is no way to guarantee that the deleted emails were exclusively personal except for her word. And we all know the value of a politician's word.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Deflection (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't believe her campaign signs are "4 her" and not "4 us". Pretty much says everything you need to know. There are laws 4 us, and there are special exceptions to those laws 4 her.
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"sky rocketing people on food stamps"
yeah, and rocket trips don't come cheap
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You do realize that the Clintons have interacted with a very large number of people, so being connected to a good number of people who have died isn't unusual. The reason why she and Bill have dodged what looks like scandals is that the scandals were mostly made up. (Besides, if she can disappear people without any traceable connection, we want her on our side, don't we?) The election is real. Sanders came in a pretty close second, and the Republicans didn't have to nominate Trump. Since Sanders didn'
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Then we might as well as get rid of the freedom of information act since it's legitimate to wipe out government records as long as someone doesn't want it.
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She wiped it after they began investigating her. She was destroying evidence.
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The most likely reason for her to use a private email server is to hide her email from investigators and/or FOIA requests. The government started investigating and what happened? Her team started "going through" her email and destroying whatever they decided they wanted to destroy. She claims they were personal emails, but we'll never know. To erase the data with a secure erase program is good technique, but doing that while the authorities are requesting access to the data is pretty much destruction of
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This isn't mud slinging. This is technology news about obfuscating forensic evidence in practice on a technology website.
Re:More political redirection (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't mud slinging. This is technology news about obfuscating forensic evidence in practice on a technology website.
Your statement is mudslinging.
Whether the secure wipe was used as a simple matter of Best Practice, or was done for Nefarious reasons, is not known. So when the article makes judgements such as "When you're using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see." it becomes a political mudslinging story.
I don't personally use this software, but I personally always securely wipe any drive which I'm done using. Even if there's nothing on there, even if it only contains "yoga emails" or etc.
The disturbing thing to me is that this article is all but using the "If you have nothing to hide, you wouldn't use secure wipe methods" line of bullshit. Using strong encryption, secure wipe software, etc. should not be allowed to be seen as a "shady" or "suspicious" activity- it should rather be seen as the Intelligent and Normal way of doing things.
Re:More political redirection (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be considered strange by computer neophytes and people that don't work with government computer systems, but it's pretty common for techies and government computer people with security clearance required jobs to employ that kind of software.
I guess the people that are making accusations over that are either ignorant, or disingenuous.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess the people that are making accusations over that are either ignorant, or disingenuous.
I prefer option 3, they are pointing out the peculiarity that, given all the other shit she's pulled, in this one instance, she chose to follow best practices.
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"Your Honor, just because my client was in the vicinity of the shooting, drove to a near by store to buy bleach & laundry detergent, then drove home to wash his supposedly blood covered clothes, allegedly scrubbed gunshot residue from his hands, randomly decided to meticulously clean several of his firearms in no way demonstrates any consciousness
Re:More political redirection (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess the people that are making accusations over that are either ignorant, or disingenuous.
Here's the problem -- Clinton deleted these emails AFTER they were requested from the House as part of an official investigation. She chose to print out everything she claimed was relevant (probably to avoid giving away metadata in headers, etc.) and then effectively "burned" the server, including (by her lawyer's own admission) tens of thousands of messages.
FBI investigations have now come up with thousands of emails which were NOT turned over in that paper dump. How many could have been part of those that were deleted and then lost when the server was wiped? We'll never know. Many of them were likely deleted in error, with her lawyers not realizing which ones should have been retained as they were going through tens of thousands of documents. But were ALL of these official state department emails recovered by the FBI (now 15,000+) deleted "in error"?
That's what's troubling about all of this. We have no way of knowing whether there may have been significant spoliation of evidence here (that's the legal term for intentionally, recklessly, or negligently destroying evidence). If this were a corporation who had been issued a subpoena and they acted in this manner, and it was later proven that they "lost" over ten thousand relevant documents in the process of their destruction of "irrelevant" documents, they would likely face significant legal sanctions, perhaps even criminal charges.
Legally, the safe course in this instance would have been to put the server in a secure location with legal supervision by Clinton's counsel until the matter could be resolved. Clinton's use of BleachBit is not surprising here -- not because it's proper protocol to delete secure information, but because it's the only reasonable way to delete potentially incriminating evidence of spoliation (even if most of it was accidental or whatever). If they hadn't used a very secure deletion protocol, then Clinton's attorneys would have been doing a VERY poor job at protecting her legally.
Personally, I'm not sure it's likely there was any "evil memo" buried among the State Department correspondence that could prove anything. (And if there were, I'm not convinced Clinton realized it.) On the other hand, I'm sure she had a bunch of private email dealings that she wouldn't want to get out -- if for nothing else then for bad public relations. Hence the destruction of everything on the server -- it's in line with the privacy paranoia that likely caused her to set up the server in the first place. But could there have been worse stuff there too? Maybe. Doesn't seem like we'll ever know, though, does it?
Re:More political redirection (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the problem -- Clinton deleted these emails AFTER they were requested from the House as part of an official investigation. She chose to print out everything she claimed was relevant (probably to avoid giving away metadata in headers, etc.)
In other words, she willingly destroyed information she was required to hand over.
The full Headers and all Metadata are part of the Record and part of the E-mail; If you are requested to hand over the e-mails: you have no right to exclude or remove headers, even if your standard e-mail software does not normally display the headers when you are reading the message.
Re:More political redirection (Score:4, Insightful)
A: "But anyone could hack in and see her emails, it's totally unsecure!"
B: "She used BleachBit."
A: "That proves she had something to hide!"
Being that Clinton didn't give a damn about securing the physical server and didn't give a damn about securing the messages sent through the server, it seems strange that she suddenly cares about security practices when deleting e-mail messages about yoga classes.
Oh, did I mention that deleting the e-mail messages would be considered an obstruction of justice if it were done by a typical citizen?
Re:Decommissioning servers (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you run shred on a server after the FBI said it wanted the data on it?
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Re:Really (Score:4, Insightful)
It's easy to criticize. What do you propose as an alternative?
Because your options this election are:
1) Clinton
2) Trump
3) Throwing your vote away
Yeah they all suck. But those are your options.
Re:Really (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
You're in this shit because the FPTP [youtube.com] electoral college system makes a two party lock-in inevitable.
- The last time a "third party" gained traction was 1860, with Lincoln's Republicans. There is a reason it hasn't happened since.
The system is broken. And the two-party duopoly has no interest in fixing it.
I'm sorry but acting like things would get better "if only more people voted for better candidates" is a hopelessly naive pipe dream. That requires viable 3rd party candidates, and the US system makes that effectively impossible.
So I'm afraid I must repeat (and I take no pleasure in saying this, believe me) your only three options this election are Trump, Clinton, or throwing your vote away.
Of course Clinton is horrible. But would you prefer Trump?
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Criminal investigations don't use 'undelete'. They use electron microscopes to read areas that were microscopically out of alignment the next time the drive passed it's head. It's very expensive to actually recover large amounts of data this way, but for 'spy agency' needs it's trivial.