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The GOP and Media Smoke Screens on Hillary’s E-mails
I’m confused, but I’m tired of reading all the posts, e-mails, commentary etc., concerning Trey Gowdy et. al., getting access to Hillary’s emails. We read or hear how computer experts can recover most or a lot of the information that has been deleted on a hard drive. That much is true. Forensic experts can recover bits and pieces of deleted information on a hard drive. I have worked as an IT specialist in a government server room. I have worked on many government servers. Without getting too technical, usually data is distributed between 2 or 3 hard drives by a process involving a RAID controller. Here is what a server may look like:
Note the Red Arrows are pointing to 4 hard drives. This server has 8 total hard drives;
Now here is what a typical server hard drive looks like:
So this is similar to each of the hard drives shown in the server above. Now, how long or how hard do you think it would be to pull on the little red tab and pull the hard drive out? About 10 seconds—if you are slow.
What I am getting at here is that you can probably forget about getting the server from Hillary and giving it to a forensic team. Why? Because all someone has to do is go to the server and physically remove the two or three hard drives (they are made to slide out from the front panel), conceal them in a black garbage bag, carry them to the nearest garbage dumpster and voila: tomorrow they are resting quietly in the bottom of a massive garbage dump.
Then two or three fresh, clean hard drives can be reinserted in the server and there will be no incriminating evidence to be found.
I suppose she can be accused of destroying evidence, but proving that will take time and maybe never happen.
My conclusion is that if any e-mails are ever found, they will show up on someone else’s e-mail account. Remember, however, that all her close buddies used her server too. Eventually someone will screw up and spill the beans.
Trey Gowdy needs to subpoena the e-mail accounts of everyone Hillary had contact with. It seems, however, that the word subpoena doesn’t seem to have much “punch” or support from our elected officials.
Published in General
Thanks for the walkthrough.
I agree that subpoenas should have been issued weeks ago. It’s clear that no justice will come. Past scandals (Benghazi, Fast & Furious, Operation Choke Point) provide ample evidence that Republicans simply aren’t willing to do what it takes to smoke out the truth and ensure consequences.
It’s all a game and no one is ever accountable. Not holding my breath for Gowdy or Chaffetz. It’s rigged.
Find a donor that sent an email pledging millions of dollars worth of support to Hillary. Have donor say that he never sent such an email. Watch how fast Hillary “finds” that email pledge. Go to same place and get the rest of her email.
Ditto Aaron’s thanks on your explanation.
To what extent would you be able to weigh in on the question of the vulnerability of HRC’s email to hackers? Former DIA director LTG Michael Flynn, tonight on Megyn Kelly, seemed pretty confident the Russians, Chinese, possibly the Iranians and North Koreans, would have been able to access her email. He also suggested less adversarial parties may have browsed through her yoga and wedding plans as well.
Let’s be honest here, the email has not been deleted. It is too valuable to the Clintons for that to happen. It is stored someplace so they can reference it as needed but not able to be taken by a search. At this point it would not surprise me if it was out of country.
Um, the NSA no doubt has the envelope information for each and every email which was sent to and from that domain.
I’m willing to bet that anonymous could write a program in about 20 minutes which would sort those sent/received emails into a neat file which could be used for a subpoena, listing the individuals who are to produce said emails and giving them specific times and dates when they arrived.
That is, if he were given access to the database with the appropriate search parameters…
The server only looks like that if Carly Fiorina is President. ;-)
As an IT guy myself, let me comment.
My understanding this server was at her home. Now, I don’t know what kind of network situation she had at home, but I’m willing to be it wasn’t all that secure. She probably had a rudimentary firewall, no encryption on her e-mail, hell the people using it were probably sending their password in clear text for all we know. So I’d say the likelihood of her e-mail server being hacked, or at the very least some of the accounts on the server, is very high.
I was recently at a cyber security summit, and one of the guys said “There are two kinds of companies in the world: those who know they have been hacked by the Chinese, and those who don’t.”
I don’t remember where I read it, but I think I read that her email was hacked by someone now in prison for hacking. Does anyone else remember that? Could he have information to trade?
I can’t wrap my head around how this isn’t destruction of government property – or destruction of evidence.
So the consensus seems to be that any number of parties, foreign and domestic, friend and foe, probably have these emails. Assuming that is true, it is darkly comical that the only ones who can’t seem to lay hands on them are certain committee chairmen in the congressional majority. Or maybe they do have them and are just waiting for a more politically opportune time to start leaking the details. Dare we hope?
She is a Clinton and a Democrat. Rules and laws do not apply.
You sure? I don’t see the Compaq logo …
Are you referring to Guccifer, that Romanian(?) guy that hacked Sid Vicious Blumenthal’s mail? He’s in jail.
It’s got an HP logo. But that’s a Compaq server. Which is to say, they kept the Compaq line when the two companies merged, much to my chagrin. I like the HPs better. So I switched to Dell.
Barfly, yes that is what I had in the back of my mind. It was not Ms Rodham’s email,it was Sid’s. Thanks for the heads up.
Okay, the emails are “gone”. Subpoena her address book and then demand that each of them turn over the emails she sent as SecState. You would be barking at the moon but it would be fun to make them squirm a little
The job of Congress is legislation. The purpose of Congressional hearings is to determine how to legislate. Without a legislative goal in mind, I don’t see the point of these investigations.
The Yeehaw crowd wants more YEEHAW!!!!
I’m not a tech head and know nothing about servers and hard drives. How would the Russians or Chinese or any others know she had the server at home? If they did, and Gen. Flynn is correct, what a blackmail weapon they’d have against Clinton should she be elected! If, for example, the Iranians were eavesdropping, wouldn’t the Mullahs be a cheering section for her. In the event any of our adversaries (or friends) had been hacking in wouldn’t they, through third parties, have been major contributors to those foundations the Clintons are so proud of?
They would not know or care where the server was physically located. They would have just followed her email address over the internet and then hack the server. The lack of a .gov on her email address would have let them know it was not a standard DOD level protected device with its levels of protection so it would be like putting up a big “HACK ME” sign.
Are we sure the server is/was in Clinton’s home? It was Clinton who said the server was under the protection of the Secret Service and we know that the domain was registered to her address. But apparently Gowdy has subpoenaed her web hosting company. If she has a commercial web hosting service, the actual server could be anywhere. I haven’t heard the name of the hosting service, though. So yes, I think there are a lot of smoke and mirrors in all of the news accounts.