I now have an RNC blackberry which you can use to e-mail me at any time. No security issues like my WH email.
So says Susan Ralston, Karl Rove's assistant, and Jack Abramoff's former assistant when she sends a message to Abramoff. TMP Muckraker explains that this may be one reason Waxman is going to question her.
House Dems Want Former Abramoff, Rove Aide for Questions
Waxman committee original source
Although Congressman Waxman and many Kossacks may be expecting a pot of investigative gold at the end of the RNC email rainbow, there are reasons to be pessimistic. Here's why.
- Rove is a master craftsman, and his craft is stealth and propaganda. Stealth is vital to maintaining his operational capability. This means that he needs secure communications. A single slip can cost him his job (He was fired by Bush Sr. for leaking to Novak), or land him in jail (Fitzgerald almost indicted him).
- A craft may be viewed as a set of techniques and the ability to appropriately apply those techniques to tasks. Although Rove may not know all the digital techniques required to cover his tracks, he knows how to secure the services of those who do.
- When Rove assumed a White House position, he knew that he would have to avoid using White House communication channels to do dirty work. One way to accomplish this was to always work through verbal instructions to trusted flunkies. Taylor and Jennings are two examples who can be relied upon to say "I don't remember" before committees. But he also needed electronic communications. Here the RNC and other "resources" were used.
- Blackberry messages are relayed through specialized servers, and copies of the messages are vulnerable to erasure. To ensure destruction of message records, replaceable removable media can be used on the message servers and the old volumes can periodically be destroyed. It is unimagineable to me that Rove would entrust his communications to insecure channels.
- It is unlikely that Congressional committees, even if they gain legal authority to search RNC servers, will be able to find intact recordings of the communications of Rove or his staff. This is why Ralston said "No security issues."
- There is one last resort for finding Karl and Company's dirty messages: the NSA. The NSA plucks just about every bit of electronic message traffic out of the ether and stores it for analysis. If Congressman Waxman really wants to get to the bottom of this sordid mess. That is where he will have to search. Of course, getting the NSA to participate in a domestic political investigation will be a difficult undertaking, to say the least.
- The one ray of hope for investigators is that even evil little Rovian robots make mistakes, and forgetting to use the secure channel is a mistake made even by elite military and intelligence personnel. This "leakage" will probably be enough to close down Rove's little shop of horrors.
I am sometimes accused of being an Internet utopian, but if the downfall of Karl Rove results from the ability of the Net to route around evil, then we will all have cause to rejoice.