Yesterday while out of town I posted the following diary about a slashdot.org. If you aren't familiar with it, Slashdot.org is the "DailyKos" of techie sites. I wanted to hear their opinions
Diary
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Slashdot story
http://politics.slashdot.org/...
Because I had to work all day yesterday I didn't get a chance to look at comments on slashdot. There were about 800- but only 8 on mine on dKOs :(
I was really interested in the techie perspective. Surprisingly the discussion was much more political than technical. For a while I thought I was here instead of there.
You can look at the "political" commments on your own, but I wanted to show some of the tech opinion here. I did like Leahy's comments that email doesn't disappear, but he's not a tech expert.
What I read makes me believe that while it may take time, we will get to the bottom of this mess. The techies that were asked to do things will come forward (subpeonas may help!). They probably aren't idealouges and from the looks of that site, I'd say most of them are alot like us.
It seems like we have a true insider's opinion here.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=230577&cid=18709927
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12, @06:12PM (#18709927)
if the emails were on servers operated by the EOP they were backed up and are recoverable. i used to work as a contract backup administrator for the EOP.
An exchange between two folks who appear to be network or storage administrators about typical practices. This may give us some more insight into what the IT folks at EOP may be thinking.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=230577&cid=18707431
Deleted? What about the redundancy?
by filesiteguy (695431) on Thursday April 12, @04:02PM (#18707431)
(http://www.perfectreign.com/)
I seriously doubt the server people in charge of email for the White House would not be keeping both full and incremental backups in addition to major redundancy. After all, they'd want to CYA for actions they did take more than actions they didn't take. Of course, this IS the government, so anything can happen!
http://politics.slashdot.org/...
Hard to beleive that data is lost
(Score:1)
by jaguth (1067484) on Thursday April 12, @08:51PM (#18712209)
I agree with filesiteguy. Any well established entity, government or corporate, will have technicians to deal with email systems and backups. This is the White House we are talking about, and the White House is HUGE. In order to backup such a huge amount of data, there will most likely be tape libraries set aside just for email backups. In order to "lose" email data, a technician would have to manually navigate to the tape in question and either erase it or physically remove it from the tape library and destroy it.
It is VERY unlikely that the backup technicians just "suddenly lost" their backups. Either the backups exist and someone is lying, or the backups were erased and someone is lying. Either way, someone is lying.
MAOP brings up the point that if Rove sent messages from a non-government account to a government account - that message would be stored. Of course if it were two non govt accounts it would be trickier.
Re:Non-issue: Get the law straight
(Score:1)
by maop (309499) on Thursday April 12, @11:06PM (#18713555)
Evidence that Rove used his private accounts for official White House duties can easily be gathered. Look at messages from government accounts to Rove's private account or from Roves private account to government accounts. Either sent or received email would be safely stored if the sender or receiver was a government account. The question about whether Rove and others used their private email accounts for official government business does not even seem to be at issue according to the article because the White House is using this as an excuse of why they cannot comply to congressional information requests. So the problem may be that the sender and receiver in some cases both used non-government accounts but discussed government business. The article is not specific enough for us to tell if this is the problem.
This user indicates that it may be possible to figure out what was deleted by looking at the server logs of both white house and other servers.
Not just deleted, intentionally deleted by people
(Score:1)
by WillAffleckUW (858324) on Thursday April 12, @05:06PM (#18708821)
(http://www.users.qwest.net/~waffleck-asch/ | Last Journal: Monday April 09, @02:33PM)
According to the Washington Post and other news sources, you find that these emails were intentionally deleted by specific individuals, chief amongst these criminals being Karl Rove.
Now, I delete emails every day, but I don't do so knowing it's an intentional act to cover my tracks, and my email server probably makes tons of archival copies, for all I know.
However, you can reconstruct these emails by subpoena action for all the individuals that the felon Rove sent and received said emails from.
And you can grab the server logs at all the waypoints - you would be surprised what you can find.
Is that dragging sound I think I'm hearing Karl Rove being frog marched out of the white house?