A disheartening article from the L.A. Times this morning...their experts disagree with what we're all hoping--that emails can shed light on this mess.
From the LA Times this morning.
http://www.latimes.com/...
The article--not an oped--by this relatively fair MSM paper acknowledges Leahy's skepticism and the claims that emails live forever. It claims this is a dated concept of how the internet works today. To wit:
Yet the technology is changing with the times.
Many companies now make it a policy to get rid of all deleted e-mails after 30 or 90 days.
For consumers wondering how long their correspondence lives on, the Internet service providers that control the routes through which e-mail travels often expunge sent and deleted messages in less than a week.
Network Solutions purges deleted e-mails after just a few hours, said Pete Fox, senior vice president of engineering. Then it's really, really gone.
"We do it very consciously, because we didn't want to get in a situation where government entities come asking for people's deleted e-mails," Fox said.
When an AOL user hits delete, the message is sent to a file called "Recently Deleted E-Mail." It sits there for three days then vanishes, said spokesman Andrew Weinstein.
Microsoft said it kills deleted Hotmail messages immediately.
Financial services companies and others may have more stringent rules on retaining data. Businesses facing lawsuits are now required to act quickly to preserve e-mail, but most firms have wide latitude to set their own retention policies.
"Companies are getting more sophisticated about not holding onto things forever, so they're not spending millions of dollars on storage," said James Aquilina, a former federal cyber-crime prosecutor with Stroz Friedberg, a digital evidence consulting firm in Los Angeles.
I don't have enough IT knowledge to back this up or dispute it. It does seem to make sense...it also has the unfortunate effect of depressing the shit out of me. Can anyone weigh in on their claims?
(Forgive me if this article has been diaried already, I couldn't find it).