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Why Hillary's Wiping Her E-mail Server Clean Matters More than It Might Seem

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Hillary’s homebrew server has been wiped blank. Long live 
Hillary’s hosted server. Per the Washington Post: Before

Before it was taken to the data center in New Jersey, the 
[homebrew] server had been in the basement of the Clintons’ 
private home in Chappaqua, N.Y., during the time she was 
secretary of state, according to people familiar with the 
Clintons’ e-mail network. After she left government service in 
early 2013, the Clintons decided to upgrade the system, hiring 
Platte River as the new manager of a privately managed e-mail 
network. The old server was removed from the Clinton home by 
Platte River and stored in a third party data center, which are 
set up to provide security from threats of hacking and natural 
disaster, Wells said.

Platte River Networks has retained control of the old server 
since it took over management of the Clintons’ e-mail system. 
She said that the old server “was blank,” and no longer 
contained useful data. “The information had been migrated over 
to a different server for purposes of transition,” from the old 
system to one run by Platte River, she said, recalling the 
transfer that occurred in June 2013. It would be easy for the 
layman to conclude upon reading this news that, because the data 
had been backed up, Clinton’s decision to wipe her original 
server was inconsequential. This conclusion, I’m afraid, would 
be a false one. On the contrary: By having cleaned the hard disk 
on which all of the important activity took place, Clinton could 
well have impeded the FBI’s investigation, and thereby rendered 
it impossible for the federal government to learn what she has 
been up to.

Casual users of modern computers do not realize that, until a 
hard disk is deliberately and comprehensively wiped clean — 
“overwritten” in the correct parlance — it will retain a good 
amount of useful, accessible, intact information. On almost 
every system available, what appears to the user’s eye to have 
been “trashed” is in fact kept around unblemished until such 
time as the space it’s taking up is needed for something else. 
>From the point of view of the person controlling the operating 
system, files that have been “erased” may indeed be 
inaccessible. For a person who knows what he is doing, however, 
those files can often be easily retrieved. If the FBI had been 
given Clinton’s original hard disk(s), they would have had some 
chance of discovering which files had been deleted (or, rather, 
unlinked from the file system) and which had not. By wiping the 
disks, she has denied them that opportunity.

“Aha,” the Clintonistas say. “But Hillary moved all of the data 
to a new machine in 2013.” Indeed she did. But — and this is the 
key — only the non-deleted information will have been 
transferred over. As Clinton’s team presumably knows, when data 
is copied from one hard disk to another, it is only the “active” 
files that are included in the process. In only the rarest of 
circumstances (RAID arrays, etc.) do source hard drives also 
replicate the “dead” information they are carrying, and there is 
next to no chance that Hillary asked for this to be done. 
Instead, she has almost certainly done nothing more or less than 
to make a copy of her e-mail cache as she had curated it; in 
other words, to have copied exactly what she wanted to have 
copied. From the perspective of an investigator, this is a 
problem. Sure, keeping the homebrew machine in working order 
would have provided no guarantees of anything. But by wiping it 
she has ensured that there is no chance whatsoever that her 
deleted items can be perused.

To illustrate why this matters so much, perhaps you will forgive 
me an analogy? Imagine that you are writing a manuscript by 
hand, and that your initial draft contains all the crossings 
out, substitutions, and spelling errors that initial drafts tend 
to include. Next, imagine that having completed that draft to 
your satisfaction, you make a perfect copy — minus all the 
changes and mistakes, of course — and then, lest anyone be privy 
to your imperfections, you burn the original. In such a case, 
handing over the finished draft would naturally be entirely 
useless to anyone who wanted to find out what changes you had 
made. Indeed, it would be of use only to those who believed that 
you were a perfect writer. That, effectively, is what Hillary 
Clinton has done here. As I noted yesterday, she may still come 
a cropper. But if so, it will be because she didn’t get rid of 
the incriminating materials when she had the chance.

Will this matter in the immediate term? As far as the FBI’s 
investigation is concerned, probably not. Hillary claims that 
she didn’t delete anything incriminating or important, and there 
is now no obvious way of proving otherwise — unless a 
whistleblower comes forward, that is. Legally, though, this is 
another blow upon the bruise. By transmitting the server’s 
contents to a third-party (Platte River), she may well have 
committed a felony. As of now, Clinton’s best defense is that 
she only passively received classified e-mails — as opposed to 
having sent, forwarded, or deleted them — and that she is thus 
not in violation of USC 18 793(f). But if she handed over a 
server full of classified information and then actively copied 
that information onto computers owned by a commercial provider — 
a clear violation of both the “communicates, delivers, transmits 
or causes to be communicated” and “fails to deliver” clauses in 
USC 18 793(e) — that defense becomes horribly moot. Drip, drip, 
drip . . .

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422513/why-hillarys-wiping-
her-e-mail-server-clean-matters-more-it-might-seem-charles-c-w
     

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Why Hillary's Wiping Her E-mail Server Clean Matters More than It Might Seem "Martha Stewart Went To Jail For Much Less" <multiple.felonies@hillaryclinton.com> - 2016-01-18 21:17 +0100

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