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

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

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

 

by Charles C. W. Cooke 

August 13, 2015 4:16 PM 

@charlescwcooke 

 

Hillary’s homebrew server has been wiped blank. Long live Hillary’s hosted server. Per the Washington Post: 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. RELATED: As the FBI Seizes Clinton’s Server, Her E-mail Scandal Enters a More Serious Phase “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. RELATED: Hillary Clinton and the Perks of Being Powerful 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. More Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton Dodges Questions about Bill's Paid Speeches, Abedin's Conflicts of Interest in DNC Presser What Does Hillary Clinton Have in Common with Terrorist Groups? Some ‘Terrorists’: For Mrs. Clinton, the Beheaders Are the Victims 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 . . . — Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review. Did you like this? 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Cooke August 28, 2015 2:03 PM @charlescwcooke In response to my rant yesterday, a friend sent me a link to a famous scene from an Aaron Sorkin-penned movie called The American President, in which, to stirring music and the obvious approval of his staff, the fictional commander-in-chief delivers these lines: In case you missed any of that: You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and handguns. I consider them a threat to national security, and I will go door to door if I have to, but I’m gonna convince Americans that I’m right, and I’m gonna get the guns. We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people, and if you want to talk about character, Bob, you’d better come at me with more than a burning flag and a membership card. My friend thought that this demonstrated the extent to which this fantasy has taken hold in Hollywood, and I pretty much agree with him on that. But, in truth, I was far more intrigued by the words that had come out of the same character’s mouth just a few moments before: For the last couple of months, Senator Rumson has suggested that being president of this country was, to a certain extent, about character, and although I have not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I’ve been here three years and three days, and I can tell you without hesitation: Being President of this country is entirely about character. For the record: yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU. But the more important question is why aren’t you, Bob? Now, this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question: Why would a senator, his party’s most powerful spokesman and a candidate for President, choose to reject upholding the Constitution? If you can answer that question, folks, then you’re smarter than I am, because I didn’t understand it until a few hours ago. America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can’t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the “land of the free”. This really is quite incredible. In the first part of his speech, the president boasts that he is a member of “an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights,” accuses his opponent of declining to uphold the Constitution, and explains passionately that individual liberties inevitably yield costs that can be tough to accept. And in the second, he proceed to suggest a law that guts one of the key parts of that very same Bill of Rights. If there is a clearer example of the manner in which entertainment-sector progressives pick and choose which constitutional rights they think are worth defending, well, I’d love to find it. View Comments The Hypocrisy of the ‘Culture Kills’ Crowd Share article on Facebook share Tweet article tweet Plus one article on Google Plus +1 Print Article Email article Adjust font size AA by Charles C. W. Cooke August 28, 2015 11:03 AM @charlescwcooke As I have written over and over again during the last few years, I do not believe that we can learn a great deal from the justifications that are forwarded by public killers. Crazy people are crazy, and they tend to pick up on whatever latent ideas they can find. Certainly, ideologies play a role in their thinking. But only in a passive sense. Lunatics who believe that they are being wronged by cosmic forces are always going to put a face on their paranoia. Should we delve too deeply into why they chose this or that? No, I think not — at least not until adherence to a particular strain reaches a critical mass. Mine, however, is not the only view out there. Indeed, there is a sizeable contingent within the United States that takes the question of what murderers purport to believe extremely seriously indeed. It is because of these people that we had to examine “toxic masculinity” in the wake of the Isla Vista shooting; that the Confederate Flag had to come down after Charleston (there were other good reasons for this, but that wasn’t one of them); that Anders Breivik’s manifesto was pored over as if it were a holy book; and that Sarah Palin was blamed for the attack on Gabby Giffords in 2011. This being so, I cannot help but wonder what the “culture matters!” folks think of these details from The Blaze: When Alison Parker was an intern at WDBJ in 2012, [the shooter] — then a reporter for the station — heard her utter what he apparently considered to be racist words. Parker made reference to “swinging” by a destination and also referred to heading out into the “field,” according to [the shooter's] 2013 complaint with the station, the New York Post reported. . . . “That’s how that guy’s mind worked,” Ryan Fuqua, a WDBJ video editor, told the New York Post of [the shooter's] racism claims. “Just crazy, left-field assumptions like that.” “[Those words are] just common, everyday talk. [But] that was his MO — to start s**t,” Fuqua added. “He was unstable. One time, after one of our live shots failed, he threw all his stuff down and ran into the woods for like 20 minutes.” WDBJ cameraman Trevor Fair recalled others using the term “field” around [the shooter]: “We would say stuff like, ‘The reporter’s out in the field.’ And he would look at us and say, ‘What are you saying, ‘cotton fields’? That’s racist,’” he told the Post. “We’d be like, ‘What?’” he added. “We all know what that means, but he took it as cotton fields, and therefore we’re all racists.” “This guy was a nightmare,” Fair told the Post. “Management’s worst nightmare.” Then there was the time a station manager brought in watermelon for all employees. “Of course, he thought that was racist. He was like, ‘You’re doing that because of me.’ No, the general manager brought in watermelon for the entire news team. He’s like, ‘Nope, this is out for me. You guys are calling me out because I’m black.’” 7-Eleven’s sale of watermelon-flavored Slurpees didn’t escape [the shooter's] observations, either. “It’s not a coincidence, they’re racist,” Fair recalled [the shooter] saying. Half-joking on Twitter, the Free Beacon’s Sonny Bunch reacted to this news by observing that, “instead of going on a killing spree, this guy should’ve gotten a columnist gig at the Guardian.” As with all humor, there is some truth at the root of this barb. Certainly, the shooter was extreme in his willingness to take offense. But, really, he was no more extreme than many of the extremely silly people who write at Salon or sit on diversity boards or who stand up and make a nuisance of themselves on contemporary college campuses. If one believes that the culture causes people to pull triggers — and again, I don’t but many do — then one has to be ecumenical about it. For what reason is this guy exempt? Why do we not need to have a “national conversation” about hypersensitivity? The answer, I imagine, is politics, for this instinct seems only to run one way. The same people who tend to think that ugly strains within our culture lead inexorably to murder did not seem to care much that the man who killed three Muslims in North Carolina earlier this year was a progressive atheist with strong views about Islam. Likewise, they were not greatly interested that the guy who shot up the Family Research Council was inspired by the always hyperbolic output of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and they saw no connection whatsoever between protestors calling for the execution of police officers and a host of incidents in which angry men did just that. Hypocrisy.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422513/hillary-clinton-email-server-blank-fbi?target=author&tid=23105