No, this is not about the comic strip of the late Johnny Hart. "BC" in this discussion means "blind copy," an aspect of emails often overlooked and almost certainly of great importance in the ongoing saga of the RNC criminal email system.
Excellent, well-explained, straightforward explanation of technical stuff for non-technical folks over at technetron's diary at the House of Orange today. The problem noted? We--or more precisely the Congressional committees investigating this fetid mess--are mostly being provided with copies, dead-tree printouts, of the nefarious illegal emails in question here.
We need the originals, in electronic form. Here's why:
There are two major items the printouts are (mostly) not providing (although there is one interesting exception technetron cites which proves the importance of this matter): The copy only shows the primary recipient of the mail. It's the difference between hitting "Reply" on your mail program and "Reply All." We need to know who the "all" were. We already know from the stories coming out of DoJ in particular that these people conducted "business by consensus," a particularly juvenile way of trying to deflect blame from any individual by having all decisions made by a committee. We joke about working for the Borg but these people actually made it a lifestyle. Ugh.
And the second thing we get from the original that we don't get from (often poorly) redacted copies is the traceroute. technotron gives one example of this which leaked out (that poor quality redacting again) to illustrate the importance. He has this nicely organized into three paragraphs, of which this is the first:
1. What's missing from the printed versions: Emailers often hide some recipients of email by using a "Blind copy" mode. Other recipients, thus do not know that a copy of the email was also sent to Karl Rove, for example. The electronic version of the originating email message would disclose the hidden recipients. But, the printed versions typically list names of senders and receivers, but do not disclose these hidden recipients. The electronic versions can, in some instance, also provide information about the route the email took when traveling from point a to point b (what servers were used). The Web of RNC communications may be even broader than we might suspect.
Well, for it to be much broader than what we've already tracked down it would virtually be the oft-discussed TIA system itself, but there may very well be some odds and ends worth tracing.
Go read. It's short, you can skip the comments although there are some informative bits in them. Action Memo here (I'd say "talking point" but Josh would sue me): Get the originals. And get the servers. Send marshalls if necessary. We can give them a couple of addresses if they don't know where to start. (Waves to Jeffey in Chattanooga.)
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Using BCC
I use BCC all the time. However, since the addressee is shown to everyone on the BCC list I address these emails to myself. So no BCC recipient knows who the email went to. I would look for emails people sent to themselves. Only the original will show the recipient list.
CC and BCC
Printouts usually include CC: recipients, as we see in several of the released documents, but they never include BCC: recipients. In fact, if "A" sends a message to B and C, carbon-copied to D and E, and BCC'd to F, G, and H -- well, B, C, D, and E never even know that F, G, and H also got the message. It's blind. Only the original in "A"'s outbox would show all the recipients.
But you don't need the original - you just need the server log. The log will record the server's actions in sending to every recipient, even if it doesn't record the content.
So while B, C, D, and E may have the memo but not know all the recipients, you can go to the server logs and see who else the same message was sent to (if not the content). Between those two separate data points, you have the content and all the recipients without the original memo.
I would think that most commercial hosting operations would have facilities for keeping archived logs for a few years; they usually compress well and you never know when you'll need them for some reason. Don't despair if KR cleaned out his outbox; server logs should have the same address information as the original messages.
--Matt
--Matt