Our magic word for today is “imaged.” For some reason that made me think of the old Star Trek ep where they transport into the Bizarro Universe and meet the Spock with the Beard and Uhura is dressed even hotter than usual, complete with dagger in a leg holster. From, as usual, Your Daily Froom:
In a letter to the House oversight committee, the Republican National Committee turned over a heavily caveated list with 37 names on it. It was described as a “current list of users who we believe are or were White House employees using RNC accounts for whom we have been able to identify active e-mail data on operational RNC servers.” The RNC said more names may well show up later.The RNC says it is “working diligently to identify and preserve all potentially relevant data that may exist” and has already gathered 25.5 million kilobytes of e-mail from the 37. It has also hired a computer forensics firm that has “imaged” several RNC computers and blackberries that are currently being used by White House employees.
The Associated Press has an annotated version of the list. The most prominent name on it, other than Karl Rove of course: Presidential counselor Dan Bartlett.
Are there any contests currently running for “greatest number of weasle words that can be squeezed into one sentence”? If so I have a nominee. And we’re not sure why St., er we mean Dan Froomkin added this paragraph under the same heading as the material above, but somebody who has a minute might want to check out the link:
The Associated Press also reports: “The White House has turned over to a House committee about 200 pages of documents related to a contract with a company run by a man who pleaded guilty to bribing a congressman.”
Other links are available at Dan’s shop, so give ’em a hit even if you don’t have time to read the whole column today. Support Good Behavior is our motto, right? and Froom’s about as good as it gets, not to mention stratospherically superior to most writing out of Washington these days.
Thankee kindly.
Front page
Not sure
Although it takes a special kind of wire service hack to write “25.5 million kilobytes” instead of “25.5 gigabytes.”
For the record, right now, my mail client stores 202,512 messages, some of which date back to the 20th century. Including all of the text, most of the attachments, and extra indexing and database information, it occupies a grand total of 5.24GB on disk. If my mail usage is typical, and I am not claiming that it is, 25.5GB of E-mail messages would be right about one million messages recovered from the 37 computers and BlackBerry devices.
(Also, for the record, “imaging” in this case means “we took the computer and made a block-for-block duplicate of the hard drive to study and analyze, including all data that would have been in ’deleted’ files.” This is generally as much forensic recovery as anyone does on magnetic media. It is possible to remove the hard disk platters and use NSA-style tools to try to recover overwritten magnetic impressions to see data that has been overwritten, which is why the DOD and NSA want data “erased” by writing over it 25 to 37 times with random bit patterns — but I’m unaware of such techniques ever being used in the US outside of military or national security contexts. That is, I’ve never heard of it happening in a criminal investigation, and that’s what this is. An “image” of the hard drive is what the FBI or any state forensics lab equivalent would do, AFAIK.)
—Matt
who is the firm
I would love to know the forensics firm hired by RNC. Why can’t Congress get their own forensics guys to make a copy?
Also, does this firm have clearance? I know there *shouldn’t* be any classified info on emails used for politics like RNC business, but we know how Rove likes to leak classified stuff. And since this is his primary email, you’d have to assume there is quite a bit of classified intel running around his Blackberry. (Hence his clearance should be revoked, why i=if he lost his Blackberry like the CDROM in the park with ppt slides?)
We should send the RIAA forensics folks after those computers, this block-for-block image is what they do when you get sued for for 13 yr old downloading mp3s.