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

[Martha Stewart Went To Jail For Much Less]

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