Is There Usable Info In Clinton's Email Server? Lawyer Said The Old Server Is Now Blank...

[Purveyor]

The private e-mail server Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state is in the hands of the FBI. What's on it? Maybe nothing. What was on it? That's what they're trying to find out.

The FBI took possession of the email server on Wednesday as it works to determine whether the private email account Clinton used as Secretary of State could have been compromised.

The server the FBI picked up was stored not at the Clinton's Chappaqua, N.Y. home, as many assumed, but at a data center in New Jersey.

A lawyer for Platte River Networks, the IT Firm that manages the Clinton's email system, told CBS News that the server was moved to the New Jersey facility sometime after Clinton left the State Department. When the Clinton's upgraded their system, the lawyer said the old server is now blank and likely does not contain usable information.

"You can eliminate data from any sort of hard drive or server. Someone may be able to recover it depending on how good they are, and how good a job you did in deleting it in the first place," said CNET'S Dan Ackerman.

more...

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/is-there-usable-info-in-clintons-email-server/

[HFRN]

1. 18 minutes of tape? nt

[Thinkingabout]

2. And if it is indeed clean as Hillary says and she turned over the emails, then what is to be gained.

A person does not have to prove themselves innocent so why spend another $6 million going after nothing? It is time for the GOP Congress members to wise up and stop going after nothing. Nothing from nothing is still nothing.

[LuvLoogie]

4. I doubt that server even has the original hard drives.

Maybe Anonymous has all the real email? Hmmm.... Maybe Gowdy can get the NSA to round up "known" Anonymous hackers?

We will then have proof that Hillary is a bad, bad girl. Until then, she can't prove that she isn't...so there.

[Thinkingabout]

6. The burden of proof does not lie with Hillary. When have you heard of a case where the accused has

To prove innocence? And if this is a just maybe something happened then they need to come up with the goods ..This is not a Rush show where he says what if. The GOP wasted $100 million trying to get something more than a blow job before, is it necessary to waste $100 million more?

[LuvLoogie]

7. Sorry T, I was being facetious.

They kept Issa busy by throwing him a fresh bone now and then over Fast & Furious.

Here's 50,000 email docs. Here's my thumb drives. Here's my server...

[restorefreedom]

3. how long did it sit in the bathtub? nt

Last edited Thu Aug 13, 2015, 11:35 PM - Edit history (2)

[malokvale77]

5. One little script...

or bash command can zero out all the data. The time it would take depends on the size of the drive.

There has been sufficient time since the first inquiry to wipe numerous TBs of data.

I'm pretty sure all involved know the difference in delete, wipe and nuke. I'm a novice and I know.

[stevenleser]

8. Beware if you think something you deleted, even with overwrites, is really gone. Particularly if

you are expecting it to not be recovered by a government agency like the FBI. They can recover almost anything.

The only way to be sure is to destroy the drive and break the platters into little pieces.

Even run of the mill civilian small data recovery companies can recover most stuff. I had a laptop at a friends business. We went to lunch and a candle she left burning burned down the building with my laptop in it. It was subject to temperatures over 1500 degrees and was completely inoperable. Even placed in a new computer, the hard drive wouldn't boot or work.

A data recovery company recovered every single file for $3000 (her insurance paid)

On Edit: I found a link to an article about the fire! http://www.sptimes.com/News/102401/news_pf/NorthPinellas/Fire_damages_casket_b.shtml

[malokvale77]

9. As long as you say so...

it must be true.

But I know, with enough time...
I can make any drive seem new.

[SlipperySlope]

11. Overwritten data cannot be recovered

I'm a computer engineer with over 30 years experience. I'm currently employed by one of the largest storage companies in the world.

Data on a hard drive that has been overwritten is effectively gone. There is no commercial data recovery company that can get it back, and to the best of my knowledge there is no government on earth that can retrieve it. If any government does that technology then they are smarter than the engineers who design the hard drives and they have kept it a closely guarded secret.

Your example of saving a laptop that was damaged in a fire is a trival case of data recovery. In that case there was no data erased on the hard drive, but the hard drive controller was likely destroyed in the fire. Recovery would be a simple matter of removing the destroyed controller, replacing it with a good one, and pulling all the surviving data off the disk and to a new drive.

"Deleted" files, of course, aren't really deleted. All deletion typically does is make the hard drive forget where the data was stored. Anyone who searches the hard drive sector-by-sector will still find the data. Similarly, overwriting a file could still leave traces of that file recoverable, if previous versions or copies were left on sectors that were not overwritten.

But I guarantee you that doing a complete overwrite of the entire hard drive will leave the data unrecoverable for all intents and purposes, other than some hypothetical classified top-secret process that speculation about hard drives worked in 1996 that isn't even true anymore.

Your advise about physically destroying the drive and platters isn't bad. The average person might not know how to do a complete hard drive overwrite. Putting trust in some randomly downloaded "drive wiper" might be misplaced; by taking matters into your own hands and destroying the platters you know the job has been done.

One caution; solid state drives are different than hard drives. Doing a complete drive wipe of a SSD might not truly erase all your data. Similarly a "hybrid" drive might have data that survives a drive wipe. The problem here isn't technically that data survives an actual drive wipe, the problem is that SSDs don't always wipe the data when told to.

[stevenleser]

14. That is not correct. The FBI and NSA have recovered information from drives overwritten

with all zeroes.

I understand the fire situation and was using it to make a general point that what people think is unrecoverable is not necessarily so.

There is a reason that there is no protocol for hard drive overwriting and erasing that is good enough for Top Secret information. The drives have to be destroyed.

[SlipperySlope]

15. Overwritten data CANNOT be recovered

Without hedging; there is no known way to recover data that has been overwritten even a single time. It simply cannot be done with modern hard drives. Maybe it could have been possible with 1970s era drives but no more.

> The FBI and NSA have recovered information from drives overwritten with all zeroes.

I have not been able to find a single verifiable article in any technical journal that shows data recovery after being overwritten, nor can I find a single verifiable reference in any legal source showing data recovery after being overwritten.

> There is a reason that there is no protocol for hard drive overwriting and erasing that is good enough for Top Secret information.

The protocol for Top Secret is driven by different concerns. Specifically there is the concern of how bad sector remapping occurs.

When a HDD sector is detected to be at risk of failure (due to corrected error rat), the drive copies the data to a known good sector and marks the previous sector as bad and no longer to be used. From that point forward, all commands that target the original sector get automatically redirected to the remapped sector.

This means that is is effectively impossible to overwrite the original sector; all commands that target it will go to the remapped sector instead. There are several practical and hypothetical methods of reading the data from the original sector however. This means that drives that have contained Top Secret data are best handled by degaussing or destruction.

[Psephos]

10. Somewhere, Rose Mary Woods is smiling. n/t

[Zorra]

12. Just one more reason to not trust Hillary. nt

[delrem]

13. Any IT person could do a total unrecoverable wipe in their sleep.

When they wipe a drive they don't just dump stuff in the recycle bin, they run a program that totally scrambles, then they do it again, and again. They also do that when they just wipe the free space, leaving certain select records intact.

There'll be nothing on there that Hillary doesn't mind being found.