GOP-issued laptops now a White House headache: LA Times Story ready for the big I?

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-laptops9apr09,0,4563806.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Democrats say a private e-mail system was used in violation of federal rules.
By Tom Hamburger, Times Staff Writer
10:03 PM PDT, April 8, 2007

— When Karl Rove and his top deputies arrived at the White House in 2001, the Republican National Committee provided them with laptop computers and other communication devices to be used alongside their government-issued equipment. The back-channel e-mail and paging system, paid for and maintained by the RNC, was designed to avoid charges that had vexed the Clinton White House — that federal resources were being used inappropriately for political campaign purposes. Now, that dual computer system is creating new embarrassment and legal headaches for the White House, the Republican Party and Rove's once-vaunted White House operation. Democrats cite evidence that the RNC e-mail system was used for political and government policy matters in violation of federal record preservation and disclosure rules.

In addition, Democrats point to a handful of e-mails obtained through ongoing inquiries suggesting the system may have been used to conceal such activities as contacts with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, convicted on bribery charges and now in prison for fraud. Democratic congressional investigators are beginning to demand access to this RNC-White House communications system, which was used not only by Rove's office but by several top officials elsewhere in the White House. The prospect that such communication might become public has further jangled the nerves of an already rattled Bush White House. Some Republicans believe that the huge number of e-mails — many written hastily, with no thought that they might become public — may contain more detailed and unguarded inside information about the administration's far-flung political activities than has previously been available. "There is concern about what may be in these e-mails," said one GOP activist who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. "The system was created with the best intentions," said former Assistant White House Press Secretary Adam Levine, who was assigned an RNC laptop and BlackBerry when he worked at the White House in 2002. But, he added, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, last week formally requested access to broad categories of RNC-White House e-mails. Waxman told the Los Angeles Times in a statement that a separate "e-mail system for high-ranking White House officials would raise serious questions about violations of the Presidential Records Act," which requires the preservation and ultimate disclosure of e-mails about official government business. Waxman's initial request to the RNC seeks e-mails relating to the presentation of campaign polling and strategy information to Cabinet agency appointees. He is also expected to ask for e-mails relating to Abramoff's activities, which Waxman is also investigating.

The system has to be full of incriminating evidence!

...when it came out about Nixon that there was a secret taping system in the Oval Office. That was the beginning of the end. IMO, the minute BushCo let the cat out of the bag about their secret email system, the Big I Word appeared on the table.

What is so ironic about this is that I am betting they are so use to that parallel system provided by the RNC, it never crossed their minds to keep those emails out of the documents which they produced. IMO, being dishonest was so normal to them, it did not dawn on them to not disclose what they had been doing.

Recommended.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-lng08apr08,0,7732102.story?coll=la-opinion-leftrail
EDITORIAL
Keep Oxnard clean
The state agencies considering an offshore liquefied natural gas terminal should vote no.
April 8, 2007

THE DECISION OVER whether to build an $800-million liquefied natural gas terminal 14 miles off the coast of Oxnard is a difficult one. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger supports it; Pierce Brosnan does not. The staff of the State Lands Commission has recommended approval of the idea; their counterparts at the Coastal Commission disagree. Depending on how you look at the proposed plant, it would be either remarkably clean or untenably dirty; vital to California's energy needs or extraneous. It's a complicated call to make, but when officials weigh in on the proposal this week, they should vote a resounding "no."

Liquefied natural gas, while still a fossil fuel, is cleaner than oil or coal and more portable than natural gas in its gaseous form. In order to be offloaded from ships and converted into usable energy, however, it requires a terminal, and there are currently no terminals on the West Coast of the United States.

The Lands Commission meets Monday to decide on the project; the Coastal Commission weighs in Thursday. It also must be approved by Schwarzenegger and the U.S. Maritime Administration.

How would the terminal affect the environment? Though some Ventura County residents worry about spills and fire, the facility would be far enough offshore to render such threats remote. BHP Billiton, which would build and own the plant, has taken unprecedented steps to minimize its environmental damage.

I'm green with envy, there is not a single newspaper worth reading in my area of the country. Not one.

I'm from the northeast originally, I miss my Sunday papers.

...I laughed like a loon because this alone can bring them down. Shredding can't even touch the myriad backup programs for emails, and there is NO "executive privilege" for stuff that is generated on an outside system.

Hekate

But for now I will wait and see.

I do feel a bit giddy though. Is that bad?

it should also be about the time they spemt on partisan political activity while being paid to do governmental business. Just doing it on private computers doesn't change the fact that this was on our payroll not the RNC's payroll.

Doing their party's bidness as if it was the same as the nation's. They can't see the difference, since ideals such as civil service are foreign to them. I don't think the world will have witnessed a crash and burn as spectacular as the GOP's since the Hindenburg. If the emails are ever public, we should comb through them looking for any evidence that they ever actually gave a damn about governing for the nation's benefit. Now that would shock me, if we found any evidence of that.

Oh how funny. They turned their own guns on themselves.

They were left by accident in NO during Katrina and they washed away, never to be found again.

:wow:

by a DU techie here that proved no way can they hide this stuff. Every e-mail leaves all sorts of fingerprints and backup redundancy on ISP servers and routers all over the internet.

I wish I had bookmarked it, but I was jumping up and down when I read the details.

Maybe someone remembers it and posts a link to it.

I'm too technologically illiterate to know about all that redundancy stuff, but there was a comment in the article that the RNC erases a lot of stuff after it ages 30 days. They were saying that they didn't think the system would prove to be much of a problem because of this recurrent cleansing. Was this just whistling in the dark?

And another question--I understand that it's pretty easy to encrypt email to an uncrackable level of security. Why wouldn't they have routinely done this? I sure would have if I had been planning and conducting felonious conspiracies online. "Key? You don't git no key. We don't got no stinking key."

31. You could delete them from the server, but...

Edited on Thu Apr-05-07 12:51 AM by meldroc
Let me clarify how much I know about computers. I am a software engineer. I do this for a living. I used to work for a major hard disk manufacturer, and I've also worked for a major computer manufacturer on two occasions, working with high end servers and mainframes. I know a lot of the technicalities about what happens when you delete stuff.

Traces would remain. To start with, deleting a file such as an email usually consists of removing the directory entry in the file system pointing to the file and marking the disk sectors where the file resides as free. The contents are still there, and frequently can be recovered by undelete utilities. If we're talking about a database or a mail server file, removing an email there will also leave traces behind.

Let's say you go all the way - format the disk. That will still leave data behind that can be recovered with forensics tools. Go a step further and wipe the entire hard disk. Now you're getting somewhere - you overwrite the entire hard disk. But... For one, it's now obvious to everyone with enough neurons to form a synapse what you've just done. What do you think Waxman and the rest of Congress are going to do if they hand you a subpoena and you hand them a hard disk containing nothing but random data. If you do that, you're going to jail. Also, that server's not the only place where those emails are stored. You have routers on the Internet where those emails passed through - those may have logs showing that those emails existed. You have the copies of emails saved on individual people's workstations. There may be hundreds of workstations out there with copies of some of the emails. In the DOJ document dumps we've already seen are references to some of the emails on gwb43.com - when those servers are subpoenaed, they'd better produce those emails if they know what's good for them. And those emails may reference other emails - better produce those too. Then there are backup tapes. If we're talking about a halfway competent ISP here, there will be an entire system in place for doing backups. In a typical environment, you'll have seven tapes, one for each day of the week, used for differential backups (where you only back up stuff that's changed or added since the previous day's backups.) You'll have four tapes containing full backups of everything, one backup done each Sunday, so those four tapes will keep the state of the systems for the entire previous month. Then you'll have a permanent backup for each month that goes into storage. In short, not only can you bring back the data on the email server as it was today, you can see what was on the machine yesterday, or last week, or six months ago, or three years ago. On top of that, you'll have off-site backups - you'll make a backup onto a tape once a month, and that tape's stored elsewhere, like in a safety deposit box, just in case the building burns down. Depending on how badly the ISP wants to be able to put itself back together quickly in case of a disaster, there may be a couple dozen backup tapes containing those emails. On top of that, we won't be talking about one server. There may be two, or even more servers, operating in parallel to ensure that email service is up and running at all times. And those servers won't have just one hard disk. They'll be running a RAID array with a whole bunch of hard disks (anything from four to dozens, depending on the scale), designed with redundancy in mind so if a hard disk, or even several hard disks fail, the data will still be there.

In short, if Waxman subpoenas the entire contents of gwb43.com's email system, saying "Oops, we lost a few messages." is NOT going to fly. Nobody who knows how these things work will believe that the email equivalent of Nixon's 18 1/2 minute gap can be produced unintentionally. Those emails are in that system, and if the RNC is following the law, they'll be able to produce them in a matter of minutes. If they say they can't they are LYING.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons, Liberal Gun Nut, Unlawful Enemy Combatant
Alert
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calimary (1000+ posts)
Thu Apr-05-07 01:19 AM
Response to Reply #31

35. Oh LORD! If only I could nominate a "post of the week"! I'm not computer-

Edited on Thu Apr-05-07 01:29 AM by calimary
savvy. Far from it. In fact, I'm about as far from being computer-savvy as it's possible to be. But even I could understand most of that. It kinda sounds like there isn't much wiggle-room here, doesn't it?

Thanks for posting this explanation! How cool that we can all benefit from your knowledge and experience!



I'm adding the address to this so I can put it in my journal. I wanna make sure I can find this again.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...
VISUALIZE IMPEACHMENT!! Then go DO something about it. Call Capitol Hill Switchboard TOLL FREE: 1-877 851-6437, or 1-800 828-0498, or 1-866 340-9281, AND DON'T FORGET http://www.downingstreetmemo.com / http://www.johnconyers.campaignoffice.com/index.asp?Typ...

I will attempt to copy if here.

I'm copying and pasting my ass off now!

Thanks!! :thumbsup:

31. You could delete them from the server, but...

Edited on Thu Apr-05-07 12:51 AM by meldroc
Let me clarify how much I know about computers. I am a software engineer. I do this for a living. I used to work for a major hard disk manufacturer, and I've also worked for a major computer manufacturer on two occasions, working with high end servers and mainframes. I know a lot of the technicalities about what happens when you delete stuff.

Traces would remain. To start with, deleting a file such as an email usually consists of removing the directory entry in the file system pointing to the file and marking the disk sectors where the file resides as free. The contents are still there, and frequently can be recovered by undelete utilities. If we're talking about a database or a mail server file, removing an email there will also leave traces behind.

Let's say you go all the way - format the disk. That will still leave data behind that can be recovered with forensics tools. Go a step further and wipe the entire hard disk. Now you're getting somewhere - you overwrite the entire hard disk. But... For one, it's now obvious to everyone with enough neurons to form a synapse what you've just done. What do you think Waxman and the rest of Congress are going to do if they hand you a subpoena and you hand them a hard disk containing nothing but random data. If you do that, you're going to jail. Also, that server's not the only place where those emails are stored. You have routers on the Internet where those emails passed through - those may have logs showing that those emails existed. You have the copies of emails saved on individual people's workstations. There may be hundreds of workstations out there with copies of some of the emails. In the DOJ document dumps we've already seen are references to some of the emails on gwb43.com - when those servers are subpoenaed, they'd better produce those emails if they know what's good for them. And those emails may reference other emails - better produce those too. Then there are backup tapes. If we're talking about a halfway competent ISP here, there will be an entire system in place for doing backups. In a typical environment, you'll have seven tapes, one for each day of the week, used for differential backups (where you only back up stuff that's changed or added since the previous day's backups.) You'll have four tapes containing full backups of everything, one backup done each Sunday, so those four tapes will keep the state of the systems for the entire previous month. Then you'll have a permanent backup for each month that goes into storage. In short, not only can you bring back the data on the email server as it was today, you can see what was on the machine yesterday, or last week, or six months ago, or three years ago. On top of that, you'll have off-site backups - you'll make a backup onto a tape once a month, and that tape's stored elsewhere, like in a safety deposit box, just in case the building burns down. Depending on how badly the ISP wants to be able to put itself back together quickly in case of a disaster, there may be a couple dozen backup tapes containing those emails. On top of that, we won't be talking about one server. There may be two, or even more servers, operating in parallel to ensure that email service is up and running at all times. And those servers won't have just one hard disk. They'll be running a RAID array with a whole bunch of hard disks (anything from four to dozens, depending on the scale), designed with redundancy in mind so if a hard disk, or even several hard disks fail, the data will still be there.

In short, if Waxman subpoenas the entire contents of gwb43.com's email system, saying "Oops, we lost a few messages." is NOT going to fly. Nobody who knows how these things work will believe that the email equivalent of Nixon's 18 1/2 minute gap can be produced unintentionally. Those emails are in that system, and if the RNC is following the law, they'll be able to produce them in a matter of minutes. If they say they can't they are LYING.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons, Liberal Gun Nut, Unlawful Enemy Combatant

on those emails

for spying on Dem politicians for past and future elections.

I guess THEY knew they had nothing to fear...

:eyes:
rocknation