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We had submissions from two different Soylentils on this story about an IT worker for the company which managed Hillary Clinton's email server apparently looking for help on how to wipe email addresses.
Clinton's IT contractor sought help removing or replacing to/from addresses on archived emails
The Gateway Pundit reports:
An employee with Platte River Networks, the company in charge of Hillary Clinton's home server, who was granted immunity from Obama's Department of Justice in their investigation of Clinton, reportedly asked for assistance in July 2014 from Reddit users on how to purge emails and how to strip VIP's email address from "a bunch of archived emails":
"Hello all- I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP's (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a PST file. Basically, they don't want the VIP's email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out. I am not sure if something like this is possible with PowerShell, or exporting all of the emails to MSG and doing find/replaces with a batch processing program of some sort. Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?"
Hillary Clinton IT worker asked Reddit how to tamper with email record
Paul Combetta, the IT guy who used BleachBit to wipe email servers for Hillary Clinton, went on Reddit in July 2014 and asked this question:
Remove or replace to/from address on archived emails?
Hello all- I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP's (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a PST file. Basically, they don't want the VIP's email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out.
Paul Combatta was given immunity by the Justice Department.
If you check the timeline you find that in July 2014 there were outstanding FOIA requests but Congress had not yet subpoenaed the email server.
One of the commenters on the Reddit thread said: "If there was a feature in Exchange that allowed this, it could result in major legal issues."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday September 20 2016, @12:14PM
Several people in the reddit thread warn him that this has legal implications, even though they didn't know anything about the context. Knowing what he knew, namely, that he was helping dodge subpoenas, he must have known that his actions were unethical. There is no gray zone here.
Granted, it's easy for me to say, however: This is where you warn your boss (whoever he was directly working for) that this is illegal. You refuse to carry out the action. You buy yourself insurance by documenting the hell out of the requests, your refusal, and the response you get. In cases this egregious, an ethical person should turn whisteblower, and reveal to the world what a corrupt slimeball they (used to) work for.
Corrupt scum can only exist with the complicit cooperation of people around them. It's a crying shame to see people voluntarily being complicit.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @12:19PM
I would usually agree, but it's the Clintons we're talking about. He probably did not want to die.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @12:26PM
Ethics in IT:
1. Do what the boss says.
or:
2. Get thrown in the gutter to die.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tonyPick on Tuesday September 20 2016, @12:59PM
It is unlikely this will be a great comfort to the whistleblower employee who ends up on the welfare line, while the folks they blew the whistle on carry on regardless.
Given whistleblowers face serious, and potentially career ending, retaliation from their employer (and it's the kind of employer doing stuff they would need to blow the whistle on for a start) then voluntary is not the word I would use. And this is not just an IT problem.
Rapid Googling: http://www.fraud-magazine.com/article.aspx?id=4294968656 [fraud-magazine.com]
"Seventy-four percent of the whistle-blowers in my review were terminated. Another 6 percent were suspended and 5 percent were transferred against their wishes. The remaining 15 percent were given poor evaluations, demoted or harassed"
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 20 2016, @02:05PM
"Rapid Googling" indeed.
I selected a random sample of lawsuits from the statewide cases reported in the LexisNexis database between 1994 and 2009. I keyed in the search term “whistle-blower” and found 380 cases
So this was looking at lawsuits already happening; not 100% of whistleblowers get targeted with legal action, I assume.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by tonyPick on Tuesday September 20 2016, @03:00PM
Yep - that article is using at the breakdown of actions via lawsuits - obviously not everyone gets that far; if you're looking for numbers on how many from the general population of whistleblowers experience some form of retaliation the best I can find is a fairly dated survey reported on this article [cfainstitute.org] from 2012
We can argue over the details, but clearly it's a significant risk with serious consequences, and seen as so.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @03:08PM
From the summary:
If you check the timeline you find that in July 2014 there were outstanding FOIA requests but Congress had not yet subpoenaed the email server.
Assuming this was the case, this could be entirely legal. FOIA's frequently have lots of things redacted. As an example, imagine Clinton had the email addresses of every cabinet-level official within the government (which, as Secretary of State is fairly probable). Should all of those be given out to the whole world in a simple FOIA request?
On the surface this seems damning, but truth be told I need to think pretty hard to come up with actual nefarious behaviors masking from/to addresses could hide. There are some, but not nearly as many as first blush would seem.
Entirely agreed that the optics of this is terrible, and it definitely (and rightly) feeds into the narrative of "tricky Clinton."
(Score: 3, Informative) by mechanicjay on Tuesday September 20 2016, @05:09PM
So, it seems it all comes down to timing and circumstances. Regardless, it seems to follow the classic Clinton playbook move of the cover-up being worse than the crime. Which is a brilliant play, btw, which they've more or less built their careers on. They can garner sympathy while they claim that they're being unjustly persecuted.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Tuesday September 20 2016, @05:29PM
Regardless, it seems to follow the classic Clinton playbook move of the cover-up being worse than the crime.
Worse than whatever happened regarding Benghazi, probably, but we don't know the full extent of what was covered up since we haven't gotten a full leak of her deleted emails (yet). The full dirt might be much worse than the cover up. It seems reasonable to assume that it is, seeing as the cover up was blatant even before stonetear got doxxed. Why do a blatant cover up if the truth is less damning?
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Tuesday September 20 2016, @06:27PM
That's kind of the classic Clinton conundrum. They cover up because of how something looks or because it might be damaging politically. They get caught in the cover-up, which proves as a distraction from the real issue. By the time it's over, the situation is so muddled and convoluted it's hard to take seriously. I think most of this stuff, if they would just own it rather then being shady about it, would go a long way to making me feel better about supporting HRC's candidacy.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday September 21 2016, @01:58AM
That's exactly what Colin Powell said: https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/09/Screen-Shot-2016-09-13-at-7.18.37-PM.png [firstlook.org]
Not as colorful as accusing Bill of "dicking bimbos" though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @06:40PM
I call BS. The State Department separately went through these emails and redacted a bunch of stuff. It's not the Platte River guy's job to redact.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by art guerrilla on Tuesday September 20 2016, @03:25PM
actually, even worse, since he ADMITTED he knew they were not supposed to be tampered with or deleted BY COURT ORDER, and did so anyway... there was NO bull 'oh shit' mome t, he did what he did purposefully and knowing it was illegal as hell... he is an eee-vil minion, plain and simple...