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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 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.