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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: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday September 20 2016, @01:29PM
Leaving aside the ethics and illegality of it all, they were just asking to get caught. I mean what the hell were they thinking?
1 - Why would you signpost the fact that you are working for a "VERY VIP" person in your question? It has no technical relevance to the query, it just invites people to speculate, snoop and then join the dots later on.
2 - Why ask on Reddit? Are there no other places to get the information? Assuming you can't just google up the answers for yourself, why not go to somewhere that won't make your dumb incriminating questions available to the internet at large for the rest of eternity?
3 - If you really have to ask on Reddit, couldn't you post anon or use a newly-created account that isn't easily connected to your RL persona? It might not be foolproof, but it would provide at least one more layer of obscurity.
This is so stupid it makes me wonder if they wanted to get caught. It could be either (a) an over-elaborate whistle-blowing attempt disguised as incompetence to provide some plausible deniability and therefore protect against the employer's wrath [b] one of those situations where people subconsciously allow themselves to get caught because they know they are doing wrong but don't have the courage to just turn themselves in or {c} some kind of mole or double agent planted in Hilary's operation by her enemies to rat her out.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday September 20 2016, @01:34PM
or (d) they honestly thought this was all legal and above board and they had nothing to fear and nothing to hide. I guess that could be the case if they are quite junior/ naive, and had been assured by higher-ups that there was nothing to worry about. The question asked does kind of imply that they were simply trying to keep the VERY VIP person's email address private.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @01:41PM
or (e) The reddit post is fake and designed to look like it was being posted by this particular person.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @06:35PM
From 12 years ago? I might believe it was a fake if it was more recent. I'm sure a lot of internet users stuck with the same username across many sites (like me) until they get into a situation where they start using different usernames, like govt for example.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Wednesday September 21 2016, @12:24AM
putin was alive 12 years ago, wasn't he ? ? ?
check and mate ! ! ! (say the clintonistas)
The Russians are coming (again) !
The Russians are coming (again) !
(is this the farce part ? ? ?)
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @02:06PM
1 - Why would you signpost the fact that you are working for a "VERY VIP" person in your question? It has no technical relevance to the query, it just invites people to speculate, snoop and then join the dots later on.
2 - Why ask on Reddit? Are there no other places to get the information? Assuming you can't just google up the answers for yourself, why not go to somewhere that won't make your dumb incriminating questions available to the internet at large for the rest of eternity?
3 - If you really have to ask on Reddit, couldn't you post anon or use a newly-created account that isn't easily connected to your RL persona? It might not be foolproof, but it would provide at least one more layer of obscurity.
Obviously, this Reddit thread was posted by Donald Trump and the Russians in 2014 to smear Clinton.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @02:38PM
> This is so stupid it makes me wonder if they wanted to get caught.
Or... He didn't think what he was doing had any legal implications. Literally if you have nothing to fear you have nothing to hide. It seems to me that people are motivated to read the worst possible interpretation into his words. The details are really light, if you frame them a certain way it looks terrible and the more terrible it looks the more salacious the story.
I think most of us have had the experience of asking a technical question in a public forum, including background details in the question and then instead of getting helpful answers we get a bunch of people seizing on those details and twisting them to fit their preconceptions either to answer a question that we didn't actually ask or to judge us as an idiot or asshole for wanting to do something they think is stupid or wrong. I certainly have. It took me a long time to learn to pair my questions down to the very minimum to describe the problem I was looking to solve because while I want to have an open discussion there are just too many dickheads with nothing better to do but use people's questions as a launching point to push their own pet issues. Another variation on eternal september I guess. And now we are seeing the ultimate case of people wanting to use this guy's question push their own agenda...
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday September 20 2016, @04:07PM
... to learn to *pare my questions down
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @04:52PM
Why am I not surprised that the only response to an even-keeled post is a fucking grammar flame?
This site is clearly rigged.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @08:35PM
This site is clearly rigged.
Ah, but is it Jerry-rigged, or Jury-rigged? Or Trump-rigged? Possibly Out-rigged?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @09:04PM
About every single programming question I've ever asked?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 20 2016, @05:16PM
1 - the "very VIP" bit was just standard self aggrandizement - you see it all the time from bloggers, pundits, and whoever.
2 - ignorant people go to reddit all the time. I often google stuff, and find hits posted on reddit. I've even browsed some of those results. I don't recall ever finding anything useful on reddit.
3 - would defeat the self aggrandizement bit. Imagine this post: "Oh, look at me, I'm so important I get to suck a very important person's ass! -anonymous"
Yes, stupid, stupid, stupid. But, then again, Microsoft and Google save all of your searches anyway. If I use either search engine to find "how to wipe my boss's email server", it's recorded. If I'm on Windows, then Windows records it right in the logs. If you're signed into either of the major search engines, they they save the search again. Linux and duckduckgo are great, because they don't record that crap. All of my research into assassination techniques has been kept secret because I don't use Windows and Google or Bing. :^)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday September 20 2016, @06:13PM
Don't look for conspiracy, where simple incompetence will do.
- The guy was a bit impressed with himself, working for such a highly placed political animal. That's why he mentions the super-duper-VIP stuff. This is pretty human. Imagine you have a special contract, working directly for some really important person whom you personally respect.
- He's likely your average admin, with average capabilities, nothing special. Trying to edit a PST file directly is pretty hopeless; indirect solutions never occurred to him.
- He's not security-aware. He probably figured that using his reddit pseudonym was plenty of security.
I think the latter point is particularly important. Even those of us who think we are security-aware, probably aren't. Security is hard. It's a lot harder than we think: when any one stupid action can give you a way, and a million people on reddit and 4chan are hunting for you - you are basically screwed.
I think all of this is understandable, except for the ethics. If that super-VIP, whom you personally respect, starts asking you to do highly illegal things that can land you in prison for decades, it's time and past time to step back and re-evaluate.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @10:59PM
Don't look for conspiracy, where simple incompetence will do.
It might not even be incompetence. Imagine the following.
Secretary Clinton comes to you and says, "we just got a FOIA request. I need to go through all these emails and strip out President Obama's email address from the from and to fields. We don't want those out in the general public." Assuming this is legal (I think it is, but I am not a lawyer), and you don't know how to do it, what do you do? I assume you check on Reddit/SN/StackExchange/wherever asking how to do it, with a request very similar to the one we see in this news article. I fail to see how this is a smoking gun of any nefarious activity.
Then again, some other posters mentioned that this might have happened after more formal requests for information came from congress which would not be legally redact-able... in which case then yes, this is somewhat suspicious.
(Score: 1) by guizzy on Tuesday September 20 2016, @07:55PM
Most people would be, in the presence of someone as VIP as HRC, be understandably star-struck.
Probably to a point where they would not question what that person asks (as long as it's not obviously immoral like killing someone), in the hope of impressing them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday September 21 2016, @02:04AM
Personally, I'd be puking my guts out being that close to that much corruption.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @07:59PM
> This is so stupid...
There is a generation now of people who consider being signed in, logged in, going public, getting karma points, and participating in memberships that get points, etc to be completely normal. And yes, this is stupid.
Nevertheless they're convinced that being digitally present is paramount above all else; and they cannot consider (or really fathom?) that they give away the farm by constantly broadcasting themselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20 2016, @08:06PM
> This is so stupid it makes me wonder...
Don't wonder too hard. It is just plain stupidity.
There is now a generation of people who consider is paramount to be signed in, logged in, go public, get karma points, and have online identities to be completely normal. To some, being digitally present is above all else; and they cannot consider (or fathom?) that they give away the farm when constantly broadcasting themselves.
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Wednesday September 21 2016, @03:15PM
As mich as asking "was getting caught part of your plan?". I have a feeling that if it was he would also not have allowed that same username to be tracable to furry fanfiction. Might have been despirate though.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam