The company that managed Hillary Clinton’s private email server said it does not know if the system was ever “wiped” of data, meaning it is possible that emails deleted by the former secretary of State could be recovered, The Washington Post is reporting.
“Platte River has no knowledge of the server being wiped,” company spokesman Andy Boian told the Post. “All the information we have is that the server wasn’t wiped.”
Platte River Networks is the Denver-based firm that has managed Clinton’s system since 2013.
Clinton and aides have said for months that she deleted up to 31,000 emails. But even deleted emails can be recovered if the server has not been cleared — “wiped” — of all data, a process that involves overwriting existing data.
Reports the Post:
“In a memorable exchange at a campaign event in Las Vegas last month, Clinton turned aside a question about whether the server had been wiped with a joke: ‘Like what, with a cloth?’ she said, adding, ‘I don’t know how it works digitally at all.’
“Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon gave a similar answer this month, telling CNN: ‘I don’t know what ‘wiped’ means. Literally the e-mails were deleted off of the server, that’s true.’”
Two things about emails. If you delete the email and purge your account before the end of the day, the email is not caught in the nightly backups. Otherwise the original is still on the backup media.
Deleted Hillary Clinton emails could be recovered, report says http://t.co/1MRJuisCbt
— The Guardian (@guardian) September 13, 2015
Also, when you delete, the file pointer is erased, but the text is still there until overwritten by something else. Security firms can recover the data.
Having worked in the graphics field, I made sure to hang around the IT department to learn as much as I could and there is a saying they usually have — nothing is deleted, it just takes time to find it.
H/T: Washington Post
