Thursday, March 29, 2007

Smart about Politics but Clueless about Technology

Sid Blumenthal has an excellent post in Salon (if you are not registered, you need to watch a short advertisement to get a day pass) about the efforts of the Bush Administration apparatchiks to cover their tracks by avoiding the use of the official White House Email System.
...Last week the National Journal disclosed that Karl Rove does "about 95 percent" of his e-mails outside the White House system, instead using a Republican National Committee account. What's more, Rove doesn't tap most of his messages on a White House computer, but rather on a Blackberry provided by the RNC.
...The offshoring of White House records via RNC e-mails became apparent when an RNC domain, gwb43.com (referring to George W. Bush, 43rd president), turned up in a batch of e-mails the White House gave to House and Senate committees earlier this month. Rove's deputy, Scott Jennings, former Bush legal counsel Harriet Miers and her deputies strangely had used gwb43.com as an e-mail domain.
Now your old Sarge is only a beginner in this IT bidness (I have an AS in Computer Information Technology), but I am almost certain the White house is clueless about technology:
Because e-mail connects through many routers and mail servers on its way to the recipient, it is inherently vulnerable to both physical and virtual eavesdropping. Current industry standards do not place emphasis on security; information is transferred in plain text, and mail servers regularly conduct unprotected backups of e-mail that passes through. In effect, every e-mail leaves a digital papertrail in its wake that can be easily inspected months or years later.
Bottom line, emails do not disappear from the Web after you send them.You can wipe data on your PC's hard drive, but if you send data to someone using the network, forget it (If anybody reading this believes that I'm in error, let me know).

If the D's have the political will to take this investigation all the way to the end, they will find out what was sent on domain gwb43.com. The only thing that can stop them is Johnny the Robber and a majority of the Supremes.

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