Missing White House E-mail Forensics

It’s always a shame when you lose a few e-mails. In the high-tech world, the "dog ate my homework" excuse does not quite work. To lose an e-mail you have to work hard to destroy the evidence. So, I am shocked, shocked, I tell you, to hear that the White House has lost some e-mails!

According to the Los Angeles Times some key emails concerning the US Attorney scandal may have been lost by the White House:

The White House said today that it may have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by political guru Karl Rove and at least 50 other top officials, an admission that stirred anger and dismay among congressional investigators.

The e-mails were considered potentially critical evidence in congressional inquiries launched by Democrats into the role partisan politics may have played in such policy decisions as the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

The White House said an effort was underway to see whether the messages could be recovered from the computer system, which was operated and paid for by the Republican National Committee as part of an effort to separate political communications from those dealing with official business.

"The White House has not done a good enough job overseeing staff using political e-mail accounts to assure compliance with the Presidential Records Act," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said in an unusual late-afternoon teleconference with reporters.

As a result, Stanzel said, "we may not have preserved all e-mails that deal with White House business."

Most unfortunate. Surely the missing emails must be recoverable? right?:

The e-mails were sent through a communications system created in conjunction with Republicans early in the Bush administration. Rove and others were given special laptop computers and other communications devices to use instead of the government communications system when dealing with political matters.

The parallel system was designed to avoid running afoul of the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government resources for partisan purposes, White House officials have said.

But evidence has emerged that system users sometimes failed to maintain such separation and used the private system when communicating about government business.

Special laptops. Other communications devices. I have a few questions:

• Were Rove and company using their special laptops on the White House LAN? If so, what is the White House policy on connecting non-government computers to the White House LAN? Is that considered a breach of security?
• If the "special laptops" were using the White House LAN, then emails sent and/or received by those laptops would have had to go through the White House firewall before going out to the internet. Shouldn’t someone look at the firewall logs to determine how many emails were sent out and/or received from these laptops and to which IP addresses? Does the White House firewall log all content that passes through it? If so, someone should retrieve the emails from the firewall logs.
• If these special laptops did not plug into the White House LAN, did Rove and company use a wireless public network (like Verizon Wireless) from inside the White House to send/receive official White House communications to outside parties? Is that considered a breach of security in the White House?
• Were any of the emails sent from these special laptops, through gwb43.com, internal White House communications between White House staffers? If so, has internal White House deliberations been compromised by the communications being sent out over the public internet?
• Does the email server at gwb43.com do regular backups? If so, someone should pull the backup tapes from the relevant time period to retrieve the "deleted" emails.

So many questions. I am sure the crack staff at the White House and the RNC will be able to answer these questions and retrieve these "lost" emails. Because as everyone knows, it really is very difficult to "delete" things these days. There’s almost always a copy lying around somewhere – in some mail server, on some backup tape, in some firewall log, etc.. That DELETE button on the computer doesn’t do what some may think it does.