In a new development in Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, the FBI revealed that Clinton used software specially designed to make recovery of data impossible in deleting messages from her private server.
Republican Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina told Fox News that the software is called BleachBit, and it’s designed to securely erase data so the information can’t be recovered by forensic techniques used to restore old computer files.
Republican Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina told Fox News that the software is called BleachBit, and it’s designed to securely erase data so the information can’t be recovered by forensic techniques used to restore old computer files.
In 2015, when Clinton was questioned about “wiping” her email server, she tried to make a joke about it, asking, “like with a cloth or something?” It now turns out that BleachBit was the “cloth” she was referring to.
According to BleachBit’s maker, “Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster.”
Some pundits have compared the missing email messages to the missing 18 minutes of audio deleted from tapes in former President Richard Nixon’s office during the Watergate scandal. Ironically, it was Hillary Clinton who helped arrange for impeachment proceedings against Nixon.
Representative Gowdy claimed that the use of BleachBit showed Clinton’s intention to hide evidence.
In fact, it was following the March 2, 2015 story in The New York Times entitled “Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules” that Clinton’s consultants at the Platte River Network in Denver used BleachBit to delete the emails from her server permanently.
Specifically, the FBI claims in its reports that Platte River deleted these emails between March 25 and March 31 following an “Oh S*** moment” by one of its staff members whose name has been redacted.
Platte River was subpoenaed by Congressional committees looking into the email matter. The committees wrote to Platte River CEO Treve Suazo, claiming that there were three instances when the company refused to provide documents or to allow its employees to be interviewed. For its part, Platte River’s attorney refused to comment on the matter, citing attorney-client privilege.
“If she considered [her emails] to be personal, then [Clinton] and her lawyers had those emails deleted. They didn’t just push the delete button, they had them deleted where even God can’t read them,” declared Gowdy.
“They were using something called BleachBit. You don’t use BleachBit for yoga emails… When you’re using BleachBit, it is for something you really do not want the world to see.”
Under normal circumstances, when email messages or computer files are deleted, the data of those messages and files remains stored on the disk where they’re located, but the directory information pointing to their locations is altered. As long as there’s empty space left on the disk, that space will be used first for storage before the original files or messages are overwritten.
But BleachBit and software tools like it irreversibly overwrite both the actual data and the directory information, making recovery unfeasible.
BleachBit is “open-source” software, meaning that it cannot be audited for “backdoors,” unlike “closed-source” software, which is what the government generally uses for its information technology projects, especially in the wake of the leaks published by Edward Snowden in 2013.
In an interview on CNN, operating systems analyst Jonathan Zdziarski said that typically “someone trying to cover their tracks would likely pay for and use a much more expensive, specialized [closed-source] data destruction tool.”
The problem with closed-source software, however, is that its makers can be audited for records of users’ actions. Open-source software is freely available in the marketplace, and updates to the software come from end users, rather than from the software’s original authors. As such, the updates are not guaranteed, and the distributors of such software are usually not bound to the same terms of warranty and liability as commercial software makers.
In an article by computer security expert Bruce Schneider, Schneider states, “Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software.” In the same article, Schneider went on to say he recommends using BleachBit to securely erase files.
Following the FBI’s revelation about BleachBit, traffic to the software’s site spiked as people sought out the same secure tool that Clinton used to safely delete their own files and messages. The Congressional committee that subpoenaed Platte River is considering recommending changes in the law regarding email storage for federal employees.
With this latest revelation, it’s clear that Clinton intended not to have any records available that could be examined or reverse-engineered to make reading her emails possible; for Clinton to continue to claim that deletion of her messages was innocent is patently absurd.
~American Liberty Report
http://www.americanlibertyreport.com/articles/new-evidence-damns-hillary-clintons-web-of-lies/
http://www.americanlibertyreport.com/articles/new-evidence-damns-hillary-clintons-web-of-lies/
