Quote:
Originally Posted by jyl
Maybe some underpaid, overworked sysadmin misplaced tapes or rewrote drives or botched some settings or - my point above is that things aren't always done just because they are supposed to be done.
My impression is, whenever there is an inquiry like this, emails turn up missing, and that is the case for large and small corporations, for government agencies, for past administrations, etc.
I think that, as a general matter, document retention is about as foolproof as cyber-security.
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True but in this specific situation the thought that a mistake would be so surgically precise as to effectively and efficiently eliminate all traces of specific activity spanning years is simply not realistic.
It would have caused massive data loss. Not something trivial that would or could have gone unnoticed.
Mistakes don't discriminate.
We are left to consider a coordinated intentional act.
Certainly possible but I think also very difficult.
We'd need to know more about the Feds backup infrastructure.
Tape is very efficient for this type of archiving.
You can't delete specific files from a tape archive.
To do so you'd first need to request an index dump of archives to find which tapes contain the data you want.
Then you need to access the physical media. Protocol is not going to let you stroll in and check out a tape or bunch of tapes and take them home like its Blockbuster on a Friday night.
You're going to have to tell them what you want retrieved and they are going to do it for you.
To delete it permanently you'd need to restore the archive to traditional disc media, delete the files then back up the altered source.
And then your time stamps will have a mismatch.
If the Fed is backing up to disc based media it's certainly easier but I'd be willing to bet those discs are also backed up, probably to tape.
Again all of this is certainly possible and doable given enough time which I don't think they had and even if you could pull it off I don't believe you could do it without leaving evidence all over the place.
It just does not seem plausible.