Computergate: Let's play dodgeball! (UPDATES 1, 2 and 3)

Copmputergate -- or emailgate, or what-have-you -- has been quiescent these past few days. But now we learn more about the White House effort to bypass scrutiny by running emails through private RNC servers.

The Chattanooga Times Free Press has a story called "Morphing a conspiracy?", which reveals that the photo of Karl Rove carrying a Coptix brochure (Coptix being one of the Tennesee companies involved) was faked.

"It's easy for people to plant disinformation and misinformation out there," said Josiah Roe, executive vice president of Coptix, based in St. Elmo.

Mr. Roe said the company altered the photo and placed it on the Internet after bloggers implied that Coptix was involved in a "vast right-wing conspiracy" because the company -- along with another local firm, SmarTech -- provides an Internet service for the Republican National Committee.

Cute, Josiah. You've done your country a real service.

Now here's the juiciest part of the story:

Internet bloggers also have alleged that Chattanooga-based SmarTech is involved in the case of e-mails sent on a nongovernment account that relate to the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys.

Jeff Averbeck, president of SmarTech, said the company hosts a server for the RNC that translates Internet domain names into numerical addresses. He said Coptix also holds an additional copy of that information -- which he said is like a "telephone book" -- for the RNC.

Mr. Averbeck said his firm does more for the RNC but he declined to elaborate, citing client confidentiality. But he said that SmarTech does not have access to RNC e-mail records.

Mr. Roe, with Coptix, said his company also does not have access to that RNC information.

RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said the committee "is not a client of Coptix."

Perhaps one of our readers with a knowledge of how such companies operate can make something comprehensible of this statement. Here's how I see it:

The White House has released copies of emails in which officials doing (shady) government business use the GWB43.com email address instead of the .gov addresses which is stored as mandated by the Presidential Records Act. That address, GSB43, traces back to SmarTech and Coptix. SmarTech merged some years ago with a company run by a Bush family friend; the company handles everything Republican.

But SmarTech now says it has NO access to RNC email records.

And SmarTech makes this announcement just after Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issues a formal demand to the Republican Party to turn over emails -- because either the Presidential Records Act (which mandates a historical record) or the Hatch Act (which forbids White House workers from doing party business on the taxpayer's dime) has been broken here.

No records here, sayeth SmarTech -- and SmarTech sayeth no more.

Looks to me like what we got here is one hell of a game of dodgeball.

UPDATE: So just how easy -- or difficult -- would it be to erase all record of those emails? Geek-speak translated into human-speak, after the jump...

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

The best explanation comes from a tech guy named meldroc, who posted over on Democratic Underground (with paragraph breaks added for increased readability):

Let me clarify how much I know about computers. I am a software engineer. I do this for a living. I used to work for a major hard disk manufacturer, and I've also worked for a major computer manufacturer on two occasions, working with high end servers and mainframes. I know a lot of the technicalities about what happens when you delete stuff.

Traces would remain. To start with, deleting a file such as an email usually consists of removing the directory entry in the file system pointing to the file and marking the disk sectors where the file resides as free. The contents are still there, and frequently can be recovered by undelete utilities. If we're talking about a database or a mail server file, removing an email there will also leave traces behind.

Let's say you go all the way - format the disk. That will still leave data behind that can be recovered with forensics tools. Go a step further and wipe the entire hard disk. Now you're getting somewhere - you overwrite the entire hard disk. But... For one, it's now obvious to everyone with enough neurons to form a synapse what you've just done. What do you think Waxman and the rest of Congress are going to do if they hand you a subpoena and you hand them a hard disk containing nothing but random data? If you do that, you're going to jail.

Also, that server's not the only place where those emails are stored. You have routers on the Internet where those emails passed through - those may have logs showing that those emails existed. You have the copies of emails saved on individual people's workstations. There may be hundreds of workstations out there with copies of some of the emails.

In the DOJ document dumps we've already seen are references to some of the emails on gwb43.com - when those servers are subpoenaed, they'd better produce those emails if they know what's good for them. And those emails may reference other emails - better produce those too.

Then there are backup tapes. If we're talking about a halfway competent ISP here, there will be an entire system in place for doing backups. In a typical environment, you'll have seven tapes, one for each day of the week, used for differential backups (where you only back up stuff that's changed or added since the previous day's backups.) You'll have four tapes containing full backups of everything, one backup done each Sunday, so those four tapes will keep the state of the systems for the entire previous month. Then you'll have a permanent backup for each month that goes into storage.

In short, not only can you bring back the data on the email server as it was today, you can see what was on the machine yesterday, or last week, or six months ago, or three years ago.

On top of that, you'll have off-site backups - you'll make a backup onto a tape once a month, and that tape's stored elsewhere, like in a safety deposit box, just in case the building burns down. Depending on how badly the ISP wants to be able to put itself back together quickly in case of a disaster, there may be a couple dozen backup tapes containing those emails.

On top of that, we won't be talking about one server. There may be two, or even more servers, operating in parallel to ensure that email service is up and running at all times. And those servers won't have just one hard disk. They'll be running a RAID array with a whole bunch of hard disks (anything from four to dozens, depending on the scale), designed with redundancy in mind so if a hard disk, or even several hard disks fail, the data will still be there.

In short, if Waxman subpoenas the entire contents of gwb43.com's email system, saying "Oops, we lost a few messages." is NOT going to fly. Nobody who knows how these things work will believe that the email equivalent of Nixon's 18 1/2 minute gap can be produced unintentionally. Those emails are in that system, and if the RNC is following the law, they'll be able to produce them in a matter of minutes. If they say they can't they are LYING.

That said, I think there is still room for an "Oops" factor -- as in "Oops, we were a terribly incompetent ISP and we did not keep backups." Obviously, if someone tries to "oops" his way out of this mess, anyone with any brains will know that heavy-duty hugger-mugger has happened. But we still won't have the damn emails. And as long as the oops-er comes up with a story that a jury might find remotely plausible, then he can escape obstruction of justice charges.

Or so I presume.

And why do I make that presumption? Because right now, Jeff Averbeck seems to be acting awfully damn smug.

Oh -- and please read ViViDVeW's commentary below. We have a pressing need now for the full email headers. And if Averbeck says he can't get that...

UPDATE 2: Here's what ViViDVeW has to say...

While the DNS records for GWB43 may point to SMARTech servers this does not mean ANY emails reside there.

As I have stated before, their servers have all of the appearance of being only mail gateways. Think of them as mail relay agents. The technical term is MTA (Mail Transfer Agent).

When an email is sent to a gateway, it looks up the domain (the part after @) to see if it is one that they control. If so, it then simply forwards the email to the IP address listed for that domain which goes to another relay or its final stop, the MUA (Mail User Agent). The MUA is the place where all emails are stored. The clients download their email from the MUA. The MUA may not even handle outgoing mail for the clients – if so, even headers from an email sent from this domain may only show you the server that sends email, not the one that stores them.

I have checked the document dumps from the Judiciary Committee and none that I can find have email headers or even email addresses. They are all scans of printouts in a “presentable” format with none of the needed technical stuff showing.

This is really a load of crap.

A look at ANY email delivered to this domain or even the email settings for a client computer of this domain will tell you what server stores the emails.

Okay, so if SmarTech is just a the go-between, which company has physical possession of all those backup tapes?

Allow me to offer two suggestions:

1. A company owned by Bush family friend Mercer Reynolds. One of his tech firms merged with SmartTech. See the expanded version of my first piece on this scandal, here. (The expanded version was published on another site; the Cannonfire version did not discuss Reynolds.)

2. A company owned by Michael L. Connell; see here.

UPDATE 3: Those cocky guys at Coptix bray about their photo retouch work and show how it was done. They also say that the photo was reprinted on this site, which is not true (although I did provide a link to the Corrente site). The bug-eyed monster shot was a nifty touch, fellows. I know a thing or two about Photoshop myself, and now that I look at the piece more closely, the overly dark arm shadow does seem wrong. It is fitting, Josiah, that you chose a restaurant scene -- because, as you may have heard, certain dishes are best served cold.

Be seeing you!