"You can't erase e-mails, not today."

Yesterday evening, Slate.com recycled an old post discussed the deletion of files from computers. This was published in response to Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) charging that the Republican Party's e-mail system could not permanently erase e-mails. Leahy: "You can't erase e-mails, not today." Presumably, they're using Microsoft Exchange to handle their e-mail. Microsoft Exchange Server is by the moist likely e-mail server used.

The Slate article with an old story - Robert Johnson, former publisher of Newsday, who was indicted for possession of child pornography. He tried to use a program to clean out his desktop computer's local hard drive to conceal illegal material. The program failed and forensic tech experts were able to recover the files on his hard drive. The Slate article does a pretty good job explaining how this works.

What it doesn't do, however, in address anything even remotely relevant to the situation at hand.

Certainly, the basics are the same -- a computer has the information which is then downloaded to a hard drive. The hard drive, being magnetic media, will retain an "image" of previous data recorded to it so that even if it is erased and written-over once or perhaps twice, the prior data is possibly recoverable using sophisticated means. Other than that, however, there's nearly no similarity.

First of all, the type of file used as an example in the Slate article is completely different. Exchange stores e-mails as a database, which means that the e-mails are stored inside of a file itself and the data is moved around, resorted, and reordered on a continual basis as the database keeps itself in a neat, tidy order. So, where a single movie file would stay the same and sit on a hard drive, an e-mail database is constantly changing. The data for each e-mail is moved around as the database resorts itself to new data coming in, data being reorganized, or data being deleted. If an e-mail is deleted from the database, the space where the e-mail resided is going to be reused much more quickly and much more frequently than on a desktop hard drive. Every time the data is overwritten, this degrades the shadow of the previous information at that location. On a database which is being constantly written and rewritten, a deleted e-mail is likely to have been overwritten so often that trying to lift a shadow of the data is impossible.

Secondly, and much more importantly, the GOP is likely using an encrypted database (depending on their version of Exchange). It doesn't matter if the actual physical image of the file can be recovered, as it's encryption renders it useless.

Also, even if fragments can be recovered, nothing can be done with them. While fragments of a movie file can still be shown, fragments of an encrypted database are worthless. Much of what makes it so easy to find a deleted movie is its size. There's a good chunk of data out there. When you only need a small piece - when, for instance, a few seconds of a movie are enough for a conviction - then having a large source of data is a boon. When any missing data makes the entire data unusable, a large e-mail database is a killer.

Finally, the vast scale of trying to find missing e-mails is ridiculous. Even movie files - on the order of several hundred megabytes for low resolution movies or a few gigabytes for high resolution - are tiny compared to the e-mail database of a large organization. The Republican Party's e-mail database is likely on the order of terabytes, thousands of gigabytes. Even if the entire volume of every e-mail ever run through the system was available for the search and viewing of a well trained data miner, this is a ridiculous amount of data. Trying to weed through this volume of garbage, most of which no doubt are stupid forwards or endless e-mail exchanges trying to set up meetings, is a herculean task.

All this speaks only to the technical feasibility of recovering the several million e-mails the Democrats want. More importantly, though, is the legal justification. Even if the GOP is capable of compliance with the request, they should resist it. Neither Alberto Gonzalez nor any of his subordinates have been charged with a crime and are not suspected of committing a crime. This is clearly the Democrats trying their damnedest to get any member of the Administration to say something under oath which, after mining through millions of e-mails, they find to be incorrect.

I thought the Clinton impeachment took political grandstanding to an all-time low, but the new Democratic tactic of trying to manufacture perjury charges takes it to a ludicrous level. It's a shame that Patrick Leahy didn't work for Richard Nixon. Apparently, instead of breaking into the Watergate, the Administration could have just demanded the Democrats turn over their paperwork and then threaten them with perjury and contempt charges if they didn't comply.