Hillary’s server has ‘more than’ just emails

WASHINGTON: Now that federal investigators have Hillary Rodham Clinton’s home email server, they could examine files on her machine that would be more revelatory than the emails themselves.
Clinton last week handed over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) her private server, which she used to send, receive and store emails during her four years while secretary of state. The bureau is holding the machine in protective custody after the intelligence community’s inspector-general raised concerns that classified information had traversed the system.
Questions about her use of the server have shadowed her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Clinton again this weekend repeated a carefully constructed defence of her actions, in that she did not send or receive emails marked classified at the time.
But her emails show some messages she wrote were censored by the State Department for national security reasons before they were publicly released. The government blacked out those messages under a provision of the Freedom of Information Act intended to protect material that had been deemed and properly classified for purposes of national defence or foreign policy.
What hasn’t been released: data that could show how secure her system was, whether someone tried to break in, and who else had accounts on her system.
A lawyer for Platte River Networks, a Colorado-based technology services company that began managing the Clinton server in 2013, said the server was given to the FBI last week.
Indeed, many physical details of the server remain unknown, such as whether its data was backed up. In March, The Associated Press discovered that her server traced back to an internet connection at her home in Chappaqua, New York.
A computer server isn’t a marvel of modern technology. Just like a home desktop, the computer’s data is stored on a hard drive. It’s unclear whether the drive that Clinton used was thoroughly erased before the device was turned over to federal agents.
If it had been, it’s also uncertain whether the FBI could recover the data. Clinton’s lawyer has used a precise term, “wiped,” to describe the deleted emails, but it was not immediately clear whether the server had been wiped. Such a process overwrites deleted content to make it harder or impossible to recover. An FBI spokesman declined to comment.
Investigators who examine her server might find all sorts of information — how it was configured, whether it received necessary security updates to fix vulnerabilities in software, or whether anyone tried to access it without permission.
Running a server is akin to her messages being stored inside an office file cabinet. But while a file cabinet only yields the documents stored inside, a server can also offer information about the use of that data over time: Who had access to the filing cabinet? Did anyone try to pick the lock? Did the owner attempt to alter the files in any way? And who was given keys to the building in the first place?