Delete Does Not Mean Delete

It is amusing to see the political chattering classes talk about the issue concerning Hillary Clinton’s email and where it was stored. While the requirement is that all government emails on any personal account are supposed to be uploaded to a government server for backup, history, and transparency because the majority of the emails will become unclassified and subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
Let me be clear, Secretary Clinton did not break any law; she simply created an issue for her impending campaign around trust and judgment. Why are people up in arms about her “dark” or private server? Delete does not mean delete.
The federal regulation states “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.” Secretary Clinton as the head of the State Department was responsible for creating and preserving the email records. Good, bad, or indifferent, Secretary Clinton made the determination that she was allowed to have a private server to make email management more “convenient.” She has complied fully with regulation, but has created an issue for her detractors to imply she is hiding something.
The 55,000 emails that Secretary Clinton has uploaded from her private server or given to the State Department are those which she determined to be work related emails. The Clinton detractors and press are yelling “we don’t know what Secretary Clinton deleted before she turned over the emails.” Exactly.
What the detractors are really saying is delete does not mean delete. Had Secretary Clinton maintained the email on an email system maintained by the government, there would be an audit trail of all the “personal” emails that Secretary Clinton deleted and the records could be retrieved from back-up copies of the emails maintained as part of a disaster recovery or business continuity plan.
A disaster recovery plan is devised to recover electronic information in the event of a natural or human induced disaster. For example, after Hurricane Katrina many companies with disaster recovery plans were able to recover their data because copies of the information were stored off site and therefore could be completely recovered. The importance of disaster recovery or business continuity plans is that an organization can recover data that has been lost or deleted by rebuilding the system. For example, an IT director can say let’s rebuild the system from March 1, 2014. Then through the back-up data get a look at exactly what the system looked like on March 1, 2, 3, you get the idea; you can recover each day’s transactions to see exactly what each day looked like until you arrive at the last day that data was backed up, say March 10, 2015.
Why is this important? Delete does not mean delete. All emails that may have been deleted are kept in back-up copies of the information that is preserved for disaster recovery or business continuity reasons. That means if Clinton had preserved her email on a government server even the “personal” emails that she deleted could be recovered. Her detractors know that and so does the Secretary. What Secretary Clinton has done is create a situation where her deleted emails cannot be recovered or accessed. If delete meant delete than what difference would it make that Clinton deleted the emails on a private server or a government server? The net result would be that the State Department would get the same set of undeleted emails. The problem for many Republicans and Clinton detractors is that they cannot take a peek at what was deleted, e.g., a list of the deleted emails, or simply recover every deleted email by performing disaster recovery; something easy to do from a government maintained server but not so much from Clinton’s private server which she has to allow access to.
The problem that many have is that while Clinton has adhered to the rules, they believe that she has not adhered to the spirit of the regulations. The problem with the concept of the spirit of the law is that it is dependent upon what court is making the ruling. Should it be Secretary Clinton, the Republicans, the Democrats or the press? Ultimately, it will likely be the Supreme Court of public opinion; you.