For missing White House e-mails, experts offer retrieval tips
April 13, 2007 (Computerworld) -- When an e-mail is deleted, does it really go away?
That's one of the central questions facing congressional investigators who want to know what happened to e-mails sent by White House staffers using unofficial e-mail accounts run by the Republican National Committee.
White House officials said yesterday that many of the e-mails may have been deleted. Experts said today that may not be exactly true.
Whether it's the congressional inquiry into deleted e-mails among White House officials or similar probes of companies entangled legal troubles, there are a host of tools and techniques that can be used to recover and analyze the data left behind.
These computer forensics tools have helped to uncover and restore long trails of information-filled e-mails in corporate scandals, from the demise of Enron Corp. to the pretexting debacle that hit Hewlett-Packard Co. last year. No matter where the information is stored -- or whether it was created by individuals, government agencies or corporate employees -- the methods used to try to recover data are similar.
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