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Edward Snowden Kills Team Trump's Conspiracy Theory By Explaining How The FBI Can Quickly Comb Through Email (geekwire.com)
FBI director James Comey told Congress Sunday that the further investigation of emails related to Hillary Clinton didn't turn up anything that would cause the bureau to recommend charges against her. The FBI had reviewed over 650,000 emails under nine days. Upon hearing this, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supported started to question whether the FBI could go through all those emails in such a short period of time. We will never know for sure until the FBI explains its process to us all (which is unlikely to happen), so people turned to Edward Snowden over the weekend for answers. And Mr. Snowden didn't disappoint. From a report on GeekWire: How easy would it be to cull out the duplicate emails? Outspoken journalist Jeff Jarvis posed that question to Snowden in a tweet, and got a quick response: "Drop non-responsive To:/CC:/BCC:, hash both sets, then subtract those that match. Old laptops could do it in minutes-to-hours."
The point is that Trump's supporters have no solid evidence that there was not enough time to review the emails.
Their extreme view of it is that all 650,000 emails were relevant, and that therefore it should have taken 18 months * 650,000 emails / 80,000 emails = 146.5 months to review them.
The other extreme of possibilities is that the FBI filtered the emails by "To/From 'Hillary Clinton', date within period of being secretary of state, not a duplicate of any of the already reviewed emails" and the output of the filter was 0 emails.
The truth is likely to be somewhere between the two, it's also likely to be towards the very low end of the range.
This seems to be the case. Demographic polling shows him losing the vote with anyone who has more than a High School Diploma.
Rawr
the point is, if they can do it this quickly, why did take some many months the first time they investigated this?
Because the first time, they had tens of thousands of emails, none of which were duplicates of ones they already had, and all of which were sent to or from Hillary Clinton, and all of which were sent during her time in office as Secretary of State. Further, they had to investigate several different avenues for finding more emails.
This time, they have hundreds of thousands of emails, only a small percentage of which were sent to or from hillary clinton, only a small percentage of the remaining were sent while she was in office as secretary of state, only a small percentage of the remaining were not duplicates of existing emails that they had already reviewed. The result is that even though the original number was larger than the original cache they had to search, it's likely that they only had to look through a couple of hundred in the end this time.
I don't get why people are having such a hard time grasping this.
Well, considering that the Trump crowd, including a few posters here who should have the ability to actually write the code to de-dupe a bunch of fucking text files, claiming this was some impossible task that could not be completed in a few days, I think it was useful to have story reminding those poor suffering Trump-support /.ers who seemed to have a major brain fart about some pretty trivial algorithms.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't think anyone can actually understand what he's saying. His supporters pick out the good bits of his word salads and declare him a genius, his opponents pick out the bad bits (not exactly a hard job), and declare him a dangerous idiot. There never really was a serious effort to put out a message or a coherent set of policies. It was just sound bites wrapped up in some sort of bizarre alpha male charisma schtick. Trump was the product of a whole lot of peoples' imaginations. Honestly, up until the last week or so, he hasn't even acted like someone who had the vaguest hope that he'd ever be president, and to wait until the last week of an election before you decide you're going to behave with some self control and dignity indicates to me that you're either a complete idiot or you never seriously wanted the job to begin with.
Trump has wasted a vast number of the GOP's resources, probably harmed a number of downticket races, enough that it's likely the Senate will either be deadlocked or at least marginally in the Democrats' hands, not to mention the damage done to the GOP's efforts in states like Florida and Arizona to reach out to minority voters. And for what? To be a hit with a demographic that the GOP has recognized for eight years now will fade in importance?
Any Republican angry at what will transpire tomorrow shouldn't blame Clinton, they should look at the fools in their own party that put one of the most unsuitable presidential candidates in modern US history in the place he's in right now.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.