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."

Comments

Unless we know the number of non-dupes.

[Anonymous Coward]

... then we still don't know how plausible it is that they reviewed XXXX number of emails in 11 days, after taking months to review 80,000 emails before.

Re:Unless we know the number of non-dupes.

[Kichigai Mentat]

Because each email had to go through several Federal agencies to have any retroactively classified information redacted before they could be publicly released.

In this case we have a trove of emails . Also note what Comey said: he said that this doesn't change their decision with regards to recommending to indict Clinton or not, so that means once they hit this point all they have to do is figure out if Clinton had sent any of the remainder of the emails, which is easily accomplished with a simple search.

Badda bing, easy work.

Re:Unless we know the number of non-dupes.

[alvinrod]

Presumably part of the difficulty with solving any problem the first time is figuring out a good method to use, implementing it, and testing to make sure it works properly. Once you've solved that problem, it becomes much easier to do it a second time because you know what needs to be done and people have experience doing it so it goes considerably faster. That isn't proof that they were actually capable of going through everything, but if we want to think about it logically, the outcome was always going to be the same.

First of all, if someone actually had something really damning they would have released it months ago if they had any intention of going public at all. Anything that's immediately and undeniably legally actionable gives you perfect blackmail material that can be used to control the president of the United States. No one in a position to collect that kind of information (blackmail) is going to waste that kind of opportunity. If you want to argue that someone who might have said information wants to release it to cause disarray, there's a more compelling argument that disarray is maximized if you only release the data some time after a Clinton victory.

It's therefore safe to assume that there's no silver bullet in the new data dump to start with and that it only contains more of the same, which the FBI have already said isn't going to get anyone to indict Clinton, even though they've essentially stated she's been pretty duplicitous about the whole thing. She's hardly the only corrupt person in D.C. and it's more likely than not if she were to go down, she could take a lot of other people with her on both sides of the isle. As much as the Republicans love talking about how corrupt she is, exposing it probably slits many of their own throats in the process. Elections are basically a trial in the court of public opinion anyways, so making swing voters think Hillary is guilty is effectively just as good as legally proving it.

Re:Unless we know the number of non-dupes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which once again begs the question why Comey broke the FBI guidelines to not insert himself in the middle of the political process, especially so close to the election. His ass should be canned for throwing all that red meat to the Trump campaign 11 days before the election as Clinton was pulling away in the polls. How do you defend yourself against innuendo from the FBI?

FOX news seemed to be getting daily updates on how Clinton was going to jail immediately after the election from an unnamed FBI source. They would report them in primetime with great fanfare and then retract them Friday morning where the viewership is much smaller with no fanfare.

The FBI is a mess right now.

Re:Unless we know the number of non-dupes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump nuked his campaign when the "grab them by the pussy" thing hit the news cycle. Clinton, seeing that there was no time for the Republicans to scrounge a new candidate, ran with it and hit Trump hard. So Trump responded with the whole "rigged election" schtick. Hillary responded by having a close aide with a sketchy husband release a bunch more inert stuff, then called in a favor with Comey to publicize it. Now, Trump can't call the election "rigged" without looking like a complete twit. And a week later, the all-clear signal comes from Comey, just in time for the election. Hillary 2016.

Is it fact? I have no idea. Is it farfetched? Not terribly. Hillary is a politician with a lot of allies. She could probably pull off something of this caliber. Maybe she did.

(BTW, I'm not voting because I have no confidence in the US government or any other government. I really could not give less of a crap who wins tomorrow.)

Re:Unless we know the number of non-dupes.

[J053]

Comey probably knew about the (apparent) cell in the NY FBI office who have a hard-on about HRC, and knew they were going to leak something, so he decided to get out in front of it with his letter to Congress. I do give him some credit for his subsequent letter yesterday, but it would have been better IMO if he had shut up and let the leaks happen, then come down like a ton of bricks on the leakers.

Re:RegEx, it's a hell of a drug.

[MightyMartian]

The problem is that if de-duping is easy, that means that it could be quickly ascertained if the new mail dump had anything significant in it, which means there was only a brief period of time in which some fantastical new load of Clinton-destroying emails would be found, and if that were the case, then the Trump camp was literally hanging on to a false hope.

So now we have some of the most tech savvy people on the Internet pretending they're simpering halfwits with know technical know-how at all, just so they can keep a faint hope alive. I guess they can keep imagining Clinton impeachment, though they won't have the votes in the Senate, and it may turn out they don't even have the votes in the Senate to do much else but filibuster Clinton nominees.

Re:Ignorance is bold

[bobbied]

You know, it would be refreshing if folks could just understand all of what Trump is saying for what it is.. Politics... You may consider yourself smart because you can see how technically stupid what he's saying is, but let's not forget the other major candidate's stupidity either "Wipe it? You mean with a cloth?" when she clearly knew better. Surely there is plenty of duplicity to go around here. Trump is just saying stuff that he thinks appeals to folks who might be willing to vote for him, and you have to admit that for the FBI this was pretty fast. At this point, with the election nearly here and the obviously narrow margins by which this race will be decided, you say what you need to, and Clinton (and her campaigners) are doing this too.

Trump may not be all that clued in on technology or how a review of 650K E-mail's may have actually taken place in such a short time, but for not being a career politician he's obviously a very quick study. Just think, it was less than a month ago he was doing 3AM twitter wars about stupid stuff and now he's going to win or loose by the skin of his teeth. Not bad...Well Better than I expected anyway...

Re:Drone Snowden's ass already

[MightyMartian]

Not really. I thought Occupy was an absurd waste of time, and I thought the whole "1%er" nonsense was simply contrived. Not that I don't want to see the wealthy made more accountable, and large corporations brought more firmly under the rule of law, but to imagine a guy like Trump, whose business history has been one of screwing over investors, using every trick in the book to evade taxes, and who is, by definition, one of the Elite, was going to bring the "1%ers" to bear was so ludicrous and laughable that I just have to imagine that most of his supporters are either complete morons or were more likely hoping he'd be so fucking awful that he'd bring the system down (which is absurd, the Founding Fathers built the system to deal with even the most terrible Presidents).

Re:But

[quantaman]

That still doesn't explain why the FBI boasted that they had 400+ agents working for many months for 33,000 emails and yet magically can go through 650k in just a few days. Either they were lying before, or they are lying now.

There's a third explanation. You don't understand how computers and basic problem solving works.

The 400+ agent review involved someone personally reading and evaluating every email.

The 650k email review involved extracting the small subset of email to/from Clinton, extracting the even smaller subset of emails not in their previous already-reviewed sample, and then reviewing those.

That may have been as simple as going through a few hundred personal emails that weren't part of the initial dump.

Re:We know because we're DOING it!

[Xenographic]

So tell me, how are there 650 dupes of 33k emails? I've yet to see proof that these are duplicates.

We've found more than just "suspicious" stuff if you read /r/wikileaks.