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Author Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0  (Read 1411871 times)

Dostoevsky

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9750 on: November 06, 2016, 07:17:33 pm »

Do you have examples of 'happy birthday' or 'congratulations' being used as cover? Honest curiosity, as I've been trawling through those emails every day for the past few weeks and haven't seen anything quite like that. Admittedly I haven't been searching for the same things other have, most likely, but the closest thing I've found to that is the occasional blank subject line (which happens often enough when people are too lazy/forgetful to add one) or a legitimate 'congratulations' email naturally shifting over to work talk (e.g. "Thanks! By the way...").
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smjjames

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9751 on: November 06, 2016, 07:22:20 pm »

The Pope subtly butts in, heh.

He's entitled to his opinion of course.
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RedKing

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9752 on: November 06, 2016, 07:24:46 pm »

649k of those were just dick pics, guys. He just kept wanting Hillary to see his Chief of Staff.
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Frumple

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9753 on: November 06, 2016, 07:24:54 pm »

650k figure used here.

Aye, but that's the total number of emails on the laptop. From the article (emphasis mine): "Metadata on the device suggests there may be thousands sent to or from the private server that the Democratic nominee used while she was secretary of state." So still potentially a lot, but no one really knows yet the FBI hasn't specified, and since they've now officially closed the investigation I'm forced to assume it wasn't that many. I would assume the vast bulk of that 650k is Weiner's correspondence.
A bit of an overview, for what it's worth to folks interested for whatever reason. Apparently the 650k is from anonymous sources, heh. WSJ broke that bit, but their article on it's behind a paywall so *shrugs* The amount actually relevant to clinton is indeed small by the estimation of just about anyone with two working braincells that has commented on the subject.

Though yeah, to the general discussion as to how hard it would be to sift through even the 650k (nevermind the stuff actually pertinent to the clinton server would be a sliver of that and easy identified for separate consideration), you're talking about an organization that regularly sifts through batches of millions in one go, few days, and little mistake. Folks have had digging through that kind of data down to a science for well over a decade even outside of organizations that have investigation as part of their job description. Few hundred thousand isn't actually a big job.
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WealthyRadish

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9754 on: November 06, 2016, 08:30:52 pm »

No no, that's being confused with the 650 million ISIS terrorists she's letting in every day.
Well, just gone back and edited in the right numbet of 000s to make it million, but you (edit:both!) replied (sort-of-)first.

Don't know about the "every day", but I'll let the original unvarnished (by commentators, at least!) statement stand for itself:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/31/donald-trump/trump-says-clinton-would-bring-650-million-people-/

It's poetic that he made that statement in Greeley, a city in Colorado known for the fun fact of being the most concentrated populated zone of literal bullshit in the state.
« Last Edit: November 06, 2016, 08:33:12 pm by UrbanGiraffe »
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Max™

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9755 on: November 06, 2016, 08:33:03 pm »

Arguing about whether the FBI or just Comey are trying to influence the election ignores that there is no conceivable reason why you would make a press release about a candidate no longer being investigated, and that there are actually legal precedents involved besides the traditional ones about the DoJ staying out of election matters right before it ends.

Comey needs to go get a job at a cable news station if this is what he wants to do, because this isn't his job.
649k of those were just dick pics, guys. He just kept wanting Hillary to see his Chief of Staff.
Underrated joke here.
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alway

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9756 on: November 06, 2016, 08:36:46 pm »

I guess they must have all been duplicate emails or something. It's definitely going to be interesting to see how people react to this, though.

Weren't the FBI initially investigating somewhere in the region of 35k e-mails, whereas the thing that sparked off the recent re-opening was finding 650k e-mails on Weiner's laptop? So at the very most, something like 5% of them could be duplicates. And I believe the FBI specifically mentioned they'd found articles to/from HRC that hadn't been handed over in the original set (despite the subpoena).

To even read 650k e-mails in the time since they 're-opened' the investigation and now, they'd have to have read 50 a minute, non-stop, in the last nine days. I have my doubts about how closely they have scrutinised these new e-mails.

Also on the e-mail note, one trick Podesta and the others used was to reply over the top of old e-mail chains and change the subject to something innocuous like 'Congratulations!' 'Happy birthday!', etc. The replies doing this would often be several months after the last e-mail in the chain. So you can have a chain of ten e-mails that originally had the subject 'Make sure no one finds out about this', but as soon as you get word that your e-mails are going to be looked at, you reply and change the subject to 'Congratulations' and add some twee message about one of the grandkids. To anyone skimming through, that's an unimportant e-mail chain, and it gets ignored.
1. First, Clinton's email server had a heck of a lot more than 35k emails. Probably in the millions, since running the state department is a big deal. 35k is what you get from being a university student who ordered Domino's Pizza online using their email account 10 years prior (I get one email from them every 3-4 days, and similar amounts from other marketing attached to ordering stuff online; that's 1000 emails per decade per source; and so I have 3,000 unread emails in my half decade old student email address that I basically never use). 35,000 was the approximate number not handed over, due to being deemed personal in nature by a third party law firm which sorted through them.

2. Emails are not magical. They do not fly through the ether unassisted on magic carpets of naivety and technological dreams. If an email arrived on this, or any other person's computer, it existed in the email server and existed at the recipient's email server (which could be the same one, or it could be gmail, etc).

This means that unless it was one of the emails deemed personal in nature by the law firm, it was either on the server or THERE WAS A GRAND CONSPIRACY TO DELETE IT. These are the only three options. Either it existed on the server and was a duplicate, or it did not and was deleted either by the law firm as an email of a personal nature or by a GRAND CONSPIRACY. It is very important to note this fact because it means that all non-duplicate emails are either giant thermonuclear stink-bombs or they are personal emails. There will be absolutely zero non-duplicate emails about relevant day-to-day running of things, and any such emails should and would send up red flags.

Likewise, there should be zero modifications to email content, because again, the only reason to find this would be:
A. something which was private, and explained as such (and, again, should be obviously private if a human read the un-modified version). I'm not sure this was actually possible or if the law firm got rid of personal emails on an all-or-nothing basis.
B. something which is a giant thermonuclear stink-bomb involving a GRAND CONSPIRACY.

3. People are not looking at the emails. People are awful at noticing things and do not have a photographic memory of a million emails to ensure they are the same. The emails are primarily being processed by software. Upon acquisition of the emails, this is how they are processed, more or less (or rather, how any sensible person would process them):

A. Emails are imported into a format compatible with FBI software for such cases, as the original set were.

B. A binary diff tool is run to toss out any exact duplicates -- this would throw out all emails which are exact matches of those already processed, checking subject, content, and metadata such as to/from and timestamps. This rules out all emails which are not either personal emails or the result of a GRAND CONSPIRACY.

C: If any emails are left, these are divided amongst investigators to look for any signs of GRAND CONSPIRACY, which includes: Emails that look like they are related to running things/government duties, Emails that do not look like they are of a personal nature.

Because step B rules out all but non-duplicated, personal emails, there should be a very small number of them. Essentially consisting solely of personal matters discussed between those using a Clinton address and this one person. The complete upper bound on the number is 35,000, if you assume that every personal email in the entire organization was a communication with this one person. In reality, it's a tiny fraction of that, because there's only so much banter one person is capable of having with the entire state department.

So by step C, there should only be a few hundred emails at most. Of these, software run during step B makes it blatantly obvious if there are modified emails, and by process of elimination, any new information should be strictly personal in nature. Hand them out to a decent sized room to sift through, and you could have the whole thing wrapped up in a day or two of reading and cross referencing.

This process is not something they've confirmed publicly, to my knowledge, but as a programmer, that's the logical way in which processing this would proceed, and it would be done in under a week if the boss's neck was on the line.
« Last Edit: November 06, 2016, 08:38:58 pm by alway »
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Strife26

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9757 on: November 06, 2016, 08:37:57 pm »

649k of those were just dick pics, guys. He just kept wanting Hillary to see his Chief of Staff.

Ahhh. *that's* why all the Republican types are so interested in them.
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Frumple

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9758 on: November 06, 2016, 08:48:32 pm »

So, a thought. Polls measure opinion, not turnout. I've been reading a bit on how the Latino turnout this election has been incredibly high (at least for early votes), which is something to take into consideration.
It has! Iirc it's something like doubled in florida's miami-dade county, compared to 2012, as an example. Early votes in general are up pretty substantially (that same miami dade has bloody close to doubled total early votes, compared to 2012, too -- it's nearly reached the point the early votes alone match the total votes, early and election day, from 2012), and, of particular note, in some of the battleground states. You're not just seeing unusual latino turnout, you're also seeing unusual independent/NPA turnout, higher than usual major party turnout... basically it's more or less across the board. There's outliers (NC's vote suppression measures have been working pretty well to depress black turnout, ferex, and the hurricane stuff isn't helping), but in general the trend seems to be pretty unusual and relatively unpredicted upticks in turnout, particularly for early voting. Time'll tell for tuesday, but... as I noted earlier, if the trend continues relative to the 2012 numbers, we're seeing patterns that are really bad for the republican party.

As I've seen commented elsewhere, it's looking a fair bit like trump actually has managed to galvanize a base this year. It's just not his. Clinton's ground game doesn't seem to be hurting, either, ha.
« Last Edit: November 06, 2016, 08:50:07 pm by Frumple »
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Frumple

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9759 on: November 06, 2016, 08:53:29 pm »

Early voting numbers are suggesting that, yeah. I've seen plenty of folks note that stuff like 538's numbers (just as a singular example; there's plenty more) are specifically built around assumptions that the current numbers break, ferex, and their results are possibly/probably off because of it.

It's still possible the election day turnout is going to be anomalous, too, or that folks have badly mispegged how actual voting patterns are going to play out relative to polling, but... it's looking increasingly unlikely. E: And again, for all chunks of our media have been trying to play up a horse race narrative, it's not actually been looking likely at all, particularly for a break towards trump.
« Last Edit: November 06, 2016, 08:59:35 pm by Frumple »
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Sergarr

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9760 on: November 06, 2016, 08:58:27 pm »

I'm not very worried about Trump winning, I'm more worried about how many people would heed his calls for revolution this time. It only takes a single person with a gun in a right place to kill one heck of a lot of people, after all...
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smjjames

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9761 on: November 06, 2016, 09:01:02 pm »

It's entirely possible. Indications are that Trump has lost Nevada, however, he might win NH, and Democratic turnout is up in Florida.

Also, things not directly related to the election could throw a wrench in things in Phillidelphia. Namely, a badly timed (or maybe they were hoping to force their hand because of the election, or were hoping for a quick resolution) strike by transit workers could unintentionally suppress turnout by black voters. The city has already filed a motion to suspend the strike for election day.
« Last Edit: November 06, 2016, 09:05:56 pm by smjjames »
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Frumple

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9762 on: November 06, 2016, 09:05:18 pm »

Yeah, just noticed confirmation that the current latino vote in florida (i.e. just early voting, not whatever happens on election day) has surpassed the total turnout for 'em from 2012, election and early. And for all there's something of a republican lean among 'em in a fair number of ways, well. They really don't like trump, and republican support for the guy has soured things for a lot of 'em, from what folks have noticed. That early voting turnout's a factoid that almost certainly has GOP strategists looking at it and just kinda' going, "Well shit."
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Dozebôm Lolumzalìs

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9763 on: November 06, 2016, 09:12:01 pm »

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
I don't really get this. What "law firm"? What "duplicates"?

(Yes, I have been living under a rock. I do not get this whole email thing.)
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alway

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Re: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American (\{mainiac})
« Reply #9764 on: November 06, 2016, 09:42:17 pm »

snip
I don't really get this. What "law firm"? What "duplicates"?

(Yes, I have been living under a rock. I do not get this whole email thing.)
Okay, looking up some sources, I come to find out I was actually wrong and uninformed on the numbers, though the gist is still the same.

So the law firm in question was this: http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202735496784/Law-Firm-Followed-Guidance-on-Emails-Clinton-Lawyer-Tells-Grassley
From some other sources, it looks like it was about 65k-ish emails total, about half personal or otherwise not related to state department business; and it was actually a smaller number of people using it than I thought.

Additionally, the 650,000 figure Covenant posted is actually ridiculously, obviously wrong. Abedin was working for Clinton for less than a decade. This would mean, for the 650,000 figure to be correct, she had to receive an email every 5 minutes from Clinton, every waking moment of every day from the time she woke up to the time she went to sleep. This wouldn't make sense even if Clinton was a stalker devoting every minute of her day to contacting Abedin. Even internet stories about stalkers aren't that absurd.

As for "duplicates," an email *server* does just that: it *serves* emails. When Clinton sends an email to Abedin, the message goes to her email server, which stores it (so you can view your "previously sent" tab regardless of what computer you use). This email server then sends a copy to Abedin's email server, which is probably Gmail, or a similar commercial email server. When Abedin goes to check her emails, her computer requests a copy of her emails from Gmail or whatever she uses, which is then sent to her computer, which saves it locally for offline viewing and to prevent needing to re-download the email every time. As a result, Clinton's computer from which the email was sent has a copy, Clinton's email server has a copy, Abedin's email server has a copy, and any of Abedin's computers which checked the email has a copy. Because they already have Clinton's email server, any emails to or from that server found on any of the other places should all be copies of the same messages.
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