Most computer users have known since the days of the floppy disk that hitting the delete key doesn't make information on a storage device disappear but merely removes the document name from the content list and allows the user to reuse that space for something else. If the space wasn't overwritten, it was still there.
Apparently Hillary Clinton's aids didn't know that. Washingtonexaminer.com tells us this: Report: FBI said finding deleted Clinton emails 'not very hard'.
Platte River Networks, the technology company that has managed Clinton's server since 2013, said the server was unlikely to contain any useful data after it handed the device over to FBI investigators in August.
But computer experts with the law enforcement agency were able to pull copies of the deleted emails off the server with relative ease, according to a report by the New York Times.
Although the number of personal emails recovered was not immediately clear, the report said FBI investigators could access deleted emails because Clinton's aides may have only made a cursory attempt to purge the records.
In this instance we should probably be grateful for incompetence. Unfortunately, foreign sources have probably taken advantage of it, too. Furthermore, with the increasingly bad news about the hacks on OPM we might be justified in thinking that incompetence is widespread in the government.
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