Yes, Donald Trump, the FBI Can Vet 650,000 Emails in Eight Days

The FBI can review hundreds of thousands of emails in a week, using automated search and filtering tools.

It would be sublime to know what the search words/phases were.

The FBI contends that it has gone through larger blocks of information in a much faster time.

The computer was Weiner's so the emails would be messages sent to or from Clinton or anyone else on the campaign rather than those sent to or from Weiner’s contacts. Simple filtering by “to:” or “from:” could cut out hundreds of thousands of messages.

BI director James Comey has had a rough week or so: First he was accused of rigging the election for Donald Trump when he revealed on October 28 that the FBI was investigating new emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and now he’s accused of rigging it against Trump by revealing today that none of those new emails contained anything that would result in criminal charges. But to hear the Trump campaign tell it, that week sounds even harder for Comey: They seem to imagine that the FBI director spent the intervening days poring over those hundreds of thousands of emails himself, one by one.

“You can’t review 650,000 emails in eight days,” Trump said Sunday in a campaign speech in Michigan hours after Comey’s latest update to Congress came out. “You can’t do it, folks. Hillary Clinton is guilty.” Trump supporter General Michael Flynn did the math on Twitter:

But fortunately for Comey’s eyesight—and for Clinton’s presidential campaign—Trump is wrong: the FBI can review hundreds of thousands of emails in a week, using automated search and filtering tools rather than Flynn’s absurd notion of Comey reading the documents manually. “This is not rocket science,” says Jonathan Zdziarski, a forensics expert who’s consulted for law enforcement and worked as a systems administrator. “Eight days is more than enough time to pull this off in a responsible way.”

One former FBI forensics expert even tells WIRED he’s personally assessed far larger collections of data, far faster. “You can triage a dataset like this in a much shorter amount of time,” says the former agent, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid any political backlash. “We’d routinely collect terabytes of data in a search. I’d know what was important before I left the guy’s house.

In this case in particular, forensics experts say, investigators’ jobs might even be particularly easy: Because the new collection of emails under investigation were taken from the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton Aide Huma Abedin, only a portion of those emails would be messages sent to or from Clinton or anyone else on the campaign rather than those sent to or from Weiner’s contacts. Simple filtering by “to:” or “from:” could cut out hundreds of thousands of messages.

Next, the agents could filter out duplicate emails from those they’d already analyzed in their months-long investigation earlier this year. According to multiple media reports, the vast majority of emails the FBI examined over the last week were, in fact, duplicates. Those copies could be spotted by their message ID, points out Zdziarski, a unique alphanumeric identifier for each email. Or if any duplicate messages somehow had different message IDs—say, because they had been copied into replies or forwarded—the FBI agents could use a forensics tool like Encase or AccessData Forensics Tool Kit to make cryptographic “hashes” of full messages or chunks of them. That hashing process converts portions of text into shorter character strings that uniquely represent the text: running a hash function on that same text will always produce the same short string of characters, but any tiny change in the text produces a different hash string. And that allows a program to quickly compare and match text samples.

www.wired.com...

Where they searching for child porn, or were they searching for corruption. Corruption would have to be hand read. Big spools of yarn. If they were about shutting down corruption they would have already. We've already done half the work for them. I call straw man (we needed a yarn man).

And Santa can deliver toys to all the children in the world in one night...

a reply to: ATSAlex

And Santa can deliver toys to all the children in the world in one night...

If you were the FBI director would you be done too?

The option is ruining the election for the Clintons, some say they are sore losers.

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

Where they searching for child porn, or were they searching for corruption.

They were looking for emails which may have been pertinent to the investigation of Clinton's personal email server. As per Comey's letter of October 28th.

Maybe this automated system is the same reason they seem totally incapable of doing anything in recent years.

it wasn't 650,000 emails they looked through.....but that truth doesn't matter here or to the OP.

Yup, we looked through 650,000 emails, didn't find the any incriminating words..

Just conversations about pizza, spirit cooking, and other weird things that we have no clue about.

In fact, it kind'a read like a weird facebook exchange, but it's Clinton and her people.. So there was no direct intent, so it's all good. Nothing to see here, have a nice day..

Fun things about search filters, they're not intuitive..

If you look for "book" it will only show you things referring to "book", not "a large volume of pages", or "manual" or "written texts".

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

They were searching for emails to/from the Clinton email server I would imagine since that's what the warrant would have been for.

All that would have to be done is to process the headers on sender/recipient to narrow to the relevant emails and then do something like create a hash for each mail and compare those hashes against hashes of the emails already obtained to eliminate dupes.

At that point you'd have every email to/from the Clinton email server that hadn't already been looked at.

650k emails would be from different accounts of course and given Weiner's habits, I imagine most of them could be spam from dating sites, porn sites, whatever.

a reply to: Cygnis

But it is pretty trivial to filter messages to and from a particular email server. Which is what the investigation is/was about.

originally posted by: seasonal
a reply to: ATSAlex

And Santa can deliver toys to all the children in the world in one night...

If you were the FBI director would you be done too?

The option is ruining the election for the Clintons, some say they are sore losers.

Yup, wouldn't wanna hurt someone's feelings; law, morals, and justice be damned.
2nd

a reply to: seasonal

Not just keywords...but whole text pages by the dates, times, sender and recipients. If a duplicate popped up....they just moved on.

We all search online right? Pretty easy to look for something by sender, date, time etc...with a few keywords too thrown in. If they already had it? Its on to the next....

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Cygnis

But it is pretty trivial to filter messages to and from a particular email server. Which is what the investigation is/was about.

Hillary didn't have a .gov address her whole time as Sec. of State. I do believe that was a violation of NARA, which is part of Federal law, unless I am mistaken?

originally posted by: Ohanka
Maybe this automated system is the same reason they seem totally incapable of doing anything in recent years.

Yes and maybe Clinton dudes know all the flag words.

a reply to: theantediluvian

Since we already know the .gov had the 33k emails all along, and did nothing (instead acted like they didn't)... DEAD END. From the ones we do know about, many had to get redacted... DEAD END. Since we know they LIED about each and every little single thing, each step along the way (to the public, to the Congress, etc)...DEAD END.

If they were out for corruption, mishanding state secrets, etc, etc, they had her dead to rights long ago, so what's the point of any of this showboating?

NYPD was involved so they had to make a quick spectacle, by the sound of it.

a reply to: Cygnis

That's why it would be interesting to now what phrases and words the looked for.

a reply to: seasonal

I think the real question here is that since we have also seen some of these emails that do provide plenty of evidence of felony crimes by Hillary, perjury just for one example, is: why they didn't act on it?? Was it the bribes Comey received from the Clinton foundation the reason their FAUX EMAIL evidence search turned up nothing, when common people looking at them have turned up enough evidence for an indictment? or was it the idea that if Comey didn't play ball, he would be dead before sunrise? Or any number of other reasons.

His reasons certainly were not based on any facts of this investigation, that is for certain.

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

Just goes to show that law, and justice are illusions for only the slaves of the country.

Slave being anyone not in the inner circle.

Just like all the other illusions. Control and to keep people in line, while the ones at the top run rampant and do as they please.

a reply to: Cygnis

Hillary didn't have a .gov address her whole time as Sec. of State. I do believe that was a violation of NARA, which is part of Federal law, unless I am mistaken?

You'll have to ask Comey about that. It would seem that he thinks not.

originally posted by: seasonal
a reply to: Cygnis

That's why it would be interesting to now what phrases and words the looked for.

From the sounds of your article, they were only match-making between what they have on file, and what they have on the laptop. Doesn't even sound like they visually looked over the content or intellectually digested any of it.

Reminds me of librarians. They sort thousands of books a day, doesn't mean they know what is written in them.