It doesn’t take the power of the government to tamper with a database log. I assure you that when I said I could alter the post, I also meant the logs. It is a bit stickier with wiki’s since they usually purposefully maintain all updates. In the case of the wiki you have the database log AND the wiki records recording the update, but I know that it can certainly be done by a sysadmin with moderate database skills; e.g. myself.
[I am a computer expert. I do not play one on TV! :]
Yes but computer forensics would uncover what you did in no time....to do what you are doing and leave no trace takes resources well out of most mid level administators leagues.
In some case you would have to alter the PC’s that the data originated from and get rid of whatever back-ups the targeted “user” may have in possesion of. Lot’s of bloggers keep back-ups for the very reason you are talking about. Many PC’s can be examined for those “hidden” windows’ logs and hard drive data that say what was typed and where on the web the “targeted user” had been.
You can alter a data base but there are a host of other things that would need to be altered including records of IP adresses and dates to what IP address had access to what database and so forth...the records of which are stored in other places out side of the database’s storage server that a sys/admin would not access to easily!
Again, the key phrase...LEAVE NO TRACES to what manipulations from the original had been done.