Posted on 11/17/2012 10:15:51 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
A House committee has launched an investigation into whether EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used an email alias to try to hide correspondence from open-government requests and her agency’s own internal watchdog — something that Republican lawmakers said could run afoul of the law.
The science committee has asked Ms. Jackson to turn over all information related to an email account under the name of “Richard Windsor,” which is one of the aliases identified by a researcher looking into the EPA.
The committee has also asked the White House’s lawyer and EPA’s inspector general to look into the matter and report back by the end of this month, saying that the secret email accounts could have been used to keep key information from official watchdogs as well as the public.
EPA did not respond Friday night to a request for comment.
The researcher who uncovered the “Richard Windsor” alias email, Christopher Horner, has repeatedly battled the administration over its global warming efforts.
Earlier this year he his colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute sued to demand the release of emails from “secondary” accounts from EPA, and cited a memo saying the practice began during the Clinton administration under then-administrator Carol Browner.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
H/T to the Drudge Report.
I wish them luck. But emails can be erased or otherwise destroyed.
Congress needs to hire Gibbs. He, Abby and McGee find out this kind of stuff all the time on NCIS.
“I wish them luck. But emails can be erased or otherwise destroyed.”
It’s not as easy as destroying a hard drive.
If they are stored on a server? simply replace the server, problem of pesky emails solved.
You can bet multiple run, Pro delete programs are running like crazy right now.
Since it's Rats, no questions will be asked about the complete deletes with no info left on hard drives.
Count on it.
Not really. “Dick Windsor” has been outed. The email account is now a game for internet guru’s.
How long before a EPA Data Center mysteriously goes up in smoke?
All e-mails leave the US. That way all e-mails are subject to search without a warrant.
I’ll bet google still has copies .
Nothing will come of this and the public won’t hear about it.
The Energy Prevention Agency needs to be shut down.
Idiots.
“Darrell Issa, Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told the Wall Street Journal ‘If all White House officials were following rules prohibiting the use of personal email for official business, there would simply be no sensitive information to find. ‘Unfortunately, we know that not everyone at the White House follows those rules and that creates an unnecessary risk.”
You bet and there are many other ways to find those emails.
EPA would have to fine itself for the carbon emissions.
What are they hiding?
Not forever and if our name is Ms. Jackson I am sure you don’t have a clue as to how to accomplish this
Bonehead needs to go and we need a unrelenting gadger to take his place if we are even going to have a fighting chance.
The bigger problem is that having found out about these accounts - months ago - nobody sent a cop with handcuffs to put people into jail for abuse of their power as government employee. If the congress “worked” avoding the law would not look like a “who cares” situataion, it would like like - “if you do this you end your life as a gainfully employed memember of society.” Heck, most of the people do bad things and go to work on wall street or in Media for twice their goverment pay. Make government effective and end this crap.
Well, Boehner is going to be Speaker in the next Congress. There is no effective challenge to him so we will once again be faced with the question if there is any hope for conservatives staying in the GOP.
The speaker has a mandate, equal to or perhaps greater than the President.
Lisa Jackson. Another member of Obama’s mocha mafia making war on America’s private sector producers who just happen to be.....white guys (for the most part, some Asians and Hispanics) I have a nephew in oil and gas. I’m sure there are zero blacks in his office but a few Asians crunching numbers. The petro-engineering department at his university was full of Asians with Indians and Chinese the most. I am sure there are lots Mexicans etc humping it in the oil and gas fields doing rough stuff, the physical work. Lots of Mexicans/Hispanics in our farm sector so I give them credit for producing. In my minds eye I can’t see very many blacks in agriculture or energy production
They’re hiding the fact that they are Legislating, appropriating and governing beyond the scope of their agency.
Is the server backed up? Is the server on site? Can key emails be found on the receiving server?
And if they are password protected/encrypted? You still can not get to them and therefore they simply do not exist.
EPA has Secrets? Have they elevated themselves to also have some kind of National Security function?
TT
My understanding was it was fake government email accounts. Probably not encrypted or encrypted using a fake PKI token. If the message still exists somewhere, it’s likely the court can get the private and the public key.
Global Warming on Free Republic
Not sure what you mean by fake. There are two or more private keys involved. One for the sender so the sender can store an encrypted copy in the sent mailbox. Another for each recipient who uses it to decrypt the email which the sender encrypted with the recipient's public key (public keys are useless to a court). But most private keys are stored in the person's OS and have to be exported to a file to be given to a court. They can be marked as nonexportable when created in which case they cannot be given to a court.
Sorry, I should say the sender’s private key is so the sender can decrypt the email in the sent box (it was encrypted with the sender’s public key).
Fake tokens was a bad way to put it - I was thinking about the alt tokens that admins have, but those aren’t linked to email.
Each email account has a set of keys, one public, one private. The public keys are published with the address listings. All the private keys are centrally (securely*) stored by the issuing authority. You might have a password on your Outlook pst folder, but that’s the extent of the protection. (It’s probably something easily cracked.)
Someone might have two current sets of keys - they might have one set for a personal account and one set for an organizational account. Or they might know someone who will set up a bogus account for them, but if they got a set of encryption keys, those keys are centrally held and if the court wants to know what’s in the emails, there is a hight probability they can find out.
My guess is they thought they were cute enough by having the second account and didn’t even bother with the keys, but that’s just my guess.
No. Typically the private key is generated in your browser and the certificate authority signs the public key in a cert request. There are other authentication schemes where a server keeps a private key and sends it to your email client when it is needed, but are not standard PKI.
If you decide to buy an email cert from verisign or someone else, they do not ever touch or see your private key.
DoD must do it differently than Verisign, because I know if I need one of my expired keys to open an old encrypted email, I can go recover it at a certain .mil site. I can see a list of all of the keys I have ever had at that site (back to 2003).
I have done it several times and I help people do it all the time.
But I don't think that would apply to government in general, probably just DoD. Also if some rogue FDA official were covering his/her tracks by encrypting, they certainly would not do it with an escrowed key. They would use a PGP key or a PKI private key that they generate and hang on to (they can also back it up securely, so losing it is not a problem, and thus one of the DoD arguments for escrow is simply a red herring).
She's both Too Big To Fail and a certified member of the looter/moocher class, so she more than qualifies for a Twinkie bailout.
I really think you're still operating under the assumption that we're dealing with smart, tech-savvy people. I have serious doubts. Some of it sounds like they just did government email over personal GMail accounts. These days it might not even take a subpoena to get the info from Google.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.