News International ordered the mass deletion of emails from its servers several times. Is there anything odd about this?
HCL Limited has told the House of Commons home affairs select committee that since May of last year it deleted "hundreds of thousands of emails on a total of nine occasions" from News International's computer servers. It said, though, that it was aware of "nothing which appeared abnormal, untoward or inconsistent with its contractual role". Keith Vaz, the committee chairman, has indicated that he wants to know more about this.
HCL is an India-based IT firm, which manages NI's email system. It doesn't hold or store the NI data; it simply manages the systems, remotely. (It sets out details of its precise responsibilities in the letter to Keith Vaz, the committee chairman.)
What do companies that are hired to oversee 'live emails' do?
Most companies don't need the hassle of managing their email and other computer systems. It's the sort of job that is best done by experts, and the internet means that you don't have to be in the same building – or even continent – as a computer to control it.
That has created a huge business for companies offering "outsourcing" of email and other systems management. You tell them where your systems are, and they will provide an agreed level of service for you, making sure – for example – that your emails don't fill up the storage on the servers, and guaranteeing that any interruption is limited to, say, less than an hour. That function is handled from HCL's headquarters in India, where skilled staff are plentiful but pay is lower than it would be in the UK. HCL helped with in-house support of the email service, which it could do by controlling the systems via the internet.
From time to time, the emails on the "live" system (going back about 15 days) would be copied off to an archive. In the past, such archives would use tape-based systems, but hard drives are cheap and commonly used now. The archiving system was provided by another company, which HCL and NI have not yet named.
Can you really delete emails or do they always survive somewhere?
You can delete emails from the sender's or receiver's machine, but if one of those is outside the organisation that's trying to delete the emails, deleting the "sent" version won't get rid of the "received" version. (It might make it hard to track down, of course.) Inside the organisation, the archiving system means that almost anything more than 15 days old will have been stored somewhere. In addition, newer emails will be copied onto a temporary archive as they travel through the system (either arriving, leaving or travelling through the company): this means that if there is a catastrophic failure of the email server, no work is lost.
Between the 15-day archive backup and the temporary backup, it's almost impossible for an email to vanish forever. For any message, that would require reaching into backups and getting rid of the relevant part of an email conversation – not easy, since modern emails use "threading", which would indicate where part of a conversation had been deleted – or the whole of it. Modern forensic systems can map out email conversations by the thread "headers" and show any gaps or inconsistencies.
So deleting an email forever requires special access to the email system, which would be flagged at a high level by the company managing the systems. Difficult? Very. Impossible? Not completely.
Is it unusual to be asked to delete huge numbers of emails?
HCL cites examples of what it was asked to delete: email "boxes" of users who had left (HCL decided not to as they weren't affecting the system); 200,000 "delivery failure" messages generated by misaddressed emails (these were deleted by someone else); a "public folder" of older emails by a user who "didn't need them" any more; 21,000 outgoing emails that were "stuck" in the email server; deletion of emails when moving from an older version of Microsoft Exchange to a newer one; and so on. Such requests aren't unusual, because large organisations generate and deal with large amounts of email, and things do go wrong with it – which is why you need experts looking after it.
The challenge, though, is spotting when a deletion of something like a public folder is requested because it really isn't needed – and when there's some different motive. But an outsourcing company such as HCL wouldn't be expected to know that. Which may be why it has referred further questions back to NI.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/02/news-international-email-deletions
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