We May Not Have Seen the Last of Hillary Clinton’s Deleted Emails

This is truly the age of the zombie — from the more obvious manifestations in the entertainment world to the political dynasties, scandals, illicit transactions and online artifacts that either refuse to be destroyed or rise again with renewed, sinister vigor.

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is currently all too familiar with the online version of this phenomenon, as the hubbub over her use of private emails to conduct State Department business during her tenure as secretary of state has once again come around to haunt her with a scary new twist.

On Saturday, news emerged that the email server that was thought to be “wiped” of its contents, thus ensuring that neither authorities nor the public would access it, might not be lost forever after all.

The Guardian picked up Sunday on The Washington Post’s initial report from the day before:

The company that managed Hillary Clinton’s private email server when she was secretary of state says it has no knowledge that the server was “wiped”.

That could mean more than 30,000 emails Clinton says she deleted from the device could be recovered, according to a report in the Washington Post.

[…] Deleting emails is not the same at wiping a server. Deleted emails often can be recovered from a device that has not been “wiped”, which PC Magazine defines as “a security measure when selling, giving away or retiring a computer. A file wipe completely erases the data from the hard disk”.

If Clinton was, as she has claimed, conducting her online correspondence in a non-sketchy manner, the potential recovery of those emails may not offer the gold mine her opponents are hoping it will. Meanwhile, at least part of what has been pulled out of cyber purgatory has risen to the lyrical level.

–Posted by Kasia Anderson