Debating About the FBI’s Review of 650,000 Weiner Laptop Emails

The following debate originally took place on my Facebook wall, upon my post, “Super-Human FBI Manages to Review 650,000 Weiner Laptop Emails in a Mere 691,200 Seconds!“…

Rayn: FBI Clears Clinton — Again:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/06/politics/comey-tells-congress-fbi-has-not-changed-conclusions/index.html

As a Twitter post I read earlier today noted: “the FBI had 8 days to review 650,000 emails on Weiner’s laptop. There are 691,200 seconds in 8 days.”

Wow! That’s some astonishing detective work! Great job! 😉

Teddy C.: They had computer programs in place to review the emails, flag the duplicates from the previous investigation, flag the personal conversations, and drill down to the actual new content that needed review. No matter what the context is, this amount of data wouldn’t be processed without some sort of automation in place.

Micah W.: Exactly. Not all 650,000 of those were to or from Hillary. In fact, what I read was that fewer than 1,000 were. The 650,000 line was picked up by a media eager to make this a horse race of an election. More money in it for them that way.

Rayn: On November 3rd, CNN reported that the FBI found “emails related to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state on [Weiner’s] laptop,” and noted that the emails “are n̲o̲t̲ ̲d̲u̲p̲l̲i̲c̲a̲t̲e̲s̲ of emails found on Secretary Clinton’s private server.”

FBI Finds Emails Related to Clinton’s State Department Tenure:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-finds-emails-related-to-hillary-clintons-state-department-tenure/

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Meanwhile, both the first and second FBI investigation of Clinton actually relate to emails sent through Clinton’s private server, and use of unsecured emails to send and receive secured information. This, of course, includes emails sent by members of her staff, such as Weiner’s estranged wife, Huma Abedin. You can see examples of this for yourself within this New York Times article, relating to the last batch of 30,000 Clinton emails released by the FBI. Note the name of the sender within the two featured emails pictured in the article. It is none other than Huma Abedin:

Last Batch of Hillary Clinton’s Emails Is Released:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/01/us/politics/last-batch-of-hillary-clintons-emails-is-released.html

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With this in mind, recognize the fact that the New York Time reported that “a senior law enforcement official said that tens of thousands of emails belonging to Ms. Abedin were on Mr. Weiner’s laptop.”

Emails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton’s Campaign:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/us/politics/fbi-hillary-clinton-email.html

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Now, factor in the reality that during the last Clinton investigation, the FBI took almost an entire year to investigate approximately 30,000+ emails handed over by Clinton:

What We Know About the Investigation Into Hillary Clinton’s Private Email Server:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/27/us/politics/what-we-know-about-hillary-clintons-private-email-server.html

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Finally, understand that relying solely on computer algorithms to process the 650,000 emails in Weiner’s laptop, instead of using actual investigators, does not qualify as a legitimate investigation practice, considering the fact that pseudonym emails addresses were discovered as being used during the last investigation…

Obama Used a Pseudonym When Emailing Hillary Clinton While She Was at the US State Department:
http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-used-a-pseudonym-while-emailing-hillary-clinton-while-she-was-at-the-us-state-department-2016-9

(By the way, as just a point of interest, the FBI has not actually made any statement about what method they used to sort through the 650,000 emails on Weiner’s laptop. As the article below states, “The FBI declined WIRED’s request for more information about how it performed its week-long search.”

https://www.wired.com/2016/11/yes-donald-trump-fbi-can-vet-650000-emails-eight-days/ )

Teddy C.: I would trust an algorithm more than a human to accurately process that many records. Humans make mistakes. Also people in IT are lazy. That is why we have automation. When this investigation began, they probably started from scratch. They probably built various tools to deal with the data and kept notes. They likely anticipated more emails would be investigated and set things up to be reusable. Manually processing this data would be a nightmare. I am saying all this without any regard to the political context. This is just how people in IT work with big data sets.

Rayn: Trust what you want, but as I wrote above… “understand that relying solely on computer algorithms to process the 650,000 emails in Weiner’s laptop, instead of using actual investigators, does not qualify as a legitimate investigation practice, considering the fact that pseudonym emails addresses were discovered as being used during the last investigation…

Obama Used a Pseudonym When Emailing Hillary Clinton While She Was at the US State Department:
http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-used-a-pseudonym-while-emailing-hillary-clinton-while-she-was-at-the-us-state-department-2016-9

Nelson E.: Budowski of LA Progressive News Gives Tips to Podesta About Clinton Affiliations with Peloski:
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/55311#efmAAGACTAD-AIBAIDALp

Nelson E.: check out how fucked up this shit is

Nelson E.: If you are speaking in code , the algorithm isnt going to pick up shit