By David Gewirtz
Anyone with even the slightest understanding of recent American history has heard of Deep Throat, the mysterious figure (now known to be former FBI second-in-command William Mark Felt, Sr.). Felt (a.k.a. Deep Throat) provided insider information and clues to Washington Post investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during their initial investigation of Watergate back in the early 1970s.
It appears we may have our own Deep Throat on our hands, as we continue our investigation into the White House email scandal. After we published our second article, we got an interesting email from someone with a very anonymous Gmail account.
We sent him (or her) back an email, asking for some clarification and specifically asking who he is. The person identified himself as "...one of the researchers with ePluribus Media" and signed his name simply as "Intranets".
This being just too juicy to pass up, we've decided to nickname him "Deep Mail" and publish the information he provided us.
In the past, whenever we've done in-depth coverage of an issue (particularly in our coverage of broadband over powerline last summer), we've found readers who know far more about the topic than we ever could. When they wrote in with useful information on the investigation, we published their reports as an adjunct to our investigation, increasing everyone's knowledge considerably.
Certainly, with the issue of Notes and Exchange servers in the White House, there's no doubt some of you will know far more about this topic than we can here. If you've got valuable information or wish to contribute a non-political, technical article on the topic, please feel free to do so.
In the meantime, we present to you Deep Mail's two letters to us. With the exception of some very limited punctuation fixes, the letters are presented to you in a completely unedited form. Keep in mind that we aren't verifying any claims. Because of some of the more controversial comments in the article, we're obliged to state that the opinions of the author are not necessarily that of OutlookPower or DominoPower magazines, the editors, or ZATZ Publishing.
Deep Mail's first letter
I appreciate other sources looking into the SMARTech stuff, and have been researching this for over a year. I do question why Microsoft people are doing articles when Averbeck and Mike Connell are so closely tied to Microsoft and have at least some influence (see Averbeck press release on product changes incorporated at their request).
It is also of interest that Connell and GovTech actually worked with Bob Ney to get the House.gov infrastructure moved to Microsoft and privatized committee and Rep's webpages. (House.gov was formerly Unix before GovTech and Ney change over to MS).
"Sadly, our source here is anything but objective. So we can't accept ePluribus' rant as independent information."
Just for your information, I don't see ePluribus Media as very liberal, many of the posters there are liberal and cross post their blog stuff there, but the foundation is citizen journalism and the folks who have looked into the SMARTech stuff are science types who also stray away from conspiracies.