On Wednesday, November 2, 2016 at 7:51:05 AM UTC-7, rangerssuck wrote:


This is 2016. We have computers. FileLocator Pro just searched my hard drive which contains many hundreds of thousands of emails and found the word "Clinton" in 5,090 emails. It took about 15 minutes for FLP to index, and less than a second to do the search. It can do much more sophisticated searches like "this word and this word near that word" and those searches may take up to two seconds.

My point is that this "investigation" could have been completed in an hour or so, and Comey could have kept his trap shut until he actually had something to say.

The investigation deals with any sensitive information that could have been disclosed
through an office mail router outside the State Department security regime. So, the name 'Clinton'
would be meaningless as a search term. This is investigation of an office full of chatter
(99% meaningless to the investigation) for any small relics. It will take time, and every
statement an FBI agent could make will cause breathless shock and dismay in a few
thousand clickbait headlines.

The real tech enablement going on here isn't the search, it isn't even the mindless flow
of data (650,000 e-mails? forwarded cat pictures, much?), it's the entertainment news
value of repeated high-shock-value distortions which you can read about on
your LCD screen, complete with a column of advertising,

Case in point: the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 leveled towns and claimed
circa 20000 lives, but the Fukushima reactor cleanup (which generated a succession of
relatively minor reports) got much more headline attention, for years afterward.