Only to begin furiously deleting all the posts - just yesterday, mind you - when other Reddit users realized who he was
Dan Calabrese , Bio and Archives--September 21, 2016
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If you don't know the name Paul Combetta, you might simply remember him as Stonetear. That's how he's apparently known both on Reddit and on Etsy, and he's the guy at Platte River Networks who was tasked with trying to wipe Hillary's server clean of all her e-mails after they became the subject of a congressional subpoena.
As you might expect, Hillary neither wanted Combetta to comply with the subpoena nor proceed legally. What she wanted was for him to make sure that no one could trace anything she was doing back to her, which presented him with the unusual challenge of trying to replace Hillary's e-mail with a fake one. How do you do that? Combetta didn't know. So he took to Reddit using his screen name Stonetear to see if anyone could help.
How do we know this? Because Reddit users sniffed it out yesterday. And hilarity ensued:One archived comment from July 24, 2014 – during the same month that the State Department first asked Clinton aide Cheryl Mills to turn over the former secretary of state’s work-related emails from her personal server – shows Reddit user “stonetear” asking others on the site: “Hello all- I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP's (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email… Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?” Multiple Reddit users at the time responded that it was not possible, saying Microsoft does not include an option to change addresses on existing emails because altering them could be used by people to evade court-ordered discovery procedures. One wrote: “[If Microsoft Exchange] allowed this, it could result in major legal issues. There may be ways to hack a solution, but I am not aware of any.” User “stonetear” responded: “The issue is that these emails involve the private email address of someone you'd recognize, and we're trying to replace it with a placeholder address as to not expose it.”
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