GG to Col. Boylan:

Col. Boylan, Could you just confirm that this email [email forwarded] is authentic, written by and sent from you?Thanks -

Glenn Greenwald

Col. Boylan to GG:

Glenn,Interesting email and no. Why do you ask?

Steven

GG to Col. Boylan:

Only because it comes from your email address, is written in your name, and bears all of the same distinguishing features as the last emails you sent to me:steven.boylan@iraq.centcom.mil

Did you really not notice that?

Col. Boylan to GG:

Well, since they were on the web, not surprising. If you do a search on the web, you will also see that I have been a victim of identity theft of late in Vermont and at least two other places trying to rent property and that person identified themselves as me and thankfully the State Police were able to get in touch with me about it while I am sitting here in Baghdad.

CommentGuy,
If it is difficult to prove where such an email routing breach could have occured, could it be easier to prove that the email received by Greenwald wasn’t the same message sent from Col. Boylan’s address…if that was the case?

For most any secure mail relay server there may be a person who can login and access the mail server itself and could fudge with the emails. But to keep from having that one person from playing with things they usually locate the logs for the mail program on a different server and don’t allow the person who accesses the mail server to have access to the log server thus he can remove the entries related to his fussing with the email server from the logs to cover his tracks.

The weak point is if the mail server guy and the log server guy are good buds they could work together to do an undetectable insert and no body would be the wiser.

The only way you can insure that an email is from a specific person is to have the email digitally signed with a valid certificate or as another possibility to send it encrypted with a program similar to pgp which will have the public key as part of the email body info and then the salon server would have to retrieve the other half of the key from any of the pgp escrow servers to decrypt the email which would validate the sender.

Since that did not happen here there is almost no way to prove it with 100% assurance.

The point of saying all that is that there are at least 20 or more hops from Iraq to NYC. Any where along the path if someone was on the inside and had it in for someone he considered to be a dork when he saw this flap boiling up could have inserted a bogus email as a man in the middle attack or like I said before a script kiddie with the right software could easily dump it in at a DC wifi spot with an anonymous login.

All this to write a mildly-damaging letter that Boylan could just deny writing.

That is quite a conspiracy theory for such a small payoff.

Here’s my theory: Boylan is a rude military spin doctor who got angry and fired off an e-mail that he regretted having written. Instead of manning up, he decided to deny having written it.

I’m trying to remember if secretaries have access to Colonel email (if Colonel’s have secretaries I guess is what I’m getting at.)

My first reaction was … no PA wrote this. If he did … he’s a really bad PA and probably won’t get to keep his job.

First of all, as a PA he’s not really allowed to write emails like that. And as a Colonel he would know better.

If he did write that email, he would not have listed his name and rank at the bottom of the email. If he did do that, he’s stupid. He will get into trouble for writing something like that.

Unfortunately for the military, they fight for freedom of speech but they do not have it. My father can not comment on websites, issues, write letters, anything. Occasionally, he’ll write me and ask me to post something on something. Or my mom will do it. But as an officer in the military, they are severely discouraged from writing letters like the one in question.

As long as I can find an open server any where in the chain to accept the email where I am faking the header info I am home free unless someone takes the effort to ask each mailer in the chain it went through to check their logs against the mail header data.

Agreed, in theory, but did you look at the headers? It went from Centcom to Salon to Greenwald.

Received: from 02exbhizn02.iraq.centcom.mil (02exbhizn02.iraq.centcom.mil [214.13.200.111]) by rich.salon.com

That would require a breach in Salon’s mail server or Centcom’s mail server. There are no other points of injection.

Also consider that the signature was the same. Consider that the writing style was the same (this may be the hardest thing to spoof!)

Occam’s razor says that Boylan wrote the e-mail and now he’s lying because it makes him look bad. Note how he’s rude and evasive in his replies. He’s cornered, and he’s losing his cool.