The FBI has been making major headlines over the course of this Presidential Election. First they reviewed and cleared Hillary Clinton of wrong doing in the case of her private email server, then after investigating former congressman Anthony Weiner and finding some emails that needed to be looked at regarding the Hillary Server, the Director of the FBI James Comey stated they were once again looking into whether or not Hillary Clinton did anything wrong.
Since it was just 2 weeks before people would be casting their votes and since people in early voting states were making decisions based on the news of the day, people were fuming over the statement and even started to question the timing.
Donald Trump and his supporters obviously rejoiced in the possibility that their candidate would benefit from this announcement.
Then, FBI Director James Comey once again stated that there was nothing relevant in the 650,000 emails and cleared Hillary for a second time. This announcement was met with outrage from Trump and his supporters who said it was impossible to review that many emails in just 8 days.
Can the FBI Review this many Emails?
The answer is Yes. Obviously the FBI has resources, technology and the team needed to accomplish such a massive search.
You to can run a scan of your emails pretty fast. Open up your favorite email client and in the search field you can simply insert a word or phrase or even To and From followed by an email address and your personal email client can quickly return results.
So if you can do it, obviously one of the largest enforcement agencies can do it and faster with more accurate results. The FBI has access to powerful computers that can process requests significantly faster than your typical home computer can.
The FBI also has access to Professional Coders that can create specialized algorithms specifically made to analyze large datasets. They also have Artificial Intelligence aka AI that can help them with their search.
Combine this with the pressure the media, public, congress and everyone in between, the FBI is not only capable of conducting such a large scale search, they were also very motivated.
So when you hear people say the process is Rigged because there’s no way the FBI can tackle such a challenge, either that person making the statement doesn’t fully understand technology or is blatantly lying trying to create a hostile environment which is extremely irresponsible.
If the FBIÂ couldn’t review this many emails, I would be extremely concerned.