The head of the Office of Special Counsel who is currently leading an investigation into allegations against Karl Rove is taking fire over allegations that he improperly and illegally disposed of documents and files. Since this is the sort of nonsense that only makes sense if you live inside the Ultimate RDF generator (i.e., inside the Beltway), I'll take a moment and break things down.

The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) is an independent federal agency tasked with protecting the rights of whistleblowers or other complainants that work for the federal government, investigating whether or not government employees have properly followed restrictions on their political activity, and defending the reemployment rights of returning war veterans.

On April 23, 2007, Scott Bloch, the head of the OSC, launched a wide investigation into the political activities of Karl Rove. Allegedly, Rove, as well as other White House aides, had violated federal law by giving partisan political presentations to government employees that explicitly encouraged them to find ways to support Republican candidates. The investigation is ongoing.

Scott Bloch, however, hasn't risen to his current position without controversies of his own. Although no findings of fact have been released as of this writing, Bloch has been under investigation since 2005 for improperly dismissing issues brought to the OSC's attention by whistleblowers and then failing to protect said employees from retaliation.

Where things get interesting from a technical standpoint is when Bloch contacted an outside company, Geeks on Call, for help with a technical issue nearly a year ago. Bloch claims that he believed his computer was infected with a virus that was corrupting or deleting his files. According to the Geeks on Call receipt, technicians visited Bloch and performed various services—including what the company refers to as a seven-level hard drive wipe.

A seven-level wipe? As you may know, simply deleting data off a drive or performing a high-level format does very little to prevent data from being recovered off the drive in question by experts. There are programs and utilities that overwrite data on the drive with random patterns, making it more difficult to recover—but not necessarily impossible.

A seven-level wipe program (such as the one used on Bloch's system) would overwrite an entire hard drive with randomized ones and zeros, but would go through the entire process seven times, thus theoretically eliminating any hope of restoring the original data. Paying for such a procedure doesn't exactly jive with virus removal, and the Washington Post states that Bloch also scrubbed the laptops of two of his aides in a similar fashion.

It's impossible to know whether these new investigative findings against Bloch are politically motivated or not, and the ongoing investigation into his behavior has yet to produce conclusive evidence against him. At the same time, however, the government does have strict rules and policies in place regarding how information is to be stored, archived, and deleted. Attempting to irrevocably delete the data on his hard drive may have prevented certain materials from becoming public (assuming no backup copies exist), but doing so only raises questions about what, if anything, Bloch might have been trying to protect—and why a virus would require such a thorough hard drive wipe in the first place. Given that there's no reasonable excuse for wiping a drive in such a fashion for the ailments Bloch claimed to have had, one of two things appears to have happened here: either Bloch was taken to the cleaners by Geeks on Call, or Bloch is covering something up.