You're misunderstanding how this works.
You can't be blackmailed by someone who has no plausible evidence.
You can't be blackmailed by someone who has no plausible evidence.
People get blackmailed, shamed, hurt and even killed over mere rumors, speculations and suspicions. As long as people believe in something (because something merely look plausible), there's no need for a fancy crypto to prove some machine sent some email. I'd dare to say most people don't even understand what cryptography is and what digital signatures really are (who signs what and what exactly this means).
I'm yet to hear a story of, let's say, a brave dissident who got out of jail because of cryptographic plausible deniability property making their oppressors unable to prove authenticity of some leaked or intercepted correspondence.
Some google employees have direct and indirect access to signing keys or writing emails. Not many, and they have good controls, but still many people with the ability to sign messages.
Not to mention a Trojan infiltration or account takeover, of which thousands (if not millions) a day occur.
The DKIM evidence is, for legal purposes, a good hint but far from proof.
I fail to see how admissibility or lack of it, in a court of law or of public opinion, has anything to do with DKIM+Hunter Biden. Can you elaborate?
I am not sure why the DKIM for all emails were not released, or why this did not catch more media coverage by other news organizations I consider more reliable (like NYT).
From your link:
> The only way the email could have been faked is if someone hacked into Google's servers, found the private key, and used it to reverse engineer the email's DKIM signature, Graham, said.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-fixes-major-gmail-bug-s... is from Aug 2020 and discusses an SPF/DMARC vulnerability that was in Google since forever (and though reported 4 months before public disclosure, was fixed only 7 hours after public disclosure). The last google DKIM bug I'm aware of was in 2012, so I can't counter the specific claim about DKIM with evidence, but the assertion that "the only way to spoof x is to hack and get the private key" is not any absolute truth.
(P.S: I have seen no denial nor confirmation about the authenticity of the Hunter Biden data - only claims of Russian involvement. Make of that what you will. The DKIM is circumstantial data until there is confirmation or denial - especially, as you say, it's not all released).
I am not insinuating any wrongdoing from anyone, just bringing it to your attention, as you claimed to not know about it.
But it does support my thesis that DKIM or no DKIM is not what gives (or doesn't give) any credence to the authenticity (or lack of it) -- here we have a high profile case, with DKIM validation (which a lot of people on this thread cleim "is considered proof by people who don't understand it") and it seems to make no difference even in the court of public opinion - those who accepted it, accpeted it without DKIM, and those who rejected it as russian disinformation, rejected it even with DKIM.
You really couldn't find any? Come on. Did you Google "DKIM Biden"?
I've read literally hundreds of pieces on the hunter biden laptop, about half of them from republican leaning outlets, (I try to keep a balanced diet....) and none of them mentioned DKIM validation.
(For the record: I don't live in the US, I don't watch television, but I do try to keep a balanced news diet)
Evidence was destroyed.
Which is very distinctly different from a passive act of not maintaining evidence of the origin of every single thing. Keep in mind that no data is altered - the equivalent of all collected samples remaining intact.
It's still just as possible to collect email logs, their contents do not magically dissappear. They would have to be actively manipulated by the party which holds the copy that would be provided to the police (either reported to them or confiscated, etc). That same party could already decide to delete the emails or strip signatures and then alter them.
Edit: Removed the word "literally" because it was incorrect and caused distraction from the actual argument.