Software:BleachBit

Short description: Free disk space cleaner, privacy manager, and computer system optimizer

BleachBit

Screenshot of the Bleachbit 4.0.0 User Interface on GNOME Shell
Initial release	24 December 2008 (2008-12-24)
Stable release	4.4.2 / December 29, 2021 (2021-12-29)
Written in	Python
Operating system	Microsoft Windows macOS Linux
Size	11.5-12.2 MB (Windows)
Available in	64 languages
Type	Disk cleaner
License	GNU General Public License
Website	www.bleachbit.org

BleachBit is a free and open-source disk space cleaner, privacy manager, and computer system optimizer. The BleachBit source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.

History

BleachBit was first publicly released on 24 December 2008 for Linux systems. The 0.2.1 release created some controversy by suggesting Linux needed a registry cleaner.

Version 0.4.0 introduced CleanerML, a standards-based markup language for writing new cleaners. On May 29, 2009, BleachBit version 0.5.0 added support for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. On September 16, 2009, version 0.6.4 introduced command-line interface support.

Technology

BleachBit is written in the Python programming language and uses PyGTK.

Most of BleachBit's cleaners are written in CleanerML, an open standard XML-based markup language for writing cleaners. CleanerML deals not only with deleting files, but also executes more specialized actions, such as vacuuming an SQLite database (used, for example, to clean Yum).

BleachBit's file shredder uses only a single, "secure" pass because its developers believe that there is a lack of evidence that multiple passes, such as the 35-pass Gutmann method, are more effective. They also assert that multiple passes are significantly slower and may give the user a false sense of security by overshadowing other ways in which privacy may be compromised.

Controversy

Bleachbit was used to erase emails on Hillary Clinton's private server during her time as Secretary of State during the Obama administration. During the summer of 2014, lawyers from the State Department noticed a number of emails from Clinton's personal account, while reviewing documents requested by the House Select Committee on Benghazi. A request by the State Department for additional emails led to negotiations with her lawyers and advisors. In October, the State Department sent letters to Clinton and all previous Secretaries of State back to Madeleine Albright requesting emails and documents related to their work while in office. On December 5, 2014, Clinton lawyers delivered 12 file boxes filled with printed paper containing more than 30,000 emails. Clinton withheld almost 32,000 emails deemed to be of a personal nature. Datto, Inc., which provided data backup service for Clinton's email, agreed to give the FBI the hardware that stored the backups.

As of May 2016, no answer had been provided to the public as to whether 31,000 emails deleted by Hillary Clinton as personal have been or could be recovered.

A March 2, 2015 New York Times article broke the story that the Benghazi panel had discovered that Clinton exclusively used her own private email server rather than a government-issued one throughout her time as Secretary of State, and that her aides took no action to preserve emails sent or received from her personal accounts as required by law. At that point, Clinton announced that she had asked the State Department to release her emails. Some in the media labeled the controversy "emailgate."

In 2014, months prior to public knowledge of the server's existence, Clinton's chief of staff Cheryl Mills and two attorneys worked to identify work-related emails on the server to be archived and preserved for the State Department. Upon completion of this task in December 2014, Mills instructed Clinton's computer services provider, Platte River Networks (PRN), to change the server's retention period to 60 days, allowing 31,830 older personal emails to be automatically deleted from the server, as Clinton had decided she no longer needed them. However, the PRN technician assigned for this task failed to carry it out at that time.

After the existence of the server became publicly known on March 2, 2015, the Select Committee on Benghazi issued a subpoena for Benghazi-related emails two days later. Mills sent an email to PRN on March 9 mentioning the committee's retention request. The PRN technician then had what he described to the FBI as an "oh shit moment," realizing he had not set the personal emails to be deleted as instructed months earlier. The technician then erased the emails using BleachBit sometime between March 25 and 31. Bloomberg News reported in September 2015 that the FBI had recovered some of the deleted emails.

Since this episode, Clinton critics have accused her or her aides of deleting emails that were under subpoena, alleging the server had been "bleached" or "acid-washed" by a "very expensive" process in an effort to destroy evidence, with candidate Donald Trump stating the day before the 2016 election that "Hillary Clinton erased more than 30,000 emails as part of a cover-up." Trump reiterated his position as late as August 2018, asking "Look at the crimes that Clinton did with the emails and she deletes 33,000 emails after she gets a subpoena from Congress, and this Justice Department does nothing about it?"

In August 2016, Republican U.S. Congressman Trey Gowdy announced that he had seen notes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), taken during an investigation of Clinton's emails, that stated that her staff had used BleachBit in order to delete tens of thousands of emails on her private server. Subsequently, then presidential nominee Donald Trump claimed Clinton had “acid washed” and “bleached” her emails, calling it “an expensive process.”

After the announcement, BleachBit's company website reportedly received increased traffic. In October 2016, the FBI released edited documents from their Clinton email investigation.

See also

• AVG PC TuneUp
• Desktop Cleanup Wizard
• Disk Cleanup
• Eraser
• CCleaner
• Norton Utilities