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White House Tape Recycling Possibly Erased Emails
Pojut points us to a Washington Post story which details the White House's admission that it routinely recycled backup tapes from 2001 to 2003, possibly destroying e-mail records from that time period. While the tapes are being analyzed to determine if any of the data can be recovered, the White House also indicated that some e-mail through 2005 may not have been preserved. We discussed the beginnings of this investigation a few months ago. From the Post:
"During the period in question, the Bush presidency faced some of its biggest controversies, including the Iraq war, the leak of former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson's name and the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes. White House spokesman Tony Fratto said he has no reason to believe any e-mails were deliberately destroyed."
Wait, I keep forgetting: Is recycling a good thing?
Or will everyone just give up on email since everything you ever say must be preserved forever to be used against you.
Will they all move to Instant Messaging?
Or maybe go back to handwritten paper mail as the only place to have a frank written conversation.
They will be lucky if they can get the last thing written to it. There goes with my data. Out with the isopropyl alcohol. Nice clean heads again.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It's longer but that would have been so cool.
Or if the gap lasted until January 22, 2005.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
"White House spokesman Tony Fratto also said to keep sucking, he has no reason to believe the Bush Administration intends to cum in America's mouth."
The cock-up theory of history is widely believed. What better way, then, for administrations to circumvent the law and get away with it than by means such as this?
Plausible incompetence is just as useful a smokescreen as plausible deniability.
I believe that orginally read "...hopefully destroying email records from that time period."
It's a good thing Bush approved the illegal interception of domestic internet traffic. Now they can just ask the NSA for a copy.
There's an old joke that, sadly, is far too applicable here.
A mobster is on trial for multiple murders. The prosecutor, frustrated he may lose the case because of the ease with which the mobster and his associates lie under oath, finally tries to threaten him on witness stand:
DA (sternly): "Sir, are you aware of the penalty for perjury in this state?"
Mobster (smugly): "It's less than the penalty for murder, isn't it?"
Too bad for us there won't even be a penalty for perjury.
Stay tuned for another exciting episode of Presidential Idol! Who will be eliminated this week? Call in and vote for your favorite!"
Give me a break.. Lose email? Could this happen at the company you work? Not if it's a company with a half-competent IT staff. To think the White House IT staff is so incompetent that they'd do this by mistake is unthinkable. No, it's not a technical mistake. If it were, White House officials would be running for cover and would hang it on the poor bastard who made the mistake.
--
They should subpoena the NSA. Surely *they* have copies..
Allow me to replace the current adminstration with a different government in this summary.
Pojut points us to a Washington Post story which details the Kremlin's admission that it routinely recycled backup tapes from 2001 to 2003, possibly destroying e-mail records from that time period. While the tapes are being analyzed to determine if any of the data can be recovered, the Kremlin also indicated that some e-mail through 2005 may not have been preserved. We discussed the beginnings of this investigation a few months ago. From the Post:
"During the period in question, the Putin administration faced some of its biggest controversies, including the Chechnya war, the assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, as well as murder of former KGB officer Alexander Litvenko. Kremlin spokesman Tony "Fat Knuckles" Fratto said he has no reason to believe any e-mails were deliberately destroyed."
Right, they only had the means, the motive, and the opportunity. But we are supposed to believe it was all an accident. Also we are supposed to believe that years worth of email disappears for the White House and no one notices until congress asks for it. Most places I have worked as a sysadmin if everyone's old email disappeared in multi-month/year blocks my phone would be ringing within the hour.
Cause I can summarize the current administration with one word: honest.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
it's a bit different; this is a national government with a pretty herrendous record in just about all aspects of office, including baldface lying and distortions of facts directly to the people over Iraq WMDs, saddam having anything to do with al qaeda, chemical weapons factories, etc etc.
For the record I do have all my emails archived dating back to before 2000... on a $1 CDROM. "Losing" emails right around the period when the administration were busy lying their pants off about Iraq is pretty damn suspicious.
My failure to retain records of my communications isn't a violation of the Presidential Records Act.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Well, even with Gore winning the popular vote it was fairly close. Quite a few millions of The People did vote for him.
:P None of my friends would have voted for Bush if they were American, but I know that polls up here indicate that *some* people support him. Not a great many, but some certainly do.
I'll agree to the 2004 election having some irregularities that could/should have been investigated/punished better, but I'm also pretty confident that a hell of a lot of people voted for him in that election too.
As for your last comment, remember that your circle of friends and acquitances are a self-selected sample, and not representative of the population at large down there
Those dirty, scheming, lying, backstabbing bastards are at it again - covering their ass, just in time before the White House changes hands. Blaming it on 'recycling' too - what a nice "fuck you" to Americans... This administration will go down in history as the most egregiously shameful, dishonest, dirty in the history of the United States. I still can't get over the fact that he managed to get elected again after he stole an election, started a war on fake motives, and let his rich friends get richer on the back of troops and taxpayers.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
No - Former President Clinton had to have his backup tapes scanned for word sequences, and it was a running battle to agree on the regular expressions used. Back in those days there were noises about the back-up system, but the problem was only with a FEW tapes.
Tapes can save OR damn this Presidency. I vote subjecting ALL President Bush's tapes to scrutiny and prove how many times they were recycled - and when.
In the words of Ronald Reagan: Trust, but verify. Access to history may be lost; there is much explaining to be done.
Of course it wasn't deliberate! Destroying evidence is standard procedure.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Let me see your e-mails from 2001-2003. "Let he who is without sin throw the first stone."
We are all sinners, that doesn't excuse the criminals currently inhabiting the white house.
I seiously doubt you'll find anything in my email in that time period that compares with colluding with Exon to financially rape the American public, starting a false war, ignoring dire threats of terrorism resulting in a national disaster, or selling the nation to Halliburton wholesale. Of course there may in fact be an embarrassing note or two in my save email folder, and I'm again just guessing, nothing that would justify my being stood up against a wall and shot.
I can't imagine the current administration can make the same claim.
Trust but verify would have been appropriate in 2001. These fuckers are well past the point where any further trust is merited.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
"Not a great many, but some certainly do."
It's a huge tragedy that exactly half of mankind have average-and-below IQs.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I spent 18 months working with the EOP on the security of the email system used to send out presidential press releases. The story that this happened by accident is just not credible.
First the archives, the archives were a pervasive force that was felt throughout the EOP. Every piece of paper, every tape, every scrap of information had to go to the archive. It was a whole cultural thing. And it was clearly a pre-Clinton culture. The people I was working with had been there since Reagan. They never refered to this as a Clinton mandate, it was the law.
The idea that a tape could be recycled for any purpose was a total departure from the Clinton era culture.
Second FOIA, was a constant issue.
Now we could assume that these changes were only due to the goal of 'restoring' executive power that Cheney and other Nixon era accomplices have advanced. Or it could be that they knew they had much criminality to hide.
I don't think these legal issues are going to go away after Bush leaves office. We are going to see a constant attempt to suppress government papers that implicate Bush in the criminality of his administration.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Berger has not revealed what documents were destroyed.
You do put a rather ludicrous twist on the issue, though. Burger destroyed the records to 'protect' them from the Bushies?
Clearly you've taken sides. I was just maintaining that the Clintonites were just as bad a gang of crooks as the Bushies.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
The other person who is lying here is Theresa Payton, the WH CIO. She claimed that she did not understand that these were archive tapes. ALL of clinton's email was taped in this fashion. Has been since the internet got commercialized. That means that she changed protocol. She would not have done so unless she was told that it was not an archive (zero chance of that), or she was ordered to do this by someone above her. I suspect that before this is done, she may be found guilty of perjury, conspiracy, and willful destruction of data.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Do we see a pattern here? Not just with this administration, but in general.
Some authority engages in controversial, borderline activity that might be illegal. It transpires that the activities were recorded (taped, logged, written in memos). Investigator tells entity to save those records. The mills of justice grind slowly. It then transpires that the records have been shredded, deleted, bulk-erased, recycled, whatever.
Authority's spokeperson smirks*. Everybody knows darn well that the destruction was deliberate, but everybody knows darn well that there's absolutely no way to prove it.
Nobody even needs to tell subordinates what to do in any detail. In many cases, all that's needed is to do nothing. It takes exceptional action to stop the janitor from emptying the wastebasket, stop the operator from reusing the tapes, whatever.
In the Boston area there is a controversial school, the Judge Rotenberg Center, which uses electric shocks to train kids with behavioral problems. Recently, a kid at the center who had not done anything disruptive was subjected to a long series of shocks, on the basis of telephoned instructions from a "prank" caller. The shock treatment was taped. State investigator ordered the center to preserve the tapes. Surprise, surprise: they were destroyed. Because, in the opinion of the head of the Institute, the investigation "seemed to be finished."
I don't think there's a thing to do about this sort of stuff. But I just hope that once, just once, one of the bastards gets taped in the act of ordering the destruction of those tapes, and--
--destroys that tape too?
Oh well, never mind.
*OK, I'm just imagining that smirk.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Youngsters... 1987, Iran-Contra hearings -- Oliver North was tripped up by copies of email recovered from backup tapes of the PROFS.
Email was certainly not a toy in 2003...
White House spokesmodel Dana Perrino noted with regret that the White House had switched to Quest during the period of the missing tapes: "They had like an awesome promotional rate!" So unfortunately the traffic was not intercepted. What a coincidence!
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
The really sad part is the office of the Presidency has become such a "Coke or Pepsi" farce that I don't think I'll be able to stomach voting this time. BOTH sides have become so corrupted that I doubt that either of them will do anything differently.It will simply be a matter of which big businesses get favored-defense and oil for republican and big media for democrat. Either way it will be "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That's part of the problem with this Democracy. A turd gets elected (twice) and it's a game of fingerpointing, blaming the other 'team' for everything. This is not football.
I, as a registered Republican (but not one who has ever even comes close to voting a straight ticket) voted for Bush on the first go-around, and against him on the second.
The Democrat bastards I helped vote into office on the second go-around appear to be every bit as colluding, impotent and worthless as the last lot of idiots on the other side of the aisle.
It's ok, though. You don't like the way things are going? Just blame the party you're not a part of (right or wrong) and hang the rest on everyone else. Thou dost protest too much.
You know, we can keep ourselves busy bitching, or getting out there and doing something about it. The national politicians, almost without exception start their careers at the local and state level. In addition to writing letters to the people currently holding Federal office, be proactive in your state and community to make sure the people presently getting elected at the State and local levels are the kinds of people you might eventually want on the Hill or in the White House.
Also, get involved with whatever party your a member of, and start actively setting standards and goals at the lowest levels of the party.
Not many people are happy with this administration, and I'm certainly not either. But every moment spent bitching, complaining and blaming is time detracted from getting out there and making a difference.
For what it's worth, the current crop of buffoons vying for the White House are nearly imperceptible from the last bunch of idiots. With the possible exception of John Edwards.
But that's fine. We can just all sit back and treat this like the Super Bowl, throwing popcorn at the TV when our guy wins or loses, and then quite possibly spending the next four years wishing things had gone differently, passing our time with childish infighting.
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I don't think these legal issues are going to go away after Bush leaves office. We are going to see a constant attempt to suppress government papers that implicate Bush in the criminality of his administration.
Have we all forgotten Bush's FIRST ACT as President?
To secure the papers from his father's administration, which were about to become public as mandated by law?
In their minds - they have every right to TAX us, in order to BRIBE the Telecom (Government Granted) Monopolies, to gather all of our personal electronic communications, for them to indefinitely archive, peruse, and examine, without any oversight, review, or accountability, and we have NO right, to lawfully subpoena evidence from them when there is clear probably cause of massive lawbreaking on their part.
America got precisely the government we chose. Precisely the government we deserve.
Pay attention next time?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yeah, that attitude clearly explains Clinton administration handling of the Rose Law Firm files.
Or the following chronology:
May 22, 1993
- Judge Richey cites the Clinton White House and the acting Archivist of the United States for contempt of court for failing to carry out his order to issue new and appropriate guidelines for the preservation of the computer records of the Reagan, Bush and Clinton White House staff.
August 13, 1993
- The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacates Judge Richey's contempt orders but upholds his overall decision that the Federal Records Act (FRA) requires that complete electronic copies of e-mail messages be preserved by the White House, and by extension, government agencies in general. The appeals court remands the case to Judge Richey to decide the issue of the dividing line between "agency" records covered by the FRA and presidential records covered by the Presidential Records Act.
March 25, 1994
- In a brief filed in federal court, the Clinton administration declares that the National Security Council is not an agency, and should be accorded the protection from public scrutiny given to the President's personal advisers. This argument attempts to remove the Clinton administration's White House e- mail from the reach of FOIA requests and the FRA, arguing that all its documents are subject only to the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and therefore not to court oversight.
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Meanwhile, the site you link to in your homepage has a poll up:
Who would make the worst president? Giuliani, Paul, Kucinich, Nader, Huckabee.
It also makes arguments about why Hillary is a wonderful human being.
I call BS Astroturf on your entire post.