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White House Email Follies
Presto Vivace forwards a link detailing a recent House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the White House missing emails mess. David Gewirtz's report, carried in OutlookPower and DominoPower (in 6 parts, keep clicking), makes for scary reading. "If, in fact, the bulk of the White House email records are now stored in bundles of rotting PST files, all at or above their maximum safe load-level, that ain't good in a very big way... I object to using the inaccurate and inflated claim of excessive cost as a reason to avoid compliance with the Presidential Records Act."
They just need some excuse for "losing" dangerous email messages...
After all, it's not like there aren't answers to the question "how shall I archive my user's email for legal and regulatory purposes?" (Disclaimer- I work for a player in that market, but we're not on the first page of results for that search. So I don't feel too bad. Oh, wait - )
the safe load level of a pst is around 2gb , after that it is subject to corruption
as to the amount of data , email systems are the largest systems on earth these days encompassing tens of terabytes of data in their live stores and tens of petabytes on tape
and yes they should have an archiving system not just doing tape back up tape
p.S if they used an enterprise email system like lotus domino this would not be a problem after all thats what the CIA uses
men will do for beer
The problem, I believe, is that the Presidential Records Act has no enforcement provisions or penalties for non-compliance. Thus, if the White House prefers to ignore it, there's no risk in doing so. So if the value of non-compliance is higher than the value of compliance, which is the case right now, the PRA loses.
This is not simply a case of incompetent IT staff setting up a system badly. The White House had an email system that by all accounts worked very well, archiving everything properly, and it was shut down and the staff let go, and the new system was set up by someone over-ruling their own IT staff in order to make sure that it couldn't work properly. That means that someone made the decision to spend a lot of time and money to eliminate a system that worked properly, to replace it with a system that didn't, over-ruling the recommendations of their own IT staff, which can only have been done intentionally.
What would be ideal would be for the PRA to be given real teeth so that the cost of violating it becomes clearly higher than the cost of not hiding whatever it is you want hidden. Given the extremely high value of keeping embarrassing or illegal behavior secret, the penalty needs to be extremely high as well, as it is for destroying evidence. That is to say, courts should presume that the records that were destroyed were incriminating. Judges take destroying evidence of a crime quite seriously.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
> operates at all near the level of minimum performance required
We should be so lucky to see such a high standard.
> Anyone still think all this incompetence that always protects Bush and his team is some kind of accident?
I would rather. The alternative explanation is EVIL and probably treasonous.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.