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."

Comments

Delete the White House

[Doc Ruby]

Is anyone out there still thinking that this White House operates at all near the level of minimum performance required from people in its job?

Anyone still think all this incompetence that always protects Bush and his team is some kind of accident?

Who cares?

[MillionthMonkey]

All their interesting stuff went through private mail servers at the RNC to evade responsibility for document retention under the Presidential Records Act. The RNC systematically destroys its emails and Bush has even invoked executive privilege in ordering the RNC to defy Congressional subpoenas to produce them.

Re:Who cares?

[MillionthMonkey]

There's also the Hatch Act, which (among other things) prevents government computers from being used for political activities. Emails regarding political activities went through the RNC servers (or, in the case of the Clinton Administration, the DNC servers); emails regarding activities as President, i.e. the Presidential Records, are supposed to go through the White House email system, where they are backed up and archived. So, you cannot infer an intent to violate the Presidential Records Act merely from the fact that outside services were used.

There, I helped you out with a few BOLD tags. Your mistake is assuming that an email either falls under the scope of partisian political activity or represents communication at official levels regarding government business. They sent emails that were both.

When you're having an email conversation (for example) about which U.S. Attorneys should be fired by the president for prosecuting Republican offenses or for not going after Democrats in election years, and what the cover stories for the firings should be, you're mixing political partisan activity and official government business. Since these emails were illegal for government officials to be sending, they obviously didn't use the White House email infrastructure to send them. Even these guys weren't that stupid. They were dumb enough, though, to indicate in WH emails when they were going to continue certain conversations, regarding planned activities to be carried out in an official capacity, in nongovernmental channels (RNC, gwb43.com, Yahoo Mail) to avoid them from ever becoming public.

But the purpose of the Hatch Act (passed in 1939) isn't just to protect Outlook servers from private or partisan use- it forbids the use of any federal agencies or resources to assist in partisan activities. That would include both WH email servers and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Re:What?

[vertinox]

What exactly is the safe load level for a PST file?

About 1.9 GB on an older PST file and anymore will crap out.

Outlook 2003 and greater will allow 20gb files, but they become horrendously slow after 5 to 10 gb.

And yes.. People will store gigabytes of email on an exchange server... Usually when they are emailing large videos, photoshop files, or do Desktop publishing work. Though I wonder what the Whitehouse doing to take up that much space.

Certainaly it wasn't powerpoints on intelligence reports.

Re:wow

[Detritus]

I'd vote for (3) Responsibility without authority. You have a whole building full of "important people" and political hacks who believe that rules and procedures are only for the little people.

I watched this on TV

[value_added]

So much for those that say watching CSPAN coverage of legislative hearings is as boring as watching paint dry.

The article, despite being spread across multiple pages, characterises the hearing fairly, so I won't bother reiterating except to say that the committee members were indeed uninformed, the witnesses were somewhere between clueless and dishonest, and the politics injected into the situation (notably from the Republicans) was so thick that I wondered whether anything could be agreed upon or any of the issues resolved. Hell, by the end of it, I doubt anyone really knew what the technical issues were, myself included.

The saving grace was watching (no one could hear what he was saying) the soft-spoken White House archivist and remembering the joke about how to tell the difference between an introverted and extroverted geek. Instead of shoes, it was microphones.

Your government in action, folks. The bad guys trying to cover up, the good guys trying to find out what's going on, and both groups taking its cues Microsoft weenies.

Re:The real question

[Adambomb]

And the captain-obvious-esk sentiment you and the rest of us all feel is EXACTLY the problem.

Just because something has always been done a certain way doesn't mean a time won't come where its necessary to put re-election odds by the wayside and do whats right. The caveat we all despise being that such people do not seem to win elections beyond the small to mid-sized municipal level from what I've seen.

I do not know of a better system overall myself, but this is definitely one of the biggest issues with democracy. Not only can doing whats right get you on your ends without any means (like say, doing nothing) but it can also be entirely undone shortly thereafter. Of course, I do not expect this to change unless we survive the next worldwide readjustment when we either can no longer maintain the food supply thats maintaining worldwide overpopulation, blow our selves the hell up, or simply forget that water isn't just for toilets.

If the current level of strife in the world isn't enough to make people want to think for themselves to be able to navigate the sea of bullshit on all sides, i doubt anything will until we see massive imminent worldwide peril with projected massive die-offs within a generation. Then the question will be, will we survive it.

Mission Critical Email - why I won't use MS Prods

[kilodelta]

I cannot stand Microsoft Exchange in any of it's versions. It is nothing but an I.T. headache of the worst kind. Try backing up the mail store, I dare you. After spending several thousand more dollars you'll be close but no cigar.

In my former place of employment we used a lot of OSS for things like web, email, database, etc. Even Samba. We had a few MS-SQL environments but I stayed as far from those as I could. For email we used Qmail with a SquirrelMail front end, and for web it was Apache/Plone and databases were MySQL.

The nice thing about Qmail is it stores email in user home folders. They're flat files that are easily replicated and backed up.

When the new administration came in the Director of Admin was paranoid about the fact that I.T. could see her email folder. So they went out and spent a shitload of money on AD, Exchange, etc.

That was a year ago. They still don't have it all running.

Re:The reason the White House won't give up the em

[socz]

Maybe citizens who have some free time on their hands and the experience/clearance necessary can make an organization to do these things for free for Govt agencies. That would be pretty cool because it could be a non-partisan group who does this.

But really, what are the odds that ANYONE in govt would want this? Too bad though.

Email Needs Rethink

[Tablizer]

And yes.. People will store gigabytes of email on an exchange server... Usually when they are emailing large videos, photoshop files, or do Desktop publishing work. Though I wonder what the Whitehouse doing to take up that much space.

Most email systems are poorly factored information because they duplicate a message for every last reader of a given message. It would save a lot of space and traffic if a given attachment or message was stored in one and only one place rather than replicated en-mass.

Of course, the security for centralizing items properly without being read by non-recipients complicates things, but shouldn't be a show-stopper. Also, the retainment date cutoff of the central server and individuals may be different, which makes some people want to be pack-rats if they can't trust the central system to keep stuff long enough.

A related problem is that people often CC copy everybody and their dog to cover their butts. Thus, we get bajillion messages that don't relate to us.

The whole idea of email needs a big rethink. It's become a jungle monster.

Re:wow

[postbigbang]

I heard an excellent synopsis of current opinion, yesterday (while waiting for my tires to be changed), in the form of this quote:

"pendulum's gonna fcuking swing in November, baby. Gerald Ford gave amnesty to Nixon. Obama won't. They better torch the place on the way out and learn how to drink tea 'cause the UK's the only place that's gonna let those jokers stay and not hang."

While primitive, it's got a certain flavor.