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White House Says Hard Drives Were Destroyed
wanderindiana brings us an update on the White House missing emails mess, which we have discussed before. It seems the hard drives of many White House computers are gone beyond the possibility of recovery. Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy? "Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005. The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed."
What did they do with the harddrives? And why aren't there any backups? The IT staff either is malicious or highly incompetent.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
"Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?"
I worked on some projects involving email at the white house. The system tracks other things includuding gifts and snail mail.
There are very specific rules and laws that must be followed and the million dollar consultants the white house pays to manage this stuff is very aware of those rules and laws.
Any destruction of email by the white house is purely intentional, period.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
This is all I ask: that Bush doesn't serve a third term.
Bonus: the challenge word is "attacker".
(Lrf, V xabj nobhg gur 22aq Nzraqzrag ohg jvyy Ohfu sbyybj vg.)
Awesome! Now arrest them for obstruction of Justice.
this administration will go down in history as "administration of coincidences". coincidences they need happening at the exact nick of time.
Read radical news here
Destruction of GOVERNMENT PROPERTY, including OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS, which these emails clearly are, is a criminal offence in the UK and a Federal offence in the US. Someone pressed that button. That someone must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law and made an EXAMPLE OF. So must whoever told him to press that button.
On a related note, I've heard absolutely nothing back from my written enquiry to the HMRC office here in Notitngham as to what of MY personal data is on the missing laptops and the missing CDROMs, with an else for prosecution for professional neglect.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
If they are arrested now, they can (and likely would be) pardoned.
Much better to wait a year, when a new administration is in office, and then go after the lawbreakers.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I would certainly hope that any Whitehouse hard drive that is decommissioned is utterly destroyed.
The real question is why secure backups of email aren't part of the IT infrastructure.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
But we don't throw them out, either. Where I work, all of the old equipment is sent to a company owned warehouse, because someone figured out the cost of just storing all of this equipment is lower than the cost of paying someone to recycle it (and then taking the risk that they pull confidential information off the machines.) And we have the desktops locked down, so there isn't even much interesting content on the drives.
I suppose it's possible that the white house destroys them because they have a way to do so. But if they were really archiving emails on the individual desktops, that's a huge problem in and of itself.
I wouldn't like loosing my complete email history every three years. I guess most users would react the same. According to the article,
"Some, but not necessarily all, of the data on old hard drives is moved to new computer hard drives"
I cannot imagine a somewhat competent IT department having a hardware upgrade policy that would consistently result in loosing your documents or your email. So that would mean the emails should still be there - on the newer computers.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
"When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired ... the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction,"
That's standard practice, and required by law, for ANY government computers.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
I work in IT in the banking industry and I can tell you that not only do we destroy hard drives we are basically required to do so by regulators.
There is a recycling company that does it in our area and they work with a large number of banks and hospitals, etc.
This may not be the reason for the lost emails, but I think destroying drives it a lot more common that many might think.
"Luke, I am your node.parent();"
I work for a large insurance company. When a hard drive is replaced it is destroyed to protect the customers as well as the company from exposure. Accurate recording keeping is also kept to assure that the drive doesn't just disappear for someones personal usage.
While the hard drives are destroyed, it shouldn't be too hard to determine what was on them. Recovering data is exactly why the administration has been so adamantly for "alternative interrogation techniques".
Hey! where have we seen this excuse before?
Smashing hard disks pisses off judges, and they write things like this:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20041021131512626
113. Late in the evening of April 29, 1997, Merkey returned a laptop computer to Novell. Upon inspection Novell discovered that the hard drive in the computer was smashed. That same computer and hard drive were offered as an exhibit and the court has personally inspected the computer.
114. The hard drive of the laptop is a modular unit, easily removable from the computer.
115. At trial the hard drive was removed and inspected by the court. It had the appearance of having been smashed with several blows from a hard object like a hammer.
116. Merkey has offered no less than four different explanations of how the hard drive came to be smashed, pointing most of the blame to his children.
117. One of his explanations is that he was so angry at the replevin that he threw the computer at Novell's door when he returned it. This explanation does not fly (like the computer allegedly did) for neither the computer carrying case nor the laptop bear any evidence of physical abuse or damage, though the hard drive, which ordinarily is mounted within the plastic shell of the computer, clearly has been smashed.
The dog ate it! No, my KIDS smashed it...no...IT IS WHITE HOUSE POLICY! (Jon Lovitz Voice) Yeah, That's the ticket!
--
BMO
I've worked at two companies where hard drives were removed from computers before they were sent out for recycling.
Then the company would physically destroy the drives... the low-budget company was a lot more fun then having them professionally destroyed.
I've heard that the military calls this "Spiking" a drive as they drive a railroad spike through the platters. But who knows if that's true or not.
I support a lot of government hardware at a help desk level. Every time they need a drive replaced, they always destroy the original one. At the very least they don't return it for failure diagnosis. Medical institutions do the same thing due to HIPAA. Nothing unusual about the destruction of hard drives at all.
Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
Can't speak for the White House, but I did work for a pharmaceutical company and they are very paranoid about information security.
Any time we replaced a hard drive in anyone's computer, the old drive was wiped according to US Department of Defense clearing standard DOD 5220.22-M. This is a rather intensive operation, and plenty of old hard drives didn't survive it. Any drive that failed got chucked into a 55-gallon drum that sat next to the wiping station. When the drum was full it was taken to a scrap yard and two company employees watched as each drive was fed into a metal shredder, one drive at a time.
I'm sure that anything capable of shredding a hard drive is very impressive to watch, but it's probably much less impressive after the 200th time you've seen it.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
Comic reference aside, In ever business I have ever worked from hundreds of thousands of employees in several countries to a local church with five staff members, the practive was to crush or other wise physically destroy any hard drives that could possibly going outside their previous usage scope.
aren't you glad you still pay taxes? look where it goes!
"Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?"
:)
I don't think this is asking the right question as some other posters have alluded to. We're talking corporate IT departments versus a branch of the Federal Government. We're also talking about destruction of the only copy of a given piece of data rather than destruction of one of several means of storing it.
It is absolutely usual for my corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy; but I work for a bank. I don't work for the government where I'm required by law to archive anything and everything. After a person no longer needs a workstation, the workstation is kept in a locked room for about 90 days just in case anything pops up (oh crap, I forgot to copy my personal folder over to my new machine!). After that, the drive is securely erased. If the machine is going to be redeployed to a new user we then load a fresh install of the OS onto it and it's put in another secured room and marked as "Available for Redeploy" in the asset database. If it's not going to be redeployed then the hard drive will be removed and run through a degaussing machine and then put in a pallet box to be picked up by our secure shredding company. The company will shred the drives on site and take the materials to be recycled.
Servers are much the same way, except that by policy, we back servers up at least once a day. While the drive that originally contained the information may be long gone, the data lives on for whatever the normal retention policy is. For email I believe it's a year, unless there's a reason for that box to be kept indefinitely (e.g. if a notice of discovery has been received).
So to answer the question posed in the story posting, yes it is normal for corporate IT departments to completely destroy hard drives, but that's not germane to the discussion. A better question would be "Is it normal for corporate IT departments to destroy hard drives by policy without any suitable forms of backup or other mechanisms to make sure any retention policies mandated by law or policy are enforced." Of course that's a lot longer than the original question and the Slashdot eds probably would have gotten lost and not posted the article!
I think it's time for some leaks, and some incentives for leakers. Someone on the IT stuff must know what happened, how, and why, and I'd bet they have the documentation to prove it, if not the emails themselves.
It's time such people did their patriotic duty, and come forward with what they know. Wikileaks.org exists now and is a great place to post such information anonymously. Will someone set up a reward fund for information leading to the conviction of the persons responsible for destroying records?
Please, I beg you, save us from these criminals, and the criminals that will be encouraged to follow if they are allowed to get away with this. If ever your country needed you, it is now.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
that the destruction of hard drive is standard procedure as that was how it was at the bank I worked at. However, that really shouldn't even matter here with server stored emails and server backups. Where the hell are the backups? It's obvious that they were destoyed purposefully.
on Kazaa?
This process is from a House Committee looking for RNC emails on government accounts or official emails on RNC email accounts. In the process, they hope to find other misdeeds. It is a fishing expedition waiting to evolve into a witch hunt. It is hardball politics.
"Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005. The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed."
Much like the missing 15 minutes. History will record this as the Bush administrations "missing".
I don't know about Banking, but just plain old back from the bbs days, back in the DOS days, I have every single piece of mail still to this very day.
That goes way past anything this treasonous administration apparently has. We used to talk about things like grinding harddrives down into sand and storing the sand for 50 years in a vault. I never lost data once over all these years. Not once. Accidentally pop a partition, start recovering. Boom everything back. The only thing that ever got lost was the CURRENT document that was running before the power was shut off. Backup supply's wasn't as common as you can get them now.
The problem with saying the IT staff at the whitehouse was either a, or b, is the same problem we have in wondering if states that buy electronic voting machines were either a.) incompetent or b.) Corrupt. It way past time to be wondering.
In the case of electronic voting machines is is CORRUPTION. we don't even say a or b anymore. They have long since had a chance to wise up. If they still are purchasing these rigged boxes, then we know they are corrupt. It's that simple.
With all the crimes and lies coming out of this administration, it's corruption. That's what it is. They can say it's incompetence all day until the cows come home, then have their fascist media air it as truth on the fascist news, until the American people believe the lie. But it's just another lie, and some poor fuckin IT guy will loose his job, and get blamed, instead of some high level corrupt piece of shit official being stripped of his security clearance, and being tossed in Levenworth.
The other thing is usually when the Whitehouse says something the opposite is true. We need to physically look at those machines, they're probably bluffing, and the more they use those machines, the less chance (if they were formatted) that we get information back.
TAKE THE MACHINES AWAY FROM THE CRIMINALS, LOOK AT THEM, FIND OUT.
I work for a big defense contractor we smoke all our hard disks in a magnetic pulse box and then disassemble them for recycling. Not unusual in my opinion - especially in this day and age - I still have all the hard disks I have ever had in a personal computer or laptop - never felt comfortable throwing them away even before identity theft and such became so commonplace.
FTFA, "When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired ... the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction,"
So, this article is referencing an industry common practice - destroy the data. For the US Government, destroy the hard drive. For corporations who might resell the equipment, wipe the drive to DOD spec. Must not let data inadvertently leak because an intact hard drive made it through a GSA sale, eh? Or should the government put together a warehousing system to store and track hard drives from retired workstations?
This entire thing is not an IT issue.
The game should be more like: if you (the person with political power in charge of ensuring that the email does not get lost) can't produce the emails, we have to press charges against you and you will end up in jail for x years.
It's too convenient to "loose" inconvenient emails blaming IT.
Everyone who knows and cares about security physically destroys drives after removal from service. My last three employers certainly did ... old drives were wiped and warehoused until enough were gathered to make physical destruction cost effective. Destruction methods varied but the goal was physical destruction of the platters.
It ain't just for corporate IT though... all of the moderately savvy individuals I know physically destroy their old drives, especially drives that have failed and therefore contain valid info that can't be wiped but could be retrieved. I'm not talking IT workers at home either, just people who have a clue and their personal financial records on the line. Most disassemble the drives and pound or BBQ the platters... a few take their old drives on a last date to a shooting range... results are pretty similar in either case.
I know I've destroyed a few drives (and will destroy more... I have a failed 500G drive awaiting BBQ season now) over the years.
Okay, so maybe they communicated information and ideas that would compromise careers or hidden agendas on a government network. What blows my mind is why anyone on a government network would have any expectation of privacy. I've worked on a government project. Everything is tracked and no software could be installed.
Why wouldn't these people do their planning outside of the government network, using email with encryption (PGP)? All of them could easily create Yahoo or Google accounts, or they could even create their own little domain name with their own server and run it all with encryption. Then we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
The point is this: religious zealots believe that anything is right when *god* is on their side. Studies have shown that religious wars tend to be more inhumane to the victims of wars that just economic wars just because it's in the name of god. These people act like zealots.
The other point is that we're dealing with an administration bent on religious action. They sincerely believe that they must secure the right outcome according to their notion of prophecy. Being so righteous, they wouldn't be interested in science, and thus have little awareness of how computers actually work.
Of course, if they're so sure of their prophecy, they might consider an alternative course of action. Instead of jumping into the gulf and inflicting war, they could just sit back, have some popcorn and see if the prophecy will really happen. If it's prophecy, no further action is required. All that is needed is a Saint's Patience.
Granted, this is a rather crude stereotype. And I've known some rather clever religious people who *did* understand computers well. And they were very nice people, so don't get me wrong about any prejudices here. I'm just saying that if you look at the group of the Bush Administration as a whole, you're going to see a lot more people ignorant of technical processes inside computers and servers than otherwise.
There is one other thing I thought I should mention. I don't know where I heard it, but someone said, "Never assume malice before stupidity." We might have a case of stupidity here. A rather large example, at that.
With any luck, we might get new legislation and oversight that helps prevent things like this from happening.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
So, if I read the article correctly
1) They haven't heard about IMAP and storing messages in the server permanently
2) They're using their exchange mail server (not mentioned in the article but other sources tell they went from Notes to Exchange) via POP3.
I spent nearly a decade working for local government as the IT Director of a County. The long and short of this is that yes, this does happen as a matter of policy quite often and across many industries. I have noticed that so far many of the posts here treat data classifications with very broad strokes, however when you are working with in the government every bit of data has a classification and is part of what is called a retention schedule. Once the data has reached the end of it's retention schedule it can be destroyed, and no this is not destruction of Government Property or Data as somebody previously posted. It is more akin to tossing out the spoiled milk in the fridge than anything. However some data never expires, but if we had to keep every shred of every piece of data collected through normal day to day operations every tiny municipality in the nation would require multi-terrabyte storage arrays. Plain and simple house cleaning is required from time to time. I'm sure I might pick up a flame or two for that, but the point is if any data is past it's shelf life you can't get pissed or cry foul if it is purged. Now I am not saying that is the case here at all, because I doubt that myself very much, I'm just laying out the framework.
Now for the physical destruction of hard drives, yup did it all the time. Granted 99% of those were workstation drives and not server hardware unless all of the data had been migrated. Our general policy though was that no drive ever left us intact. Equipment that was later donated came sans hard drives. The drives were usually disassembled and the platters destroyed. It was much more easy on the man hours than sitting there watching a drive over write to Government specifications. The same was done for backup tapes that had physically failed, those were melted down, others stored in vaults untile the data expired and then they were destroyed.
In a lot of places its standard practice.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Or following orders. They were almost certainly following policy. The complaint here is that the data is missing/destroyed. The data is supposed to be retained by a backup solution. The hard drives are only a 'working area'. Sure the data is stored there while someone is actively using the computer but as soon as it leaves the person's desk it is now a security risk.
The drives should be thoroughly wiped and then recycled or destroyed. That is good IT policy. I run the IT hardware division for my company that supplies and supports customer's computers. When any computer is repaired or replaced the old drive is dated, put into secure storage for a minimum of 30 days, and then DOD wiped, and then recycled or physically destroyed. (The magnets are really good for hanging things on cubical walls.)
The reason our drives are 'aged' for 30 days is because we can't trust our customers to have a good backup. (or ANY backup...) The White House shouldn't have any issues with their backups so they have no reason to retain the drives. This brings us back to the backup question. The rule for a really secure backup methodology is, "Multiple methods of backup, and multiple media". About 10 years ago I saw an article in a trade journal (InfoWorld?) that quoted the statistic that after a catastrophic data loss, 15% of the time the backup method itself is found to be flawed. Having 2 methods of backup would reduce the chance of an unrecoverable flaw to 2.25% which is much more acceptable.
The solution to the White House problem is the judicious use of pink slips. Fire any one who bowed to pressure and allowed this to happen. (or was incompetent enough to allow a flawed backup scheme...)
"My believability barrier just snapped."
Why? Many people lost that much and more when their IBM Deskstars went south.
I used to work for a Fortune 500 company which was in the nursing home business. Due to the potential release of sensitive information, which under patient confidentiality laws must be protected - even to the point of not disclosing that an individual was a resident, all workstation drives were routinely destroyed when the machines left the company. For those of you who are being so freaking paranoid, there is ONE difference between destroying a drive when sending a workstation for disposal and disposing of the entire workstation with the hard drive still in it. With either option, the data is lost to the entity which used to own the computer. The difference is that the company which releases the hard drive from service without destruction faces a very real risk that someone will be able to obtain sensitive data from it. The data cannot be retrieved by unauthorized third parties if you securely wipe/destroy a drive. From the tone of things, it sounds as if some of our readers envision a room in IT in which rack upon rack of hard drives should be stored! Can you imagine walking into a vault and seeing a room full of 1 GB hard drives which were not destroyed, just in case someone wants to spend 2 billion dollars to search them all for data? Recycling backup tapes used to be a common thing; they are expensive when you look at the number of tapes required for corporate level backups. The traditional method of 3 generations of backups was , for years, considered the standard. It is only in today's lawsuit happy environment that companies are being forced to retain backups for a longer period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Woods
What's really interesting about this entire discussion is the assumption that some criminal act has been committed here. Whether or not you support this administration, this whole thing seems more like a fishing expedition by a bunch of people with some kind a agenda.
Trust me, having spent the last 18 years working in IT as a federal employee and a contractor, I don't find this whole "lost emails" and "destroyed hard disks" situation surprising, nor sinister. In spite of the superior levels of technology available, IT changes come to federal agencies (yes, even the White House) very, very slowly. The rules and regulations regarding security, certification of systems and classification of documents (both hard copy and electronic) are frequently a confusing mess of legal-speak and idiocy, where one instruction will occasionally contradict another.
I was the IT director for eight years in a small Navy command. I had the responsibility of overseeing things like file backup and recovery and hard disk destruction. These tasks were often time-consuming, confusing (to follow some instructions), and wrought with opportunities to wipe out the wrong disk. I was fortunate, because I was careful and anal about record-keeping. Once, I removed a Secret classified drive from a machine for use in a new box, because I needed to copy data from it. I stored it in a marked package in a three-drawer safe, with notes on it saying not to remove it from the safe. A week later, I found it in a stack of Secret drives being transported out for destruction, drives that were stored in a completely different cabinet. Luckily, I had to verify the inventory of what we were sending out and caught the "good" drive.
Turns out this was my fault...I didn't add the stored drive to the proper inventory document, and someone else assumed it was going out for destruction (we didn't have the tools or the authority to destroy classified disks, so they were sent to another military facility).
The data on that drive was pretty important -- not to the national security -- but vital for certain people's jobs.
So, if I can nearly screw up on making sure one lousy drive doesn't get blown up, in my little organization, on my little network, I can see how it might happen in someplace like the White House.
Plus, it's not like this is the first administration that lost something. Aren't they still looking for those FBI files that were left laying about when Clinton was living there? And, has Mrs. Clinton found her tax returns yet?
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
1. Yes it is our policy to destroy hard drives before disposal. 2. Why is it possible, in the white house of all places, for emails to only be present on client computers, be it laptops or desktop? Ridiculous
The White House, and for that matter, every government agency, should have a data-retention and data-destruction policy and follow it.
For things at the White House level, I would expect all media, even those thought to contain only routine information, to be destroyed when they are no longer in use and all data on them has been copied off or has met the criteria for destruction.
Now, as for emails being destroyed:
If they were destroyed in accordance with policy, should the policy be changed?
If they were destroyed against policy, by whom, when, and why? The American people need to know.
If the policy didn't provide for the retention or destruction of the emails, the policy is flawed and must be revised.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
At my office, we just finally got rid of several computers that were cluttering up my floor. The hard drives were destroyed.
We blowtorched holes through them. Also see: Drills.
A friend of mine favors the shotgun method.
Well, he'd loved this lot - skillful? no way. "Lucky?" definitely - though I doubt this is what he meant by luck
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Court: HardDrives, perhaps? White House: Ah! We have HardDrives, yes sir. Court: You do! Excellent. White House: Yes, sir. It's, ah ..... it's a bit old.
Court:
Oh, I like it old.
White House:
Well, it's very old, actually, sir.
Court:
No matter. Fetch hither those HardDrives full of Emails! M-mmm!
White House:
I think it's a bit older than you'll like it, sir.
Court:
I don't care how fucking old it is. Hand it over with all speed.
White House:
Oh .....
Court:
What now?
White House:
The Condi's eaten it.
Court:
Has he?
White House:
She, sir.
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Ask the chinese crackers! They would probably have a backup of the lost whitehouse mails.
For not starting impeachment hearings. For not demanding an independent investigation. This is truly awful. I've been thinking of moving to Singapore since you actually get some security and solid business growth for the lack of freedom.
Not for a corporate IT department, but for a place dealing with national security.
Which, of course, the White House is.
Back when I used to work with the Three Letter Agencies, disk drives could be erased in one of two accepted ways: send them back to the TLA for destruction (they ran them through a ball mill), or if you were in a hurry, take them to an open field and set off a thermite grenade in them.
The thermite grenade was more fun, but made the fire marshall techy.
What's more, guaranteed erasure is increasingly an issue for corporate IT departments too. Lots of people working on that. See, eg, Radia Perlman's "ephemerizer."
I'd add an insulting coda here, but if you're dumb enough to think the White House is running a "corporate" IT department, you're too dumb to get anything subtle.
These ppl KNEW that it was illegal, even back then. And yet they did it. Every IT person in the white house should have prison time along with the WH admin.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
n/t
didn't we have some telecom companies monitoring all the network data? would not it be possible that AT&T or whomever has had that data routed through them, then to the NSA or whatever group.? Besides, destroyed hard drives are still recoverable in many cases.
//i have as many lives as people i know.
Look, the DOJ will not investigate as they are republicans (total corruption within the party), so it is up to dems to do this. If they really wanted to investigate, they would call in Sibel Edmunds and put her before the senate or the house or both. But ALL of congress is trying to keep this quiet. Waxman and Clinton PROMISED her that if the dems took control of congress that they would help her. They lied (IMHO, this is why clinton is the weakest of the 3 candidates ). Apparently a number of dems promised her that. ALL OF THEM LIED. NONE HAVE DONE A DAMN THING. This shows that because we have allowed laws that pretty much limit this to a 2 party system, that nothing will happen. Currently, I do not see the dems as being as corrupt as the pubs. But the fact that they are giving a sham investigation into this WH's doings, says that they are wanting a "get out of jail free" card for future use. So, yeah, the old timer dems are not that much different than all the republicans.
Is it any wonder that Americans are picking up on a man who says that he will change things while the old timer dems and nearly all of the pub party dislike him.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What about the backup copies? They _have_ to have backup data somewhere. Let's just hope that whoever finds it is willing to leak them :)
What if the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program backfired and accedently wiretapped the White House? Then the NSA would have that data!
A bunch of known liars destroy evidence that could incriminate them. What the fuck were you thinking when you re-elected these people? Did you seriously expect such textbook megalomaniacs to not do this? Just how naive are you?
You've been idiotic enough to put people in power who really like power, and they aren't going anywhere any time soon. You might think the coming election will help - but mark my ways even if the face and the haircut (and possibly even the gender) change, they will still find a way to retain power. And it is all your own bloody fault.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
That's exactly why we are having this conversation because Cheney et. al. did exactly that. They used outside email servers against the law and got caught. They were using the RNC servers and when handed a subpoena for their email claimed it was all lost. It turns out they weren't all lost much to the chagrin of the administration.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040402404.html
http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1362
Of course, nobody will be punished in the least for violating The Presidential Records Act.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
We have a written policy NOT to back up email, we currently dban every hard drive we send to surplus and we are toying with the idea of physically destroying hard drives. YMMV.
The other end of the trade show there was a company showing containers of metal shards. They had a shredder for disk drives. They have security clearances that allow them to shred drives with classified data. I have no direct knowledge of the drive disposal policy at the EOP, but I would expect that the NSA would require this as a matter of course. It is smart IT management.
But the argument over the drives is somewhat irrelevant as we know for a fact that members of the administration were using the RNC mail servers to transact government business, specifically to avoid leaving a paper trail. In the process they directed emails containing the most secret, most confidential government discussions through the machines of a small company that has no security clearance, does not even have a security policy and used the same network resources and mail servers for other customers.
The company concerned received the contract for the 2004 RNC convention. They would therefore have been an espionage target in any case. I would think that it is almost certain that multiple foreign powers have copies of the emails. Why don't we just call up the Iranian embassy and ask them nicely if they will share?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
> Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
I think this is becoming the standard operating procedure at more and more places as stories about data leaks through old "disposed" of hard drives become more widespread. I think part of this has come as part of HIPAA compliance.
At Stanford University any computer disposed of needs to heave either the drive wiped or removed for destruction separate from the computer itself. It has been a pain because when we are disposing of really old computers sometimes it requires some creativity to figure out how to get all the drives out when the computer itself is no longer functioning.
-bri
>> "Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?"
A Corporate IT Dept, yes. A Govt. dept, I've seen it before..
One of my good friends (who is still active Air Force and therefore shall remain unnamed) has a 13 inch HD platter. It was given to him as a plaque for some good IT related dead. It is engraved with his name, rank, a thank you , and an image of the starship enterprise. Most of the programmers had a drive platter that had been deeply engraved.
My friend explained since the HD had held military information all sectors had been overwritten with garbage and then the physical media destroyed beyond hope for recovery. He said this was policy for all hard drives on his base. Why? Well my friend's hard drive had simply held weather information from a mainframe.
It's not much of a stretch to think this might happen elsewhere. Does that make it right for the White House emails? I'll leave that to you to decide. I'll admit I don't like it. But as to "is it malicious or incompetent" this administration has shown equal capacities for both.
and the check is in the mail ...
...
...
and the tax rebate will stimulate the economy
and there are large numbers of WMDs in Iraq
and [Fill In the Blank]
somehow, this just doesn't pass the smell test.
I do not see how this is a debate. If the IT policy dictates that the data is within a recoverable period, then produce the data. If you cannot, then whoever is responsible for said recovery is guilty of "Failure to obey a lawful order or regulation", Article 92, and "Noncompliance with procedural rules", Article 98, of the UCMJ. Plain and simple.
The admin maybe guilty of "Dereliction of Duty" if the drive was destroyed to early, but the CIO is responsible for the data retention policy.
Hey, thanks for the links. That really clarifies matters a great deal for me.
As to the punishment, there is always karma. They may get away with it as far as we are concerned, but they may have trouble sleeping at night.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
I once worked as a technician at a local electronics retail and service centre, in a town I'm sure is hundreds of kilometres away from any sort of industrial metal shredders. We had contracts to provide service for government-linked organizations, and it was policy then to physically drill holes clear through any decommissioned hard drives (often at the expense of voiding what would have been a warranty replacement), and sending photographs of the drive back to a supervisor to confirm the incident occurred.
The spirit of the law is to preserve documentation of the activities of the White House for history, posterity and oversight. Well I say a well used hard rive is a very rich document indeed. As a historical or forensic document, the original HDD is far superior to any purportedly complete and accurate copy provided by anyone at all. The law was created to prevent the executive from destroying records of wrongdoing. Effectively all the law is asking for is a redacted version of the original historical document at the discretion of White House, while permitting the White House to destroy the original document. How is that supposed to accomplish anything at all? The funny thing is the White House wouldn't even offer us that. My guess is there was too much compromising information to possibly edit it all out, so they just pragmatically threw it all down the memory hole. Individuals and corporate IT are wise to destroy or overwrite their hard drives for privacy and security reasons. In government, I don't see how that isn't anything less than destruction of the original historical record. What we are left with is something else that is redacted and adulterated by someone with great potential for conflict of interest in the matter. Of course the President has special privacy and security concerns to consider out of nation interest. Isn't that the point of being able to classify some documents in the first place? Is it that much harder to classify the information in a disconnected hard drive than the information in a file cabinet?
I work at a large hospital and we destroy hard drives on all surplussed PC's and multi-function printers by policy and in practice.
Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
No. It's not unusual at all, especially if those hard drives have held confidential information like people's medical or financial info. If there's a chance that they once held state secrets, then definitely. Anything less would be incompetence.
The only real question is what constitutes "destroyed." At medical or financial facilities a disk wiping utility that overwrites the disks with 1s and 0s ten or twenty times is usually secure enough to do the job. If you're dealing with state secrets, then shredding the disk platters is more appropriate.
So, this policy violates data retention laws that THIS ADMINISTRATION pushed through. Also, it violates the presidential records act. But, I'm guessing this will be yet another thing John Q Public ignores because they're too busy watching Dancin with the Stars and American Idol to care - bread and circuses.
Come on. Slashdotters ought to know better. This is mod abuse, period.
Gee everyone wants to act like the Bush administration is the only ones ever to do this. No bias here at all is there? For a criminal case what about Clintons former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger getting caught stealing documents from the National Archives to keep them from the 9-11 Commision?
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
"Millions of missing emails" over a three year period? Perhaps some frustrated admin purged the spam folders!
There is a very good reason for destroying the hard drives of old government computers before disposing of them, and it is similar to the reason I destroy the hard drives of my own old computers before disposing of them. I destroy my old hard drives because they are loaded with personal information: addresses, bank & credit card statements, etc.
The Privacy Act lays out very strict guidelines for preventing the accidental disclosure of personal information, especially social security numbers. It does not specify particular methods (such as destroying hard drives), but it is clear that even the slightest risk of exposure must be avoided. I once was working at an organisation where an external USB hard drive used for file transfers between separate networks and for short-term backups went missing. Nobody knew for sure which files were on it at the time that it went missing, so we had to assume that it contained information protected under the Privacy Act. The nightmare of Privacy Act-mandated paperwork that followed lasted for months and probably ruined at least one career. We basically had to tell a bunch of people, "Your personal information may or may not have been compromised, but we really don't know for sure." Destroying the hard drives is pretty much the only way to achieve the 100% certainty required that no personal information could possibly be exposed.
I sorry to say, very sorry to say, that you guys & gals down there have a rotten, infested and putrid governmental system and incumbents.Cr0vv.
But here's the thing I'm seeing over and over again in all of this; It doesn't matter what the politicos do, there simply isn't any agency through which the public can enact a change. How do you impeach a president? How do you put a Cheney in prison? Which government agency do you call to arrest the government? Only the densest and/or most deeply committed evil-doers will defend this government, so why is it still in power?
The congress does nothing, which implies that they either don't want to do anything, or they cannot. There are many reasons for this, but the fact that we've watched a fraudulent election take place, among numerous other crimes suggests that they are locked up. Black mail. Stupidity. Evil. Whatever, that avenue clearly doesn't work.
Which leaves what? A Washington city cop making an arrest on Whitehouse property?
In the end, we're talking about a government which is little different than some tin pot dictatorship. People keep waiting for somebody to do something and it keeps not happening.
And everybody is too scared to pick up a rifle and start shooting politicians because they know what will happen after that. --All semblance of order instantly lost, and what remains of society catching fire. Nobody wants that. Anything but that. And so we keep hoping that somebody will do something. --And look! We have a promising election coming up! We can focus on that, and ignore the FACT that we KNOW the electoral process is corrupt. We KNOW that the military industrial complex still holds power over everything, and we KNOW that the same people and agencies who killed Kennedy are moving in the bushes. But we'll put up with that false hope because anything is better than the alternative.
Maybe this time. Maybe!
-FL
The 1978 Presidential Records Act expressly forbids it. In fact this admission that they intentionally destroyed hard drives just adds to the evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the current administration. These crooks were also using Republican National Committee servers to conduct official Whitehouse business in order to skirt the record keeping requirements of the act. http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2007/03/white_house_emails.html
But the congress is gonna let them slide again, when they should impeach the bastards.
-- QED
Score: (+6, Hilarious)
I'm fairly sure that a lot of damaging info to the current administration would be found on those drives.
Privacy for ordinary citizens is a right, but our officials that WE ELECT, their job is our business and we should have the right to know what they do. If they've done nothing wrong, then why hide anything. This does not apply to citizens on ordinary, routine matters e.g. we should not have to voluntarily have our cars searched cause we're innocent.
We elect our officials - they work for us, and therefore need to have accountability.
..........FULL STOP.
The unitary executive theory, which according to its adherents argues that the President, in his capacity of Commander-in-Chief, cannot be bound by any law or by Congress, since anything hindering him in that capacity can be considered unconstitutional.
That is what we are dealing with. A monarchy that just happens to have been elected - back to another George III ironicly. Thankfully even his own party will stop at nothing to remove him is he takes the step of ignoring term limits. There are far too many that would like a chance to be President some day and there are many far better suited to the task. Hopefully the economy will hold together enough until the election that military intervention in the government will remain something that only happens in other places.
If we were to have found former Whitehouse computers that had been decommissioned without destroying the drives, you find people here calling them idiots for that. I'm not questioning the problems of not archiving data correctly, but this is sounding like a question designed to ensure that you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
So back to the question, is it unusual to have corporate policies to destroy drives when you are done with them? We have centers dedicated to it. We also have a 'document retention' policy dedicated to making sure documents do not get retained a second longer than necessary unless required by a court. I'd hardly expect less from the Whitehouse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQYPCPB1g3o
or an execution for treason against the constitution.
Bush (on the advice of Carl Rove) has done something to us all that is going to possibly destroy democracy with is own private militia ([Blackwater] paid for by us,)
Look for Osama bin Laden to resurface as the terrorist "boogie man" and for martial law to be declared just before the election (where the dream of a perpetual "Republican Majority" would hit reality.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Problem is, that we're DUMBER today then the eariler generation, see WE let Bush get away with being a crook-over and over and over! THEY threw the(ir) bum OUT!
In 1996, President Clinton enacted a computer reutilization act for all government property. If any item is deemed 'Educationally Useful' it is required to be made available to public schools and not-for-profits as a donation. Any items not picked up by schools or the like, are then made available by the pallet in a open auction. Whatever is left over is considered scrap and sent off for demanufacturing. Now before any of this equipment can be passed on to non-federal hands, it must be cleansed using the Dept. of Defense approved sanitization method dictated by NIST. Basically meaning it has to be wiped using the DoD algorithm, or if the equipment is non-functional it has to be degaussed, pulverized, shredded or the like depending on the type of item. Of course each Department and branch of government determine their own upgrade time frames based on budgets, projects, etc...like any other IT shop. And 3-4 years is about the average time frame in my experience most hardware is upgraded (and probably assumed given a 4 year Presidency, although the dates overlap his re-election). However, there is no chance that this data has magically disappeared because of this process unless it was setup to do so. And even then, you'd have to intentionally get rid of all email recipients local machines, their archives, PST files, etc...and then do the same to the entire server array AND the backup solution. And then you're also telling us the White House has no disaster recovery solution? No COOP plan, site, bank of servers that are cloned?
What's the big fuss? Since the NSA listens to everything and spies on everyone, just get the backups from them.
Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
No. We do it, and all we have to protect is customer credit card data, which is practically public knowledge by now. Imagine if you had some REAL secrets.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Not abnormal at all. My experience is with the Canadian Forces, as well as with Public Works and Gov't Services Canada. Family members who work for CSIS and for Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) confirm that it's the same for them, too. By policy, hard drives are destroyed when computers are decomissioned. This is usually done with a drill press, punching a dozen holes into it and through the platter, before dismantling the hard drive and disposing of the platters separately. Good way to get your hands on some rare earth magnets, actually; I've got a handful of them holding stuff to my fridge.
Consider... when I was in the military, I routinely worked with material and information that required clearance. One of my coworkers had actually spent 2 months in military prison for putting his initials on the wrong line of a document shredding report. They take a very strict approach to guarding secrecy. If there's even the slightest chance that secret information will get out, somebody's head is going to roll. If the Canadians are paranoid to the degree that they'd destroy every hard drive when decomissioning a computer, what makes you think for a moment that the US government wouldn't be?
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Hard Drive destruction is SOP for ANY hard drive which had classified data on it.
Derek Greene
Some banks, the one that employs me included, physically destroy any hard drive that contained customer data when it is rotated out of use.
Desctruction in this case started with physical disassembly and drilling through the platters.
There's more to it than this.
They may get away with it as far as we are concerned, but they may have trouble sleeping at night.
I doubt it, they are probably high-fiving the stuff that did get deleted and how much they did get away with. After all, this is just a game to them. They won big on this round. And, remember, they are religious zealots.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
This is not a shock to me but what is the shock is the fact that people do not hold them accountable. They know they can get away with it because YOU let them.
The constitution is just a piece of paper, Bush is right, until YOU actually do something about it, that is all it will be, a piece of paper.
Watch this. http://zeitgeistmovie.com/
Uh, no? It's not unusual at all I don't think, although I'm currently coming from the perspective of a relatively small non-US government department (~350 people).
We have a strict policy that all hard disks from PCs should be destroyed or securely wiped before they leave the building, or they'll remain stored in a locked area and not leave the building until this is possible. This includes photocopiers, printers, scanners and fax machines, and anything with persistent storage. Laptops and tablet PCs which leave the building (some of which go all over the world) are required to have strongly encrypted disks which need a password protected key on an external device to access, and the staff are educated about why that's important and why the key should be stored separately. We don't explicitly use hard disks in PCs for any kind of persistent reliable data storage, but they get used as a matter of course for caching all kinds of things, and this includes whatever people might be working on at the time. (Our document management system caches documents people are working on to the local drive, for good reason.)
Where possible we get broken PCs repaired on site, and when this hasn't been possible in the past we've had issues of the PCs being stolen from the suppliers while they're under maintenance. A lot of them also go to schools once we're done with them, and it makes absolute sense for us to take responsibility and make sure the disks don't get out into the wild with data possibly still on them.
Keep in mind though that this policy is completely separate from the data retention policy that we have. Staff are required to file their documents and emails according to what kind of business it is (we have systems to help them streamline this so there isn't too much overhead), and they get chased up by the document management people (who routinely monitor new documents) if they don't, or if it looks like they're filing things incorrectly. Document accesses and modifications get audited and once a document's been filed, it can't be deleted or changed by anyone except document management staff (or the IT team I guess), and it'd be very difficult if at all possible to do that without leaving an audit trail. It'd also be difficult to delete and modify the backups, some of which are off-site.
Data on the network, intranet and in our document management system gets filed, stored, routinely backed up and sent via a secure courier to a vault in a different city. It might get disposed of after some amount of years, or alternatively sent over to the Archives department if it's that important. Whatever happens gets decided according to whatever retention policy the document management team sets, and that's usually governed by law. As an IT group we don't set the data retention policies for the different files and classes of documents (we're not lawyers or librarians), but we work closely with the people who do.
Having said all of this, I don't think the organisation has any corrupt employees who are habitually trying to manipulate the system and break the rules for their own personal or political gain. If we did, then it might be more difficult to manage, because there's only so much that can be done if someone on the inside isn't trustworthy. But if you're in a well run organisation then those people should be out the door as soon as anything like that is discovered.
If it was "policy" then why couldn't they have come out and said so on the very first day?
Why has it taken them so many months to come up with this excuse?
No sig today...
Employees whose salaries are paid from an appropriation for the Executive Office of the President have looser constraints on their participation in political activities than other federal employees (c.f. 5 USC 7324). However, this participation requires that costs associated with the activity not be paid for by funds derived from the United States Treasury.
Thus sending partisan political communication through an external server is hardly in defiance of the law, but rather in compliance with the law. There is nothing wrong with that - the only problem is the improper use of outside email for official business.
The solution is very simple - Congress can either amend section 7324 to allow the use of White House email addresses for such activity (while prohibiting the use of external addresses) or it can require that all such communication be "carbon copied" to a White House email address for archiving.
and it gets destroyed. What were the odds of this NOT happening?
The government is the only entity that is allowed complete control over the evidence that they are suspect for. We should allow the same for drug users and murderers, after all it is good precedent.
"Please hand over the evidence, and DON'T YOU BURN IT NOW! haha!"
The problem with your version of governmental accountability is that you seem to believe that the government *can* function without politicians undertaking behaviors and activities for which they would be thrown out of office.
We expect politicians to be completely flawless and morally upstanding. We expect them to be forgiving, firm, strong, understanding, compassionate, intelligent photogenic . . . the list goes on forever. In reality they are human, they have flaws and they make mistakes. Even if they didn't, they would still have to make choices that people would find disagreeable. As a whole these expectations lead to a situation where politicians must lie and hide their actions from the public.
If anything they need privacy more than the average citizen because the bar is so much higher, and they have so much more to lose.
This is not the world I want to live in, but it's the world I do live in. I wish everyone was able to be completely open and honest about everything, and I think that's the direction we should be moving the country in. But it can't happen overnight, and it has to start with us, the voting public, being more understand and reasonable. We have to be willing to vote for a candidate who says "look, fixing our problems is going to take hard work and personal sacrifice" and a candidate who has made mistakes and admitted it.
As an SMU alum, I'm looking forward to returning to campus so I can visit the Bush Presidential Library. It'll be like the most awesome couch with a coffee table book full of big color photos. Not a bunch of annoying stuff to read like at those regular libraries on campus.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
> In the US however people seem to fear being questioned about their patriotism when they publicly protest their government.
You notice how they're trying to paint the one candidate left who has the guts to speak the truth as "un-American"?
Now, I don't actually believe that he is. But if I did, that'd just be one more reason to vote for him in this election.
Patriotism turned into jingoism around the time it became clear to every fair-minded person that the war in Iraq was not right. I'll go back to displaying the biggest damn flag I can find, like I did after 9-11, right after we go back to acting like a decent country where our leaders don't flaunt the law with impunity, call the Constitution "just a **** piece of paper" when it outlaws what they're doing and call everyone else "un-American" when they're called on it.
I believe that you have no idea how prophetic you are. I personally believe something is likely to happen before a new president is sworn in. The current one is looking for any well timed reason to usurp democracy yet again. A well timed attack or international event would give him the opportunity and motive to declare a national emergency and forestall a change of administration. I'm almost prepared to take bets on this, and I'm certainly going to point to these predictions when I am shown to be correct. And before you type your tin foil hat joke, remember that declaring a state of emergency is a one man operation and does not require conspiracy or collusion, so a tin foil hat provides no protection from a power hungry president. A president just needs to properly cultivate a state of fear (which we have) and declare his emergency.
I hope I will be shown to be wrong.
Just callin' it like I see it.
When I was at Intel they had a document tracking system and we had to securely destroy various documents when we were finished with them. It's been a while but I think it was all "Intel Secret" and above and nearly everything is "Intel Secret". This is no different.
But, as usual, kdawson is posting his wacko conspiracy theories.
I think I found your problem. In a single sentence, you managed to equate a "massive negative effect on the President and his administration" to "national security interests." I sure hope you don't vote.
Capitalizing "national security" in the beginning doesn't even begin to give the concept the level of credence as say, established law. The Presidential Records Act exists. Show me when the legislature voted on National Security.
-- arstchnca
--
The reason that this is a huge issue is that the destruction of presidential records is illegal. The Presidential Records Act mandates that all records from the President and Vice President are owned by the public, and that the President is not allowed to destroy any records without specific authorization from the Archivist of the United States stating that the records do not have any historical, informational, or evidentiary value.
There is a great desire on the part of many Americans to impeach Bush for his part in prosecuting the disastrous $2 Trillion+ debacle, the Iraq War, which is currently sinking our economy. Nixon wss easy to impeach because he left a lot of evidence in the form of tapes for his prosecution, but Bush and Cheney are not making that mistake -- they have both had very "convenient" situations where their records regarding among other things the Iraq War planning that have been "accidentally" destroyed.
If the American people were to have more evidence about White House activities, there would be many more people joining Scooter Libby in jail, and we would find out more about things like "ex" gay prostitute Jeff Gannon's entries and exits at the White House .
What about hundreds of thousands of civilians, in the country you guys invaded and completely fucked up?
Its like Americans don't remember a fucking thing from Vietnam. The minute I heard they planned to put troops on the ground in Iraq, I predicted it would be a royal clusterfuck that would last years. And there you are, years later, everything fucked up, trillions of dollars spent, hundreds of thousands killed or maimed, and no exit strategy.
Impeaching the politicians who led you into this mess would be a good start, but what you should really do is line them up in front of the White House wall and shoot them, for treason against the United States.
The IT director says we're going to be rolling out a deletion policy for files. I don't think there's anything inherently evil about it, the rationale is more ass-covering. The logic goes like this:
1. If you have no data retention/deletion policy, opposing council in a lawsuit has a reasonable expectation that you will be able to produce documents requested. They could ask for something from ten years ago and demand you produce said evidence.
2. If you have a deletion policy in place, say everything after 18 months, you only have to provide documents up to that point. Not being able to produce something from two years ago does not mean you are playing coy.
3. Without a deletion policy in place and properly enforced, opposing council could argue that you are withholding evidence.
It seems like a reasonable bit of ass-covering, just like making sure our licensing documentation is up to date if the BSA comes calling.
Since the lawyer wasn't around, I couldn't ask all the questions I had. The one that immediately comes to mind, if I were hit by the RIAA saying I was file-sharing and they demanded I turned over my hard drive, if I smashed it and smiled at them pretty-like they would slap my ass with obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence. So if I said I had a personal policy of reformatting my hard drive every week and could produce documentation to prove it, would I be able to get away with it? I don't think so.
I think if it were any small company facing this same line of questioning, lady justice would be strapping on the assault-dildo and sharpening the spikes. If this were a major multi-billion dollar business, they would just brazen it out and probably get a fine that is small compared to the size of the crime committed. And since this is the White House, they'll be able to tell the law to fuck off and get away with it. I don't see anything to convince me otherwise.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"It would be costly and time-consuming for the White House to institute an e-mail retrieval program that entails pulling data off each individual workstation, the court papers filed Friday state."
Yeah - if you're using fucking Outhouse - and/or Exchange - that hordes its emails like it's fucking gold.
You have to spend money or do a lot of futzing around to get email out of Outhouse into some sort of standard format.
Use any REAL email system and it's not a problem.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
No. In a democratic system, the needs of the country are more important than those of the President and his administration. The President and his administration are essentially disposable, the country and its constitution aren't.
The system recognises that presidents and administrations can be rotten, and that it's in the country's interests (including its national security interests) for the bulk electorate to have the ability every four years to kick a president out and vote in someone else who they think might do the job better. There are also mechanisms for getting rid of incapable, incompetent or criminal presidents in the middle of a term.
In fact, the system goes further than this: it currently recognises that entrenched centralised power represents such a potential threat to the democratic system that it currently refuses to allow a president to serve more than two full terms even if the electorate want them to. Presidential power and influence is reckoned to be so corrosive that the need to avoid its possible misuse even overrides the natural right of the electorate to vote in who they want.
So no, saving the reputation of a sitting President and his buddies when they've been up to no good is NOT a matter of national security. It's instead a matter of national security that if a bunch of wrong'uns do get into power and misbehave, that we flush the bastards out before they do any more damage to the system and to the country, and that we then try to learn as much as we can about what went wrong so that we are less likely to get caught out again.
When these guys exploited 9-11 and treated it as a blank cheque to allow them to do anything they wanted in the name of national security, they plunged the US into one of the most damaging periods in the country's history. It's a question of national security that we learn from the experience and try not to let anything as half-assed happen again. We need to find out why the system failed, so that we can examine whether further safeguards are needed.
What we can't have is people in power who've screwed things up, illegally destroying the evidence that would tell the US authorities what actually happened, in order to save their own necks and those of their friends. We currently seem to be at least three or four (maybe as many as six) layers deep into apparent illegal cover-ups of other apparent illegal coverups -- national security demands that if there is this level of apparent endemic criminal activity at the White House, whose main purpose seems to be to conceal incompetence, and to conceal criminality conducted not to save the country but to prevent the country from takng standard measures to protect itself from corruption, that we sort the thing out.
George W Bush once said in a speech (about Abu Ghraib) that bad things will always happen under every system, but that the important difference between the United States of America and Saddam Hussein's Iraq was that when people break the law in the US, they go to prison. Bad things might happen sometimes under the US system, but when they did it was because of isolated individuals who were then caught and punished, no matter how well connected they were (as opposed to the systemic corruption of Saddam's regime, where the guys at the top could get away with anything).
Well, let's see this difference between us and a country we just went to war with to depose their corrupt government being demonstrated. Lets have a full investigation, lets prosecute anyone who hampers it for obstruction, let's have juries deciding whether there's sufficient evidence to send people to prison, and where there's a "grey area" over whether criminality or incompetence or naivete in "following criminal orders" was involved, let's imp
Eric Baird
is the Congress gonna quit dicking around and finally IMPEACH Bush & Chaney?
I'm getting sick of the dancing around in order to allow this idiot to continue in office.
Geek Hillbilly
The Bush Adminstration has broken several FOIA laws, the laws they ENFORCED in the Patriot Act of 2001 against Cyber-Terrorism, and are in direct violation of may Sunshine Laws.
This "The Hard Drives Are Dead/Destroyed" is a load of horse hockey. But what is total BS is the fact that they won't be going to jail for breaking the laws that they enforced. Their is no accountability whatsoever in this Adminstration, and all that they had was conveniently destroyed.
If there is anyone who works at the Pentagon or CIA who has the courage to bring justice to the people of the United States of America, since we know you are reading our messages and tapping our phones (Hello.) you would be a real patriot and keep a copy to nail your boss when he's out of office next year. How do you sleep at night knowning that your boss has been stealing from your paycheck at $3.75 per gallon or when meat is $8 per pound. You got to eat sometime, Big Brother.
"All animals are created equal...except some are more equal than others." --President George "Orewell" W. Bush.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
I use a .458 Magnum to destroy drives. 500 grain softpoints at around Mach 2 really punch big holes through platters, and throw enough fragments around inside the drive to ensure that nothing is going to be readable. Use three rounds to be sure, and you can do about 3 - 5 drives at once by lining them up.
And it's more fun than a hammer.
THE X-FILES Teliko (4x04) "Deceive, Inveigle, Obfuscate."
"National security" does not in any way supersede the Presidential Records Act. In fact as federal law, passed by the Congress and signed by the President, the Presidential Records Act defines national security with respect to presidential records.
I hope that was a troll because if not, I'm feeling pretty depressed about my country right now. We're supposed to be a nation of laws.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Email is sent from one computer to another. They can't destroy computers that received the emails, and unless they delete their address book, won't a lot of the recipients already be in the list?
There are also logs on servers. There is a lot of data left that the Feds can search if they tried.
Also I am repeating this because it cannot be emphasized enough: White House records are public property, so it is illegal to destroy them. Any comparisons to personal data or corporate computer policies are categorically irrelevant.
Why not impeach them for illegal destruction of records. That is a start.
the b*sh administration is making congress look like IDIOTS, making the presidency look like criminals, and making a laughing stock of the rule of law. i hope the supreme court is listening cause you guys are bending over. congress is taking it in the ass like the obtuse unproductive bloated piece of shit it is. and worse of all the american people get to pay for it .. what a fucked up country..im moving. you guys are sooooo fucked and most dont even know it cause theyre tards too busy watching american idol. oh and fuck you b*sh you fuckin asshole fucktard. and fuck your mother too for spawning your fucked up ass. and fuck your father for spawning your fuckin ass you fuck. youre a fuckin murderer and a liar and a cheat. you are a disgrace to america. may you rot in hell for all eternity.
This could range from malicious intent down to incompetent workers to deficient policies. Policies which may not have been written to encompass the need for retrieval, or had them written out upon Bush's inauguration. This whole mess is ridiculous though, why didn't this statement come out earlier? It seems to me that hard drive destruction was recent. The court should demand procedures and/or vendor receipts and start chasing this down. It's ludicrous to think that the motions would have gone on this long only to NOW say that the physical media was destroyed. Chase the rabbit down the hole, maybe we'll finally catch something out of this whole mess.
his prison term was commuted by the president, which left standing the other penalties imposd by the judge - fine, public service, and supervised probation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Libby>
And the $2 Trillion+ cost of the war you cite is more like a half Trillion dollars: http://zfacts.com/p/447.html>
Bill Clinton also left a lot of evidence (including a wad of DNA) to support his impeachment: http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/impeachments/clinton.htm>
Ken
Nice to know we can do away with the formality of this:
After all, the Constitution is "just a goddamned piece of paper".
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Sorry, they are required BY LAW to VERY meticulously preserve EVERY email and provide them for archiving. Additionally, they broke the law by originally trying to circumvent it in using the Republican Party's private computers for official federal communications.
This is very overtly deliberate, and a very obvious middle finger being raised to anyone who dares to expect accountability from the Bush "Administration".
Then they need to be prosecuted for misuse of official secrets.
They used unclassified workstations to evade the law. The fact that they used these workstations instead of white house government resources is a sign that they knew the law and was attempting to evade it.
Why is it that when the government taps our phones you say "There is no problem if you have nothing to hide.." but when elected and appointed officials in the executive branch refuse to disclose activities they performed as elected and appointed officials of the executive branch, it is no business but their own?
The answer, is that you are a partisan,
It's a Nixon flashback. The IT staff got the in the White House for a reason, they just don't hire anybody (unless you're an elected leader of course), so its ignorant to believe that they're simply incompetent.