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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."
Awesome! Now arrest them for obstruction of Justice.
Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
During my employ as a contractor with the Canadian Department of National Defence, it was standard for decomissioned (read: hellishly outdated) systems to be stripped of RAM and HD, by policy, before being sold off as a lot as surplus/scrap. The RAM and HD would then be sent to an industrial grade metal shredder at a larger nearby base for destruction.
Granted, this was for workstation systems where no personal or private data was to be stored. Again, by policy. I'm unsure what the policy would be for servers where email was stored. Probably still destroy the physical hard drive, but the final backup tapes are more than likely to be kept under lock and key for eternity.
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!
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BMO
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...)
After the president admitting to a felony against the FISA? After the administration ordering evidence to be falsified to have a casus belli against enemies of their Saudi friends?
The last few US administrations, both Democleptopopulist and Repunepotiauthoritarian, criminal? Who wuda thunk it?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
Dumped by his handlers when he refused to be a typical President and was replaced by Woody Wilson who blessed us with the Federal Income Tax, the Federal Reserve and after running as "The President who kept us out of war", gave us World War I.
It's very sad that we have to go back a hundred years to find an honest President and I guess that proves your point.
What do military codes have to do with the acts of our elected officials? Consider the following example correspondence:
"Send the troops into Laos, authorization code XKSD230923"
The bit the people have the right to know is "Send the troops into Laos"; the whole transaction shouldn't be secret just because there happens to be some sort of secret authentication token in the same sentence.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".