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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.
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
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.
This is the US you're talking about. I'm not trolling but I've been surprised by the lack of protests and resignations over such failed policy. A war based on false information, falling dollar, weakening economy, information getting destroyed, Katrina, etc. In old Europe, where I am from, governments would resign and write out new elections after such disastrous events. If they don't write out new elections they would be forced by countless protests from the public. In the US however people seem to fear being questioned about their patriotism when they publicly protest their government.
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();"
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".
Here's the problem: The people who would be doing the prosecuting are the very same people who told the guy to press the button.
We're unfortunately in a bit of a bind. The branch of government designated to enforce our laws has no regard for them, and the only other branch of government that could do something about it is too spineless and fractured by party politics to lift a finger.
The current administration is trying real hard to out-do Nixon as the most criminal Presidency in our nation's history, and if anyone were to actually do some investigation into it, we may even find that it has been a success.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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.
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.
"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.
This is all I ask: that Bush doesn't serve a third term.
He can't anyways. This is his second term, and that's all the President of the United States gets. Congress saw to that a long time ago. Now if they would just apply term limits to themselves, this country would be a much happier place.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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...)
Ask the chinese crackers! They would probably have a backup of the lost whitehouse mails.
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!
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.
> They surpassed Nixon in that regard years ago.
-nod- Nixon only illegally wiretapped one hotel, not the entire nation.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
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/
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.
Sure accidents happen, even in the White House, I am sure. /. that we discuss how some policy's in some companies etc, do destroy their hard drives, I am sure they do, but this is what happens when nerds discuss these things, we tend to over state 100 times about how hard drives do get destroyed by policy, and not talk about the fact that no one in thier right mind would believe it was really a accident, period.
But its a matter of coincidences here, the emails that were needed in this investigation are missing, that could happen, but the percentage of the exact data that was needed has gone missing would be very low, unless you just happened to mess up all the time, lets just says its maybe 2%, MAYBE, I would hope that in the White House it would be on the low side.
Now given this Presidents reputation so far, and the events that seem to just happen right when they need them to happen for his aministration to not get in to trouble, if you still belive this is not a simple criminal act, you sir would be the perfect example of the gullible people here in the US that scare me to death.
In fact, I find it funny here on
So either you are just gullible as Gomer Pile, or you might just not want to believe this is true, maybe cause you were 1 of the people I used to laugh at with W04 sticker on their car, that seemed to have totally disapeared in the last 4 years (every once in awhile I still see one and through a egg at them), and that would mean that maybe you are somehow to blame for some of this mess we have gotten in to?
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.
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.
I personaly have every email back to 2003, I find it very useful to be able to go back and search them for things.
These are White House emails, I would think they would be kept much longer.
Also most emails are so small in size, they can be kept very easily for long periods of time.
I could almost fit 1 million emails of 5-10k on my keychain flash!
I see no reason at all to delete them if they are of any importance at all, NO!
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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 .
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
"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.