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Judge Demands Information About Missing White House Emails
Lucas123 writes "A District Court judge has ordered the Executive Office of the President to tell the court by May 5 whether any e-mail server backup tapes were kept for a period from March to October 2003 to cover controversial issues such as reasons for starting the war in Iraq, the release of a former CIA operative's name and the US Department of Justice's actions. The White House has been working for months trying to fend off a lawsuit filed last May in federal court in Washington by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. The judge cited what he called an apparent contradiction by White House CIO Theresa Payton as to whether backup tapes had been preserved. He also recommended that White House employees be ordered to turn over any flash drives or other portable media that may contain e-mails. The White House missing email scandal has been developing for some time now."
Why not just ask AT&T, the NSA, and all the telecoms that got their hands (or other appendages) caught in the cookie jar (data-pipe). They probably have some copies running around somewhere 8-/
The longer they manage to keep the law at bay the greater chance that whatever "evidence" remains is distorted, manipulated or just outright deleted.
The Long Now Foundation
I find it somewhat amusing that in this day and age where data retention acts in various countries are often the topic of the next, the US government can't even keep it's own emails :-)
At least it's good to know a government is willing to go a long way to keep you from knowing if they fucked up.
Privacy is terrorism.
It's fairly obvious that the tapes have been misplaced (misplaced into the shredder next to the giant electro-magnet and then shot into the sun). There's really no hope of seeing them again. If a copy turns up, it will only be because of a sudden outbreak of morality on some stooge's part, not because a court orders it.
That being said, what can we do to ensure this doesn't happen again? One obvious method would be to have each branch of government actually run the backup for another branch. For example, the Judicial would backup the Legislature, the legislature would backup the Executive, and the Executive the Judicial.
I know this has flaws; how do we keep everybody from peeking into the backups, for example. I'm sure the Legislative branch wouldn't want the Executive branch to be flipping through its emails, and vice-vice-versa for the other branches.
In any backup scenario, those that could be incriminated by the backups, should NEVER be allowed to manage them. An independent organization should be tasked with managing the IT behind the scenes, it should not be left in the hands of the administration. Someone like the library of congress, the secret service or some agency that is not directly under each branch's control would be vastly superior.
Let's figure out which scape-goat will be ritually sacrificed for this screw up, then move on to a real solution that makes this sort of thing a whole lot more difficult in the future.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Nobody "credible" will dig, and those who demand that digging be done will merely be ridiculed as crazy. Which I guess is true; you'd have to be crazy to think that the truth (whatever it might be) will come out on this, but you'd have to be stupid to think that on this one particular issue this administration is at all trustworthy when they've been caught brazenly lying about pretty much everything else they've ever done since they took power - and it was taken, not given. This is no different. Just because I don't know and can't prove what happened doesn't mean that I have to accept as gospel the words of the biggest bullshit artists of them all.
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap.
--Jeckler (/. Beta IS GARBAGE!)
Here it is:
a) We short circuited the whitehouse email by using GOP addresses
b) There was stuff we didn't want anyone to know in there
c) We deleted it all and trashed the server storage just in case
Does that answer your question?
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
In my mind, the amusing thing is that this has happened before... under the Clinton administration. Remember Travelgate? Remember the lost emails that the White House couldn't find? You would think someone would learn. Or should I believe that maybe Democrats and Republicans have something to gain from poor email archives?
WRONG.
Tell me what the official policy is on dara recovery? If the servers with email on them were to explode, is the stance that "those emails are lost"? Or is there a backup strategy in which tapes with data are kept? If these tapes are kept, and an email is subsequently deleted, it could be recovered from these tapes. The email undelete policy is irrelevant to the questions being asked here. The court isn't saying "as long as it's within your policy to undelete, please undelete the messages we want. They are saying "we know you back up your servers, produce those backups now." To which the response is "against our policy, those tapes were destroyed. We don't know when, by whom or how, but we can't produce that which we, by policy and law, are required to have." Do you understand the issue now? Your limited experience with one company's undelete policy is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
No company in their right mind will retain emails unless for those reasons stated.
Most companies in their right mind keep email backups for 7 years as documentation in case of specific audit types that can go back 7 years. To delete them if they stored documents or contained specific information is illegal, and most people that play in the corporate IT world know this.
Learn to love Alaska
You'd have to go quite far to convince someone to kill himself and a load of innocent passengers in order to protect your own damning evidence though. How on earth would anyone pull it off?
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
A challenge for many record retention policies, especially with email, is to prevent the proliferation of copies and avoid "unplanned retention." Many (most) of the emails being sought in this case were long iterative threads with large cc lists. When you factor for network distribution mechanisms and the variety of personal practices (use of various POP clients, personal folder management, people who still insist on printing stuff, desktop archive and cache settings, etc.), it is quite humorous and implausible to believe that the emails are gone. In fact, you can't practically make them go away.
You can, however, wipe the server and make the "Backup Tape" go away, and then try to keep people focused on that.
No, the rabbit really isn't in the magician's hat, and no, the rabbit didn't really disappear.
Come on, that's just starting to stink of loopy conspiracy.
If there really was a conspiracy to destroy a whole bunch of documents, you're seriously telling me the simplest, easiest plan they could come up with was "Let's find and finance a bunch of nutjobs to fly planes into buildings - and make sure that two of those buildings are the towers of the WTC"?