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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
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
It's not the entire U.S. government that's the problem. Usually the government keeps pretty good records. The problem is this administration believes itself above law and order. It also has infected large portions of other parts of the government with it's political appointees whose only quality is loyalty the administration. Whatever was on those e-mails was likely to be more damning the "hand slap" they're getting now for erasing, er "losing" the e-mails. I suppose it could have been an innocent mix-up, but if the administration is so incompetent that they can't make back-ups of data they're required to, I suppose it's no suprise they've failed miserably in just about every other enterprise they've attempted in the last seven years (except of course, smearing their opponents, they're rather good at that).
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
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.
The sickening party lie, that somehow it is acceptable today because someone from another political party did it a decade ago but not quite so bad is just a disingenuous lie.
All those absolutely corrupt idiots who fail to demonise any corrupt official often have their snout right in the trough with them.
Quailty government is all about the continual audit and review of every action of government and where applicable, the public disclosure of those actions so that htye can be publicly debated and based upon those debates, far more sensible choice about who you should elect.
It is the standard lie of the politically corrupt to claim all politicians are corrupt whilst they and the slimy cronies cook elections to ensure the worst and most criminally politicians of the lot get elected. So why mod idiots who say do nothing, idiots who look at failures a decade ago while ignoring what is going on today, or disingenuous idiots who would allow their own country to fail as long as they profit.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Well said John :) If I had the points I'd deffinitely mod you up. All these idiots who are currently demonizing the Bush admin seem to have been born in 2001. Either that, or their memory is so faulty that they've forgotten all the scandals of past administrations.
Either that, or they don't buy the "But they did it too!" argument you typically hear from children on the playground.
People who criticize the Bush admin are not necessarily idiots. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to do so and these data retention "problems" are definitely one of them. And no, no one has forgotten past administrations' scandals, it's just that past administrations' scandals do not legitimize the actions and practices of this administration.
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"?
It's getting to the point that it is the entire US government that's the problem. Where are the congressional hearings about this, demanding answers as to why laws are not being followed? Where are motions to at the very least censure the Bush admin for failing to follow the Presidential Records act? As far as I know, only Kucinich has publicaly mentioned the impeachment process (Only to table the idea a few months ago)
Our 3 sections of government are supposed to watchdog each other. When one of them messes up royally, the others should at least make some noise about it.
this administration believes itself above law Lay off the kool-aid, dude. At least this administration hasn't had the FBI files of the opposing party "somehow" appear in the White House.
Are you seriously comparing the stupid Clinton "Filegate" scandal to the Bush Administration's abuses of the justice system, which includes selective prosecution and actual imprisonment of people based on their political alignments? Even as Bush listens to your phone calls, monitors your financial activity, and records every web page you visit, with your open acquiescence?
I personally dislike the Clintons but the Whitewater Independent Counsel found in 2000 that there was no evidence of criminal activity or impropriety in "Filegate", nor was there evidence that anyone in the White House had actually requested any of the files. There was no hit on Vince Foster either.
Huh? It's the government! Do you really expect gov't to be efficient or do things correctly?
I guess we should just shut the government down if you idiots are too ideologically handicapped to run it.