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Whitehouse Emails Were Lost Due to "Upgrade"
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "We now know how the Whitehouse managed to lose about five million emails. It seems that they 'upgraded' their Lotus Notes system, which had an automatic retention and backup system, for Microsoft Exchange, which did not support the automatic system. So they changed it to a manual process, where aides would manually sort emails one by one into individual PST files, which they call a 'journaling' archive system. They're still building a replacement for the retention system. Right when they had one finished, the White House CIO complained that it made Microsoft Exchange too slow, so they hired yet another contractor to build another one, causing a senior IT official to quit in protest. So they still haven't completed the project after almost eight years, and rely on humans to sort millions of emails."
ridiculous!
"Strategic Incompetence"
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
read the summary and understood the Whitehouse is blaming Microsoft? hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
There is nothing that will happen for the rest of the week that can make me more light hearted than this. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
C'mon. After 8 years they still couldn't come up with something? As a Government employee I know how slow things can be, but 8 years?
It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between subterfuge and sheer incompetence.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Honesty, why throw out what works?
Our government is a black hole of wasted money and half-assed IT projects that some contractor is stringing out to make the most money.
So now you're telling me it wasn't Alzheimer's that wiped out Reagan's memory?
What was that quote about never ascribing to malice?
It's a well put-together story (plausible enough) but I'm still skeptic though.
Maybe we've just seen too many lies :)
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
How Much Exchange and Windows lowers total Cost of Ownership. Sure This isn't MSFT's fault that lies strictly with with IT department, but if MSFT worked better with others this wouldn't be so much of a problem.
Once your locked into MSFT's system you can leave easily. I have 15 year old email boxes that load up just fine in thunderbird, Apple Mail, pine, etc.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with saying "Never blame on malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence."
Best Slashdot Co
Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. This shouldn't be taken as a Micr$oft bash as much as an example of poor planning. After having administered both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange I can say that ditching Notes for Exchange isn't a bad move. But doing so without planning out the migration path is. Any large scale project should involve a considerable outside contracting firm that would have automated measures in place. You could even plug in a server appliance before your front end Exchange servers that would automatically archive off mail messages being sent to/from the White House staffers. Another example of US government being inept. Just look to how the US air traffic control centers still operate with equipment that is so outdated that some units are out of commission because they can't order vacuum tubes to service them...
The White House's failure to follow records retention laws was due to deficiencies in Microsoft software?
I predict this will lead to a civil, thoughtful Slashdot discussion which results in many useful recommendations for avoiding similar problems in the future.
I recommend fire.
Not to defend microsoft, but COME ON! Who do they have doing their tech support? Is Bush doing it himself?
I find this frankly impossible to believe, and insulting on top of that.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Computation and Turing machines and all of that science stuff are just theories. The so called "experts" tell us that these things can sort email, but it's better to trust the people to get about the business of the government. I wonder if Bush looked into the eyes of Bill Gates and saw his soul? Maybe if we allow enhanced interrogation methods, we can recover the email? Ahh, too easy, I could go on for hours but I'll stop now.
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B258243&x=8&y=15
throw new NoSignatureException();
I just finished setting up our email retention system, which took a grand total of 3 months from the initial inquiry until complete date. Now I work for a smaller, more agile organization than the Whitehouse, but that doesn't mean that it should take 32x as long for them to complete a similar task. To any technical person it is painfully obvious that this was the intended results of their actions, email retention isn't that hard.
Well we meant to backup up all these terrible incriminating emails but wouldn't you know it, there was a technical glitch.
Basically this comes down to either:
The Government was Incompetent.
or...
The Government is lying and covering up.
Hmmm.... Mr Rock, meet Mr Hardplace.
the incompetence permeates all levels of this White House.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Seriously, this is the least bullshit excuse the could come up with? If ANY corporation in the US tried this kind of thing, the wrath of SARBOX would rain down on them like you wouldn't believe.
Even given the staggering incompetence of the Bush administration in nearly all aspects, this just doesn't pass the laugh test.
1) To bad the Whitehouse isn't using an e-mail system like millions of other people. Wait they are. Like it or not MS Exchange is everywhere.
2) To bad the requirement for e-mail archiving and retention is unique to government. Wait, most publicly traded companies have legal and compliance requirements to do so.
3) To bad there is no market for software to archive and retain e-mail on one of the most common e-mail platforms. Wait, there is, and its huge.
4) To bad nobody has nobody has developed technology for this market. Wait, there are dozens of solutions.
To bad no one is getting fired, imprisoned or impeached over this one.
"...and don't call me surely."
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Backups? Well yes, funny story. We were upgrading the backup storage facility at the same and suddenly- oh look over there! There's a bird or something!
*runs*
Oh, and stop calling me Shirley.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
rely on humans to sort millions of emails
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer -- the real axis of evil!
Are the people involved in this process, from conception to the current state, being held liable for criminal negligence?
They're being heavily fined and potentially imprisoned for a blatant disregard for government policy?
Is there anybody in a position to make in-depth enquiries regarding the processes involved in this fiasco, who has the wherewithal and political clout to actually do something about it?
I didn't think so. Now bend over and get ready for another "Oops, we did it again!" situation.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
and rely on humans to sort millions of emails.
No problem. They had the job outsourced to India.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
...could they not use Auto Archive to put them to a PST instead of doing it manually. You have the pain of the PST files but you don't have to rely on imbeciles to manually archive stuff. Eventually rotate the PSTs onto removable media and store them in a nice safe place that the government already owns.
So, backup onto floppy and post to underground storage next to the accelerators at Fermilab then.
the audacity of bullshit.
At best given the explaination provided, the emails are not lost, they are simply unsorted.
Also, what about backup tapes? You don't do a major upgrade without a backup. Even the most slackjawed IT yokel (like me) knows that.
"...and don't call me surely."
You don't mind if I call you Surly, do you?
This guy's the limit!
the missing e-mails have nothing to do with nefarious scheming
By itself, that might be a sane assumption...but when you consider their other email problem, specifically, that they conducted government business over the RNC's computer to avoid leaving tracks, well, no. It's pretty clearly an obvious plan to avoid any record of what they do.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Strictly adhering to that maxim leaves you vulnerable to manipulation by malice masquerading as incompetence.
And frankly there comes a point where incompetence just isn't a believable excuse anymore. Being unable to implement an email retention system in 8 whole years is so bad, it doesn't matter whether it's incompetence or malice. The people responsible should be punished either way.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
utter bollocks. just unbe-fucking-lievable.
*every* backup system should result in a set a of data offsite or in a storage area never to be touched again.
even if you use incremental backup every nth backup should be a complete archival read only copy re the previous sentence.
the *very* worst case should be the last major backup is in a format that is not readable with the current system and some red faced admins need help to read read the data.
5 million emails? jesus wept.
add the conspiracy theory factor into the mix and you have something that, on the face of it, sounds unbelievable.
as one of our politicians in the UK said to another a short while ago "you cannot have it both ways, you were either ignorant or incompetent - and neither is acceptable".
be held accountable for this debacle?
I think for this administration it goes in a different order
1. ?????
2. Profit!
3. Blame it on Microsoft
4. Post on Slashdot
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Oh, for the love of fucking god. I'm getting awfully tired of this public spat about twitter, his sock puppets, and the people who want us to know about them.
Since most of us don't have a friggin clue what this is all about, make it go away. It really isn't better than the rest of the trolls and ACs spewing crap into Slashdot nowdays.
And, for the record, I am not twitter, one of his sock puppets, or whatever. But this whole on-going thing is getting pretty tedious.
Twitter, if you have nothing better to do than post under a few pseudonyms so you can get mod points and generally be an ass
So, assuming for a moment their story is true and it *is* just negligence, incompetence, and stupidity; it is still FEDERALLY CRIMINAL negligence, incompetence, and stupidity, Right? Books will be thrown at those responsible, yes?
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
"The Bureaucracy must expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." I wonder how much those human email sorters get paid? I bet one of them sabotaged the Exchange server
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
If only someone could come up with a device that can do repetitive work without error and without getting bored. Some sort of electronic mechanism that could look at a certain field in an electronic document and then put the associated text into an electronic bucket labeled for an individual.
Why hasn't someone invented something like this?
One of my first projects after moving to Vancouver was a couple of test installations of pre-release Exchange server back in 1996. Since then I've worked constantly with every version of Exchange in all kinds of backup situations. Early versions of Exchange were a bitch to restore but it's gotten better.
However, there has *always* been a way to retain and archive emails automatically from Exchange and no shortage of migration utilities from notes to Exchange. The reasons stated in the article just don't wash. No one, not even the newest tech school grad could come up with a system like that currently in use.
However, it may in fact not be intentional malice from the start but more likely an existing state of incompetence that was taken advantage of to hide traces or misdeeds or at least to make finding any evidence difficult.
This still doesn't address the use of non-government email systems for official business by Rove and other Republican members. According to the laws of the United States this is all highly illegal. Don't you care at all about what your government is doing or do you think whatever you do won't make any difference?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I lost a lot of email using Outlook and PST files for backups. After reinstalling Windows from scratch and trying to import the PST files into the new Outlook, 9 times out of 10 it couldn't import the email. That is why I switched to Thunderbird which has better success of backing up email files and importing them after a RRR (Reboot Reformat Reinstall).
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
They should just switch to hosted E-mail services with Google Apps :-)
Seriously, though: the White House should not be in control of White House IT services. An independent agency should be responsible for that. It's all part of checks and balances.
I work for a fortune 500 company. We migrated from Notes to Exchange about 5 years ago. I liked Notes more.
As an aside, Notes had support for POP3 so you could use any mail client you wanted.
Exchange has its problems. One time a few years ago our company "focal" (lead supporting 50K people) could not resolve a bug which crept into my profile without deleting me from the system and re-creating my account. Unfortunately when this happens, all of the group mail lists and recurring meeting notices with my name got dropped. There was no way to recover aside from manually correcting the lists. This caused headaches for several months afterward.
There is no good way to back up mail on an Exchange server. What I do is to create two rules which run whenever I send mail, and whenever mail comes in. They copy the message to an "archive" folder which is on another network share. Eventually the size will grow so that you'll have to archive your archive. The bottom line is that the burden of backup falls upon the end user.
Why does Microsoft feel the need to re-invent things that already have standard (and superior) solutions?
--
This space for rent
You can't argue that using Exchange in this case did not lower the total cost of ownership for the Whitehouse, by all indications, it would have been much more expensive for them if the emails had been preserved.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
We need to have a single gov wide IT department and we need to keep it mostly in house with little to no contractors in it as they are slowed down by red tape. The armed forces can keep there own system under this as well as long as it is not the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet tape set up they same must have the same contractor rules aka the gov has full control and can step in at any time and take over.
David Gewirtz of the Outlook Power and Domino Power magazines has published a book on the subject titled Where Have All the Emails Gone?
It's written to be read by a non-technical crowd, so if you pick it up be prepared to skip some chapters which go over networking and e-mail application basics. It's still a very interesting read in that provides some fascinating history going back to the first e-mail system used in the White House and works forward to the current controversy. None of the administrations is blameless in their handling of information.
Al Gore lost the 2000 election due to an "upgrade" whereby the 538-member Electoral College was replaced by the 9-member Supreme Court.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
a: saved to tape and sent to a vault on a daily basis
b: recorded by the NSA, who also saves and backs up data
So, it's all a load of bullshit - they're thinking that the public is stupid enough to buy it, or, simply kick it down the road another month or two until the ADHD press finds something shiny to get distracted by like Miley Cyrus Boobs or another blast from Trainwreck Spears.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
You're absolutely right, I couldn't give a toss who each individual poster is provided that what they have to say is interesting to read.
All of these blah, blah, twitter, blah, blah, sockpuppet posts are just moronic, annoying trolling and I wish you would stop because it's not in the least bit interesting.
Everyone posting this "it's a sockpuppet" name calling is going on my foes list so I never have to see it again.
This being Slashdot, everyone and their grandmother is tripping over each other trying to:
a) laugh at the government
b) laugh at Microsoft
c) insist that wiping out the emails was a conspiracy
It's funny how when this happens to thousands of companies around the world it's normal but when it happens to the government it's a conspiracy and/or major incompetence. With all due respect, it's perfectly normal. People who apply double standards and claim that this doesn't happen to large organizations on a daily basis should really sit this one out because you're not being honest.
It was internet cleanup day. The white house, unfortunately, forgot to disconnect their network from the internet.
blah blah blah
They couldn't find an IT guy who was unconditionally loyal to Bush, so they gave the job to Skippy, the neighborhood dog walker.
And stop using that bloody "Shirley" joke. It hasn't been funny for decades.
Not a typewriter
I know what that policy is. it's the "fuck you, we're covering our tracks and blaming microsoft" policy. I'm sorry, that doesn't fly around here. Someone broke the law. The white house CIO seems like the prime suspect. the presidential records act was violated, for all those who say, "what law?". Lost in an upgrade is what I expect from bill's plumbing and computer fixin's. It's even what I expect from enron. It is not what I expect from the white house. It shows an unparalleled level of incompetence and hubris.
When will he end up in jail?
They're using their grammar skills there.
Wow! ...just wow...
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
When you're thinking in economics, it's easy to do the math:
If the penalty for deleting mails that you are by law required to archive is less then the penalty for whatever those mails document, then it's the better choice to delete them.
It really is that simple.
And the only solution around that is one that's got its own problems, namely when you are required to have/show records in a case, and you can't or don't, you are assumed guilty and the penalty for deleting or not keeping those records is in addition to the penalty of the crime.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If the results of an election seem wrong, don't let lawyers get involved and muck up the process of sorting the thing out.
whitehouse.org has copies of many of the deleted emails sent to them by mistake.
Sorry folks, I seem to have gone off thread here </rant>
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
One of my favourite MS oddities.
Of course, this is what 90% of organizations seem to do anyway.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
How is incompetence an excuse for violating the Presidential Records Act?
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
If you've ever worked with government at any level you would recognize this situation as good planning. A senior IT person quit and I surmise that he mentioned to someone that the system was flawed, illegal, or both. It would be interesting to hear depositions of the past and present IT staff and aides involved in this process Even if we need to water board them. And disk and tape forensics is always an option, unless they were also "upgraded".
-- Wondering how long until the internet becomes fully corporatist, like television.
There are far worse crimes than destroying records which are specifically mandated by the Presidental Records Act to be maintained? A law which was passed not even that long ago, SPECIFICALLY to prevent Presidential abuse of power by destruction of incriminating documents? Which crimes exactly are you thinking of? Oh, that's right -- the ones which were probably detailed in all of the lost documents!
We've faced a similar issue and finally found a company (global relay) that does the archiving automatically. In government where you have to keep email indefinitely, finding a balance between mailbox size and performance can be a challenge. We were doing the pst thing and let me tell you, not the best idea in the world but honestly with exchange there aren't a whole lot of choices with this. Even worse a pst has a 2 gig limit and with some of my users that didn't take long to hit. Add on the fact that pst's are notoriously fragile it's not that far fetched that some emails could have been lost. but all of them, well they really must have screwed up or someone found a plausible excuse...
i find it amazing that these people have time to follow, notice trends and reply to all of those posts. and yes, i agree it's even more annoying than somebody else arguing with himself. as if all those "it's him again !" were... well, him as well.
Rich
The industry is full of stories like this, for years. Exchange by default can't handle it - it's still a workgroup server at heart, and subject to many OS and filesystem limits. Does Hotmail.com even rely 100% on Exchange, or is it still UNIX at the core?
De-centralized email storage and PST files?? COME ON!
It is almost CERTAIN to expect that they knew this would cause emails to be lost and take the system from bad to worse. Even a junior IT person fresh off the boat would say this was CRAZY to attempt, with FEWER benefits and increased risk. In the corporate world, this would be met by massive civil lawsuits and possibly criminal charges. Any "contractor" the WH employed would know this for a fact.
So given that such warnings had to have been given and they went ahead anyways, you have to wonder if strategic "loss" of emails was perfect cover for an email purge. Given the shady nature of these characters, I'm sure this was a calculated "feature".
I have hard time believing it is not intentional incompetence or malice. But at this point it doesn't matter. They have been committing crimes by not keeping a record of government email, and by using GOP computers to handle whitehouse email, and by not supplying the records to Congress after being subpoenaed, and by ordering the Justice Department not to enforce the subpoena. This is a massive cover up on a huge scale, and they have managed to block every attempt by Congress to investigate it. Whether they are covering up malice or negligence doesn't make the cover up legal.
However, the reason it must be malice (aka intentional incompetence), is that for these purposes it doesn't matter whether the files were correctly converted from one format to another. They could have given over all the records to Congress in whatever disordered form it was in, and let Congress figure out how to sort through it. There are very easy ways to pull information out of a complete morass of files. For example, just text index the whole mess, and search for any text containing interesting phrases, and then follow the references in those text blocks to related text blocks. You could probably get 90% of the meaning of a collection of email in random formats just by doing things like that. But obviously the whole point is to block that from happening, not enable it.
People call the White House incompetent, but when it comes to things like getting rid of evidence and avoiding any actual consequences for their supposed incompetence, they are masters.
Dear Mr. Gates;
Remember how we kept your company from being split up into different pieces and imposing various fines and regulations that would limit your operations as a result of your abuse of your monopoly?
It's a shame this favor we did for you did not allow you to fix your exchange product so that we would not lose all these important emails. *wink* *wink*
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Well, it sound slike their IT people just didn't get how Exchange archiving works. Which, granted, is pretty ass backward from Notes.
In Notes, you create a archiving policy. Say, "all messages older than 6 months." You then toss these emails to a designated server/mailfile and the users can access them all peachy-key, although typically you set the ACLs on the mailfiles to not allow any deleting.
In exchange, it works quite differently (with PST files being saved to a network drive of some sort) and it sounds like their IT people just had no idea how to implement it.
No, he suggested that Microsoft patriotically gained access to electronic communications in an effort to prevent terrorism. If the subjects have nothing to hide, what do they fear from Microsoft's oversight?
The problem is that it is illegal to use government email systems for non-official business like running a political party. This makes it mandatory to have a second system available to those people who are active in party operations. Then you have to rely on people to use the right system for their messages. Even with good intentions, people will make mistakes, and there will be gray areas.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
For the uninitiated, twitter is cleverly implying here that "M$" can read your email at will. You know, because "they can and would", which is appropriate because it sounds like something Bush would say.
So twitter, I suppose we are all waiting for proof of what you're saying. Some sort of proof that Microsoft is reading the .PST file on my computer? I'm sure every single Slashdot reader would love to get their hands on that kind of evidence.
More to the point, someone should mod your comment up to +5, given the importance of your assertion. That is of course if you actually can prove it in some way.
Just remember to use this same account to reply, not one of your other 9 or 10 sockpuppets.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Does this mean Bill Gates is going to vacation at Gitmo this year?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
write your own insightful posts, and let real people reply to them.
And be displaced by this guy who first-posts and then replies to himself multiple times? Am I now supposed to believe that he's being defended by a cadre of ACs?? I don't buy it.
Complaints are warranted every time this happens. Maybe once his karma gets negative enough (on all his accounts), we won't be having this discussion anymore.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
holy crap, maybe it's a slashdot induced psychosis. Multiple personalities locked in perpetual sock puppet flame wars. symptoms include compulsive posting and fanatical fanboyism
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
No, I don't mean CNN, NBC, or even the ones that a bit more out there like Huffington or even amateurs like Kos.
I mean comedians. Yes, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are probably doing a better job covering political events, because the mainstream press won't bother with the stupid stuff the White House does, nor does the less conventional media, because it's more funny and sad than informative.
Lewis Black once got his loudest laughs based on his aneurysm joke that stems from a sentence that's nonsensical without its context. Now that this administration has seemingly tossed rationality, common sense, and sanity in the general direction of South America, his character probably doubled his blood pressure meds for destroying one of his funniest jokes at the time.
At the same time, Bush and buddies give him plenty of material to gleefully mock and angrily stew over at the same time, so it's all good. So far, there are no sedition laws... yet.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
OK, let's ignore Twitter's use of sockpuppets (which has gotten so blatent, it hardly needs to be pointed out) and focus on the more serious issue, that he like to throw out anti-Windows and pro-Linux cliches without regard to context.
Here the context is a bunch of missing emails. There's no evidence that they were lost due to a Microsoft screwup. Officially, federal IT screwed up. But given the Bush administration's previous attempts to avoid archiving incriminating emails (such as relying on outside mail servers, which is not just illegal, but really horrifying in terms of national security) it's not impossible that this "mistake" was deliberate. Somewhere Rosemary Woods is smiling.
So shut up Twitter. The whole world doesn't revolve around your Linux obsession.
I'm looking forward to losing a few other things out of the White House during the November 2008 upgrade
Nice oblique Arthur C Clark homage. Nearly spit my coffee onto my keyboard.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Remember the Senate investigation into President Bill Clinton's investigations into his political opponent's backgrounds?
The investigation came down to a presidential staff member asking the Secret Service for a list of who had been in and out of the White House in the last 4 years (previous to Clinton taking office).
Well, the Senate grilled the crap out of a few Secret Service members and all they did was provide a list of people to the president (or his staff) about who had been in and out of HIS house recently.
I believe that after that fiasco, the Secret Service would rather have a system that DOESN'T WORK, rather than one whose data can be used against them (or the president).
I watched the grilling on CSPAN and one Secret Service agent got a new one reamed in front of the whole nation. I bet he is at a post in Alaska now.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence. Yes but the alliteration and parallelism works better this way. Malice and Magic start with the same letters. And Incompetence nicely parallels Technology.
thus it's both funnier and more thought provoking the original way. Your version is a more cynical editorial comment, the original is a more philosophical outlook that perhaps incompetence is more prevalent than malice but all too often we humans are given interpret the former as the latter
.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Trouble is, the investigators are also flying the 'L' on their foreheads, geniuine or not, and the would-be 'heroes' aren't fighting for this cause.
what our tax dollars are spent on.
I'm glad I live in a country that doesn't frivilously squander tax dollars.
Oh wait I do.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
There are a couple of SOX compliant archival solutions for Exchange that can get the job done just fine. If the SEC can mandate email retention on a 4 person investment banking firm, the White House sure as hell better be able to retain their important communications. I've never understood the Federal government mentality of building everything from scratch. My only exposure to government has been at the city level and they are more than willing to use off the shelf systems to get the job done. What is it about the Feds? Is it because of all the mandates and regulations that they place on themselves that they paint themselves into a corner where the only way to comply with all of those mandates is to write the damn software themselves... I mean, outsource it to contractors.
And there's a fair bit of that or there wouldn't be a national deficit that is so large it's starting to develop its own gravitational pull..
Insert
And no amount of lying will change that basic fact, nor the fact that every mail server recipient host also has a copy of the intentional fraudulent emails from the White House.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Not to defend microsoft, but COME ON! Who do they have doing their tech support? Is Bush doing it himself?
I find this frankly impossible to believe, and insulting on top of that.
I took the Govt online IT skills recruiting challenge a few years ago (and politely declined the offer to join with them). I'm not surprised by this development at all.
That's so true!
And insightful!
Too bad there isn't a Pulitzer Prize for Slashdot posts. Fm6 would be a shoo-in.
Shut up dude. You're just one of his sock puppets.
If I were his socketpuppet, wouldn't I use a different login?
Dude, you have way too much time on your hands!
IBM's HQ is in New York. Microsoft's is in Washington.
Both are blue states.
The AC that seems to have taken up poor twitter's cause is probably feeling dumb right now.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
In the past the interns had to stay up all night with the paper shredders to get rid of the evidence. These days you just have to misplace a couple of backup tapes and fail to follow data retention procedures. The communication still takes place but the evidence trail is easier to get rid of.
right here:
http://www.emc.com/products/family/email-xtender-family.htm
Exchange isn't something you can take out of the box, install while you are having a few beers, and expect great results. A large Exchange deployment requires planning. Everything from the server and network architecture to the storage subsystems needs to be thought out. This includes backups and archiving.
There are lots of companies that make tons of products to do this. CA, Symantec, and EMC, just to name a few.
This upgrade looks like a convenient cover for something more sinister.
-ted
Why do I have a feeling that if I sent an email to the President and Vice President threatening to kill them that they wouldn't have any problem retaining it? Maybe I should do it just to prove that they do have an effective email retention policy. ;)
I, for one, think this is excellent progress. Previously "losing" information on this scale would have needed a major fire, or a move between administrative buildings or a flood or similar catastrophe.
We can now achieve all of this without the hassle of packing information into boxes and mis-lableing them, and without the human cost of employing the four horsemen of the apocalypse to manage IT.
We should all be thankful.
Nullius in verba
This was done on purpose based on policy. "Not the Truth" is the rule of thumb for this administration.
It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between subterfuge and sheer incompetence.
Because the bullshit is so deep?
This is why we have not closed the borders. I can see the room now with thousands of alien workers reading every white house e-mail for sorting. Nice.
the non-government email systems were probably used by Rove & Co because the government ones were so fucked up
No, the non-government one were used because when those people (Rove, Bush, their staffers, etc.,) were working on campaign or party-related stuff, it's ILLEGAL for them to use the government systems. So, if they HAD used those systems for that sort of messaging, everyone would then complain about THAT.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I guess they have more horse lawyers in charge of IT now...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
It's true that putting incompetence first produces better rhythm and a very tight resonance with the original.
But the other way around is more insightful into human behavior.
Sufficient incompetence can accidentally mimic malice.
But a large part of malicious scheming is not just to avoid detection until it's too late - but to avoid responsibility when the result of the scheme comes to light. Thus when one is responsible for keeping evidence against oneself, two design goals for a malicious scheme are destroying the evidence beyond recovery and doing so in a way that is a plausible accident.
If the apparent cause of the accident is lack of due diligence when such was required it still doesn't adequately deflect blame. But if the apparent cause is incompetence to perform the requirements, it DOES deflect blame. It's not the actor's fault that he wasn't capable of performing the function. It's not the boss' fault because the actor had adequate credentials. Malice disguised as incompetence is an example of protective mimicry.
This if malice is indistinguishable from incompetence it's sufficiently advanced.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... for defamation.
Their "upgrade" was a downgrade from Lotus Notes to an Exchange server. Many financial services companies, are on Exchange, and have to record a lot of emails -- apparently they are saying that all the companies required to follow the law, cannot due it because they are on Exchange.
I know -- this excuse isn't going to fly with Slashdot -- but on its face, it is bad PR for Exchange.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Does this explain why Rove used the non-government system for 90%+ of his government-related emails?
10-50% just for convenience reasons and poor training I can see. 90%+?
No. Freaking. Way.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
After 3rd world elections and a 3rd world currency the US government's IT infrastructure is going the same direction ;)
It just doesn't get any easier than that...
Good lord, you figured me out!
You're actually the only other person on this site:(
While it's easy to point to a "White House Conspiracy" about this kind of thing, I don't think it's very realistic at all.
Not only would putting together a conspiracy like this be extraordinarily difficult given the number of people involved who would potentially leak information about said conspiracy, it would be a terrific success of social engineering coupled with a vastly incompetent plan to begin with. Hardly a month has gone by in the Bush administration where there wasn't a scandal, big news or a big decision of some sort that hit the newswire.
It would be far easier to use an external e-mail address to simply avoid the archiving requirements than to push an archiving implementation project out 6+ years. It would be far less conspicuous to delete individual e-mails than to delete days and weeks of e-mail. It would be far easier to destroy an entire archived collection than to find and hunt down e-mail from specific days and weeks.
During election cycles its easy to get sucked into propoganda, and sometimes its even fun. But more often than not, when you get sucked into political propoganda, there is something else that you should really be paying attention to.
Sending a guy who works for white house IT to jail might make you feel better, but it sounds like sour grapes to me - sourced from an overall frustration with the administration. Most of us here have worked on projects that went south at some point or another, and in large part it wasn't because of a lack of technical knowledge, but instead from other factors. We're talking about missing e-mail. How many of us work for companies that can find e-mail messages that are 6 years old? Most enterprises that I work with only started mass data retention projects within the last 2 years, and I would guess that there are a few days here and there where things didn't quite work as expected.
Yeah, it seems convenient that these particular days went missing, but with loose parameters, any day of missing e-mails in the last 8 years could be tied to a white house scandal.
1. Nerdy content that average people can't fathom
2. Anti MS
3. Anti Bush
My wife works for USDA. On several occasions, she has gone a week or more without email due to botched Lotus Notes upgrades. Mostly, I think it was due to incompetent contractors, but, considering the times I've had a gun put to my head and forced to use Notes (over a slow WAN connection - the very definition of torture) I am sure some of that is intrinsic to the application. I'm not sure what they use now, she does 90% of her email on her blackberry, but I think they have gone to Exchange/Outlook.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
What, like the guy in the $100,000 suit is gonna design a retention system for the guy who doesn't make that in a year? COME ON!
Oh wait, he does make that in a year.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Except the existing state was a fully functional backup system with appropriate safeguards and redundancy. The replacement was an utter clusterfuck that had at least one fix squashed just before implementation. Per the article, the guy in charge quit because they kept blocking proper solutions.
One can only read that there is deliberate stonewalling & willful incompetence because if they were actually so incompetent as to not be able to archive email with a sane solution after 7 years, then the Whitehouse network would have crashed & burned long ago. They did not, ergo, they cannot be as incompetent as would be required for this to be true incompetence.
I love how they are blaming Microsoft for loss of emails, didn't they think to back up the data manually instead of just building one. They need to make a book called: White House Email Backup for Dummies :-D
Something tells me there will be another "upgrade" on January 19, 2009.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
This is fascinating, as archiving emails has been a fundamental requirement for the financial services industry for years. We use EMC Legato. It has hooks into all sorts of systems. Exchange, or even messages sent through bloomberg terminals.
I'm certain there are at least a dozen companies offering similar solutions. This is a purchase order and maybe a few months of consulting time.
I thought Bush was going to run the government like a business. The first MBA President, blah blah blah.
How is it that his idea of business looks more like an Organized Crime Syndicate?
Just like the popular "downgrade" from Vista to XP, the white house should "downgrade" from Exchange to Lotus Notes.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24
I figure since Microsoft is willing to take the hit to the chin, they'll get some lucrative tax break for the next 20+ years. Or when there's a big Class Action lawsuit, they'll get Govt. bailout and make it all go away.
Was that fire in the building next to the White House several months ago burning the disc drives that contained the backups of all those emails?
Sigh.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
I guess nobody there ever heard of using qmail? Implementing a full-blown SMTP, POP3, and IMAP server with full and complete archiving of every message is trivial with it. Hell, I can build a cluster with these tools in a day or so to cover even a pretty heavy load.
And... I will not allow any proprietary email systems into my organization in any way, shape, or form.
At least they weren't lost in the floods of 1967.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Dog eats homework, blames aliens.
Unless... he's you...
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
oh shit, where was I yesterday...
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
... and you are paying for it with your taxes.
I'm just guessing that the telecom companies' various subpoena-less wiretaps might have saved some internet traffic. And don't tell me that our nation's intelligence services aren't monitoring internet traffic to/from government facilities (if they're not, then they're not doing their job). Some of this stuff has to be saved somewhere.
Ben in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde
To keep the smell away they'll have to be sure the bullshit stays deep...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Because I like to buck the slashdot trend of not actually RTFA before commenting, I read the article and also some of the discussion of it. Found this near the end and decided to repost it here (mainly because I'm too lazy to write up my own thoughts about the subject). I AM NOT the original author of this post, "The Real Bill Anderson" is. Here is the link to the Ars discussion where I found this: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/174096756/m/953006491931/p/4
.pst files (semi-tongue-in-cheek prod: if they were text files it's be far easier to search and examine!) being stored and named by government employees it is entirely *expected* that stuff goes missing and may or may not be found later.
... tell me it's never been seen outside of government? Go ahead. Accounts of new manager not doing old manager's projects come from all sectors.
It seems few commenters on this thread have been involved with the process of compliance archiving and restoring. The law does not require an automated system.
Why is that important? Because often, government or not, if it isn't required you don't get funding for it. Get it and you'll see mass complaints about the government going beyond it's requirements, pork passing, etc.. Yes, we the technical crowd agree there *should* be one. But how often does what we say *should* happen get passed on because should != required?
I've witnessed many an org pass on "shoulds" to get the "have-tos". No politics involved.
It's important also to note what is missing. The congressional report linked earlier goes into some detail, though not enough IMO. But what we do see is that it isn't all Bush or even Bush related emails. It's "components". Given the description of what can at best be described as an ad hoc method of
Again, no politics need be involved for this. Perhaps sad-but-basic office politics, and maybe high level politics. But the system and processes described are far from plausible, and in my experience in this industry over the last half-decade *common*.
Yes we can agree that the system sucks, and is ridiculous and non-scalable. And we can agree that the techies in the positions should have known that. But that does not mean BBB (Big Bad Bush) had anything to do with it. Indeed one thing from the congressional report mentioned earlier is that the office of the Vice President had lots of missing stuff. That has a familiar ring to it. Yes, read the GAO linked report all of it. VP Gore's office had stuff "missing".
No, that's not a defense-by-childhood-argument. There is a reason behind it. It's similar to tracking a server issue and it happening on the shift before you. Gore's office rightly concluded that that the FRA (Federal Records Act) did not apply to the OVP (Office of the Vice President), and neither did the PRA (Presidential Records Act). Therefore they were missing because they were not required to be there.
While we are under the impression that the records acts noted above require "all records", it is not true. For example, the the VP emails their [insert family relation here]] about dinner tonight or a movie tomorrow, those are not records covered by the acts. Nor should they be. We the people have no business reading those emails. Many may be shocked to learn the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) likewise does not require all email to be kept either. Again, this is sensible.
And it is nonsense. How does one decide what is a regulated email, and what is not? Who decides? This represents a fallacy in the notion that you can exclude certain emails from the system or rules. As a result most entities archive all of it. Which introduces other issues.
Regarding the current CIO not implementing something a prior CIO was working on
It is too easy and too simple to conclude that anything that relates or touches the "White House" is automatically controlled by the POTUS.
"they changed it to a manual process, where aides would manually sort emails one by one into individual PST files"
This is total nonsense, a generic backup application copies the files to tape. The only skill involved being the ability to swap the Monday tape for the Tuesday tape. The backup system copies all file types regardless of whether they are PST or not.
davecb5620@gmail.com
"A couple of years of not archiving emails due to configuration errors"
.. :)
.. :)
Like, where are all the tapes of the nightly, weekly and monthly SYSTEM BACKUPS. They do keep backups of the IT system of the Government of the worlds greatest democracy.
Like, I worked for a ten man architect outfit and even they managed to figure out that they needed backups. We didn't have to hire in a special contractor, we bought a HP Surestore tape unit
Disallow
was: Re:Interesting take on what REALLY happened
davecb5620@gmail.com
Having worked in federal government IT, I can tell you this is entirely believable. When I started working here, support would still walk to hundreds of desktops to manually install a new network printer. They also send out instructions to end users expecting them to search for dll files and check versions to see if a software upgrade was successful. Incompetence is alive and well in government IT.
Do you understand how the Exchange MTA works? Do you understand the nature of mailbox storage on an Exchange server both pre and post E2K3? It sounds like you are confusing standard mailbox file folders with PST files which aren't even used for mail storage on a standard Exchange server.
For whatever reason, the current system is a clusterfuck and far too much time has passed without a resolution and with visible stonewalling on the part of the government at getting a solution to be complete absence of malice as the article points out.
Global rules can be implemented on an Exchange server to do the replication required to perform some sort of journaling even if an external system is required to implement more in-depth rules based upon content and/or recipients.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Jeez, you're a twit. Even if I had mod points (and I haven't had them for a long time) it takes more than one moderator to knock off even a single point. Back when they still published Karma scores, it was about 25 karma points for a score point. So five different moderators would have to use all their points just for that one score point. To reach your current abysmal level, it would take 10 users.
Oh, wait, there's this evil conspiracy against you, right. It couldn't possibly be true that your posts are so irritatingly stupid that lots of different people mod you down, and continue to do so even when your starting score is -1!
Forget the conspiracies. Microsoft has no reason to shut you up. Clowns like you help Microsoft, because you convince people that the open source world is dominated by self-righteous idiots.
And enough with the sock puppets! If you had any creativity, you could maybe make it look like you're more than one person. But you don't, so you can't. You just make a bad reputation worse.