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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."
"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
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It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between subterfuge and sheer incompetence.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with saying "Never blame on malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence."
Best Slashdot Co
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.
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.
Because "works" in this case is a means by which they can get caught?
If I was going to be as corrupt/incompetent as this administration, I'd try to limit how much that criminality/idiocy could be directly documented for criminal proceedings/historical study.
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.
Or perhaps an example of really good planning. If I was planning to make sure a few million potentially incriminating emails never found their way into the public eye, that is how I might do it. Certainly if I had spent a number of meetings discussing how and when Americans should torture people I would be motivated to do so.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It fits the results better, actually.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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".
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.
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.
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.
How is incompetence an excuse for violating the Presidential Records Act?
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.
You have to prove criminal intent. Incompetence is not a crime.
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