Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Whitehouse Emails Were Lost Due to "Upgrade"

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the upgrading-to-orwell dept.

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."

7 of 482 comments (clear)

  1. This is a classic case of... by FuzzyDaddy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Strategic Incompetence"

    --
    It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
    1. Re:This is a classic case of... by PawNtheSandman · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Mission Accomplished"

    2. Re:This is a classic case of... by Chris+Burke · · Score: 5, Insightful

      (Such amazing IQ swings we see. Genius! Moronic! Brilliant! Ape-like! Bing-bam-boom! Sometimes several flip-flops in one day! One would almost wonder if the problem lies in the observers, rather than the observed.)

      The problem lies in this ridiculous line of thinking where someone can only ever have one adjective applied, and that adjective must apply to everything they do.

      Here's the dope: The Bush White House is quite adept at playing politics -- genius when Rove was involved -- including yes the ability to make apparent incompetence into a strength. They are skilled at making the organizations they control work for them, producing the information they want to hear, and failing to find or losing the information they don't want anyone to hear, to support their political goals. When it comes to actually executing policies outside of Washington, they're terrible failures because in reality you can't get rid of facts you don't like and keep only the ones you do.

      What's so contradictory about that? I'm "brilliant" with computers, I'm "moronic" with cars. To think that one precludes the other is idiotic. But then again, so is the whole "flip-flop" figure of speech.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
  2. These days... by neokushan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between subterfuge and sheer incompetence.

    --
    +1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
  3. Re:These days? by Shinmizu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

  4. Re:Six P's by Jeremi · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This shouldn't be taken as a Micr$oft bash as much as an example of poor planning.


    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.
  5. Re:so to summarize... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Funny

    Basically this comes down to either:

    The Government was Incompetent.
    or ...
    The Government is lying and covering up.

    I understand the concept of Occam's Razor, but it could really be a case of AND instead of OR.

    It fits the results better, actually.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!