Slashdot Mirror
Bush Administration's E-Mail Deluge May Overload Archive System
Lucas123 writes "The Clinton administration generated 32 million e-mails. Bush's administration has generated 50 times as much data — 140TB, 20TB of which is email — which soon will have to be archived through a new government-built records management system. The new system may not be up to the task because the technology behind it may not be able to handle the sheer volume of data along with the fact that the Bush administration has been slow in providing the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) with needed information about the records, according to a Computerworld story. Questions have also been raised about millions of missing e-mails from between March 2003 and October 2006. 'It wasn't until this summer that an intensive effort began to share information,' said Ken Thibodeau, director of NARA's Electronic Records Archives."
If it anything like our corporate mail server I would bet you the number one space filler is people making minor changes on documents then reattaching them and forwarding them back to the same 50 people who just got the previous version of the document, repeated over 100 iterations as the email soon becomes a 2GB mess.
Well, Clinton never tried to insist that his VP wasn't part of the executive branch,
It's called "Unitary Executive." That is, there's only one guy in the executive branch that gets to make the decisions. It's entirely up to the President how much of a role he gives the Vice President. Under George Washington, John Adams lamented that the only thing he could do was preside over the Senate and then, he had no say on anything unless there was a tie. It drove him nuts.
If you read the Constitution, Article II groups the Vice President in with the executive branch, but the ONLY place it provides a job description for him, other than sitting around, waiting for something to happen to the President, is in Article I, Section 3 where it says he is to preside over the Senate and break ties.
As for the rest of your comment, every administration keeps secrets and covers things up. All of them. It's not just a Bush thing or a Cheney thing, it's a Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, et al thing. Some are better at hiding it than others... and some people simply refuse to open their eyes if it is "their guy" in the White House.
Stop Koolaid Politics
The Bush administration moved the White House from a Notes/Domino based system to a Microsoft Exchange based system.
Before moving, they'd had no downtime -- even when congress was taken out for 2 days by the code red word (they were on Exchange).
In moving, they mysteriously 'lost' all their backups for a period of time that was suspicious as hell, and now they can't scale to handle the capacity issues they face.
In a Notes/Domino world, this kind of archiving problem wouldn't be all that hard to deal with. You'd just need enough storage for it, and create archives per week/month/year (or an archive per individual's mailbox, or whatever) to put on as much hardware as was required. I single checkbox would be all that was needed to have it encrypted as well.
Oh well. I guess if conveniently "loosing" mail when you don't want it found is one of your design goals, than you probably want to migrate to something less reliable.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln