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."

Comments

Shadowy Government

[GMonkeyLouie]

Whenever I receive news that information that we're supposed to have access to from the Bush administration has gone missing, it makes me queasy. There's so much secrecy surrounding random little things that it's started to make me paranoid. Maybe it's just me wanting to blame the last eight years on a scapegoat, but I feel like someone at the top is trying to hide something really big and succeeding.

Re:Shadowy Government

[mhollis]

I have understood this outgoing administration to be more than secretive. they're positively paranoid and the only administration in memory that was similar was Nixon. All internal memos have been classified first. Declassification only happens when there is a strong and abiding reason why the memo should be declassified. Contrast that with Clinton, where all internal memos are not classified, unless there was a strong and abiding reason why the memo(s) should be classified.

When Bush announced that his administration would immediately prepare for a transition (before the 4th of November, which was election day in the US), I assumed that the first course of action was that this Bush administration would do what the last Bush administration did: [Rip] the hard drives out of their computers and tried to erase "sensitive" computer files in the White House and West Wing.

To say that the Clinton Administration started with a "clean slate" was an understatement. Later, Clinton lawyers ignored the dangers of historical archive deletion when faced with Republican destruction of historical records. Presumably, they wanted a "pass" from future Republican administrations.

Republican administrations tend to be very secretive. Democratic administrations tend to not. I shall expect the Obama administration shall have to purchase all new computers -- or at least hard drives -- in order to simply start up in their first week. This is a horrid waste of taxpayers' money all in the name of whitewashing one's past deeds (for good or ill).

Due to record-keeping, we now know that Nixon did know about the Watergate break-in. And we do know that he was very interested in its coverup. Nobody can be prosecuted at this time for that (those who were found guilty have all ready served their time). I would be very interested to know if Reagan's CIA planted the stacks of AK-47s used as evidence by his administration that the attack on Grenada was justified. And we still do not know everything about the Iran-Contra affair. These historical records are worth keeping because, well after the Statute of Limitations, America gets another look at how an administration dealt with the world.

It is a shame that any Administration is that interested in "rewriting history" in order to unfairly burnish a legacy, which in the case of "W" is hardly salvageable.