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Bush's Electronic Archives Threaten To Swamp National Archives
ColdWetDog writes "The New York Times reports that the soon-to-be-disbanded Bush / Cheney White House threatens to overload the National Archives with close to 100 Terabytes of data. This includes the Barney Cam and even 'formats not previously dealt with.'
By way of comparison, the Clinton White House dumped less than a single terabyte into the archives. Of course, Mr. Cheney, always the Good Citizen, tried to help out when he 'asserted this month in a court case that he had absolute discretion to decide which of his records are official and which are personal, and thus do not have to be transferred to the archives.'
Glad to see that somebody over there is trying to clean up the cruft for posterity."
'formats not previously dealt with.' If they can't open on a typical machine, they are probably just corrupt. Wait a second...
While the National Archives obviously must catalog and make available all the data in some form or another (honestly I do not know their rules & regs for that sort of thing, and it seems a good bit is missing), the mere act of storing 100 terabytes hardly seems all that daunting. NewEgg has 1TB Samsung Spinpoint harddrives available for $100 with free shipping. You can't tell me the folks over at the National Archives couldn't afford 100 of those plus some additional hardware to oversee the transfer of all applicable data to the drives for storage, at least until a better solution could be found. Hell, have the Bush/Cheney crew do it for them and stick the drives in a closet somewhere until they can sort through all that mess. It doesn't take a $144 million computer system to handle 100 TB of data.
Mr. Cheney, always the Good Citizen, tried to help out when he 'asserted this month in a court case that he had absolute discretion to decide which of his records are official and which are personal, and thus do not have to be transferred to the archives.'
Thereby making what he was doing immune to FOIA requests. Nice.
It's just unreal how unabashedly criminal Cheney is. Nobody ever calls him on it. Anyone in a position to do anything about him (other than Dennis Kucinich anyways) strangely...doesn't.
Of course, he's also the same guy who shot a hunting buddy in the face. And had the victim apologize.
Far more dangerous than W. Will not be sorry to see him go. Good riddance. Go retire on your inflated Halliburton stock and please leave my country alone.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"I'm told researchers like to come and dig through my files, to see if anything interesting turns up," Mr. Cheney said. "I want to wish them luck, but the files are pretty thin. I learned early on that if you don't want your memos to get you in trouble some day, just don't write any."
This really says it all, doesn't it? I mean, wasn't this essentially Nixon's view on things? That if the president (or his puppet master, vice-president Cheney) deems it not for the public's purview, it's none of your damn business? I mean, what part of PUBLIC office does this numbskull not understand? (Excuse me, the mastermind understands, just doesn't care.)
Sickening. What's even worse is that no one's gonna make this administration accountable for anything they've done. In fact, I'm sure no one's gonna really take a hard look at what exactly this administration has done until a looong time later; everyone's too preoccupied with moving on.
They have to store it without losing any of it. That means redundant storage distributed geographically. The cost of doing this is pretty significant.
What's more, the interest is not just historical, they should be able to access this information immediately. For example, when the new administration is looking to negotiate a deal with North Korea, they need to know exactly what the old administration was doing and why. They need to know what overtures the US has made and why. Additionally, they need to know what overtures the North has made and what they could mean. It will save the new administration lots of time to read the old administration's analyses instead of having to generate their own. Theoretically, the transition team should be assuring that this kind of institutional knowledge is passed, but in reality something always gets missed.
With this amount of data, you are looking at something a lot more complicated than a mysql database and a web based front-end. To be quite honest, I would be surprised if there is any off-the-shelf software capable of this task.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Because, clearly, he has an archive folder as "president of senate" and "vice president". It is far from insane to suppose he also has a folder labeled "questionable documents" he will put in the archive less likely to go public.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Problem is, some of this information is classified, and most of it isn't. Some of it legitimately contains private information that should not be made public yet (things like job applications). It contains personal information that should probably be permanently removed from what the public sees, such as employee social security numbers.
What isn't classified or private needs to be available to the public, what is classified or private needs to be available to people with the proper credentials. Some of it will be automatically declassified in 5 years, some of it in 7 years.
In short, somebody has to look at it before it is added to an index. Probably security will dictate that the classified information is stored on different machines, probably different networks, than the publicly available stuff. You might be able to write an algorithm that automates this process, but Google certainly isn't it.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
I hear you can't look at porn on the White House computers. NOW does it sound impressive?
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
The contingency plan, quietly approved by the National Archives on Nov. 7, emphasizes the difficulties posed by large numbers of White House records created with proprietary commercial software.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
As a last addition, 1 TB of data was added to the archives. It contained all the news footage, replays, and parodies of the shoe-throwing incident.
Than go driving with Ted Kennedy.
And where in the Constitution does it say that the Executive cedes power to Congress by a mere passage of a law (FOIA)? I thought the actual Executive was in charge of that branch.
For all of you constitutional purists, I'd ask where in Article I Congress has the right to limit executive authority, whether it's FOIA, FISA, the War Powers Act, "congressional oversight," etc. I am looking but can't find in the Constitution where Congress can do this without ratifying a new Amendment.
Oh, and we are still waiting for that big Clinton records dump into his library that we've been promised. I guess we'll have to wait until Hillary is elected president in 2016 - wait, re-elected in 2020 - before they dump everything.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
100 TB! Wow! That's about 60 hard disks or so! And I don't even want to imagine how much money you'd have to pay for those drives - it'd be a *four digit sum*!
100TB seems like a lot, but can you imagine how much data the Obama administration might leave? Considering that they seem more 'connected' then most other politicians.
/. but can you imagine the baggage left by some of these administrations?
there is always talk of obsolete formats here on
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
If you think this is bad today, this is only the tip of the ice burg. The national archives better ramp up for a drastic increasing curve of data to store as each new president is elected.
Not that i have the answer, but i can see it happening. Just look at the exponential increases in personal information for the average citizen.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maybe we can find out how someone can have the goodwill of nearly every nation on earth (even Libya offered to help!), a tame congress, wartime expediency in letting anything you like get through, signing statements to change anything you don't like, a booming economy, a military grudgingly ready even to abandon the Geneva convention if ordered and access to experts on every subject yet STILL muck it up so badly.
It is policy that dictates usage for personal communications and that varies by branch and office.
What you do have are laws preventing the use of federal systems for purely political uses. This is what was the problem with the mailing system a year or so ago. People were given blackberries and other systems for political and party related messages and because of government requirements not given those same types of tools for government business. People being people and since they had those tools available to them tended to use them for all types of messages.
The other big problem was that law there was no penalty for not recording the email for the national archive but there are penalties for using government systems for political reasons.
He may have been loud, but he wasn't very firm. When Bush effectively nullified the ban on the military using torture with a signing statement, McCain said and did nothing. When congress tried to extend the ban to prevent the CIA from using torture as well, McCain voted against it.
He may have been against torture at some level, but not as much as he was in favor of getting the nomination. When the two goals came into conflict, he caved.
--MarkusQ
Needle.
In a haystack.
"If there's anything we haven't classified or destroyed, let's make it impossible to locate."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
No, he loudly and publicly proclaimed his absolute unconditional refusal to endorse torture. Then, when his bill to prohibit it was quietly circumvented, he said and did nothing. Given the opportunity to vote for a revised bill that would have had teeth (by specifically prohibiting the CIA from torturing people, thus closing the loophole) he voted against it.
And then, on the campaign trail, he continued to play up his POW history and his objection to torture.
That isn't wisely refraining from shouting at your colleges, that's showing your true colors and folding like a hypocrite when it counts, and hoping the saps you pander to are too dumb to notice.
--MarkusQ
Government employees aren't supposed to be using government computers for non-government purposes. I can't complain if Cheney has a few shopping lists and personal emails lying around, but truly personal files should be few and small. If he claims that any substantial portion of his files are personal, he's either lying or he has been misusing government property.
No need to draw attention by stopping something; flood the infonet with too much bad information and create a bigger haystack. Not to mention all the FUD that can be done much easier now. You could even put out almost true information with slight crazy distortions to make the truth look bad.
The IMPORTANT INFORMATION WAS LARGELY DESTROYED ("mistakenly lost") and whatever might be useful will take forever to dig out and make any sense of.
Criminal neglect never applies to politicians and don't think that they do not know this.
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"If there's anything we haven't classified or destroyed, let's make it impossible to locate."
No problem.. send the media to Google. I'm 100% sure they can figure it out (unless the archive contents are encrypted).