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."

Comments

Formats not dealt with?

[eggman9713]

'formats not previously dealt with.' If they can't open on a typical machine, they are probably just corrupt. Wait a second...

Re:Formats not dealt with?

[Atario]

When trying to hide something in plain sight, drown 'em in irrelevant crap.

It's just unreal

[Weaselmancer]

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.

Re:It's just unreal

[Chris_Jefferson]

Remember, this is the republican party. If they get back in any time before he dies off, he will be there in the background, pulling the strings of whatever new puppet president they choose. McCain would probably have stood up to him, but I suspect now the republicans blame him for their loss, it could well be back to the "Bush Box" to find their next candidate. Scary thought.

Re:It's just unreal

[Zorque]

Sorry, Right-wingers, that wasn't a troll. Just because this guy said something you don't like doesn't make it any less true, or any less valid of an opinion to express.

Re:It's just unreal

[schon]

McCain would probably have stood up to him

Two points:

1. McCain lost any credibility he had when he endorsed US torture of foreigners.

2. If McCain was someone who would stand up to Cheney, he'd never have been chosen for the Republican ticket.

Re:Not much of a threat

[MichaelSmith]

I think google have a free service where they lend you a Network Attached Storage box. You load it up with whatever then send it back to them. You still have online access to the data and google indexes it for you.

Disgusting

[pnumoman]

"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.

Re:Disgusting

[dbIII]

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?

Looking from overseas I find it sadly funny that people who call themselves "Republicans" really want to act like absolute monarchs instead. Hopefully future administrations will act a little bit more like the government George Washington and others wanted instead of like some 18th century German principality.

More to it than that

[an.echte.trilingue]

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.

Wouldn't work here

[an.echte.trilingue]

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.

Re:100TB

[Firehed]

I hear you can't look at porn on the White House computers. NOW does it sound impressive?

We've been saying this for years

[an.echte.trilingue]

For years I have been listening to people here rant about the potential for records to get lost due to proprietary formats. Nobody listened, and now it is happening:

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.

Re:We've been saying this for years

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there are advanced national and international programmes for digital preservation around the world. Quite a few people in those programmes have participated in these discussions.

But the message hasn't entirely got through to all the other government departments, who are still stuck in a paper mentality. Most are willing but don't know quite what to do (and certainly aren't sure how much it will all cost), and a few are actively difficult to work with, for whatever reasons.

Wow! So many HDs

[Anonymous Coward]

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*!

the next white house team...

[acedotcom]

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.

there is always talk of obsolete formats here on /. but can you imagine the baggage left by some of these administrations?

Check the record

[MarkusQ]

Umm, McCain was the loudest critic of torture in the Senate. That's one of the reasons a lot of people DIDN'T like him as a candidate for president. He would have let thousands die rather than twist someones arm. Remember he was tortured, that changed his psyche.

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

Re:100TB

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Needle.

In a haystack.

"If there's anything we haven't classified or destroyed, let's make it impossible to locate."