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

[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: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: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.

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*!