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Hard Drive With Clinton-Era Data Missing From Nat'l Archives
CWmike writes "An external hard drive that's believed to contain nearly 1TB of data from the Clinton Administration is missing from the US National Archives and Recording Administration (NARA). The drive includes more than 100,000 Social Security numbers and home addresses of people who visited or worked at the White House. Among those whose information is on the list is one of then-Vice President Al Gore's three daughters. The drive also contained details on the security procedures used by the Secret Service at the White House, as well as event logs, social gathering logs, political records and other information from the Clinton administration. Rep. Darrell Issa, (R-Calif.) said the Archives was in the process of converting information from the drive to a digital records system when it apparently disappeared. The hard drive was apparently removed from a secure storage area to a workplace where at least 100 'badge-holders' had access to it, Issa noted."
There was a 1TB HDD in the Clinton administration? I knew it, he was a Terminator!
But it's OK, because the data was encrypted, right? RIGHT?
Is it just me, or is "Clinton-era data" slang for "jizz"?
Obviously not secure enough.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Any finance-sensitive and/or war crime reports on that disk I wonder...
Somebody check Sandy Berger's underwear!!!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Besides having data from back in that time frame. It's interesting that the summary doesn't point out that it was lost in the latter part of the Bush administration, and the story mentions the timeframe without being as balatant about who was in power.
I sense partisanship.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The article says "data from the Clinton administration", not "hard drive from the Clinton administration".
home addresses of people who visited or worked at the White House. Gee, I can't imagine who would be interested in this information. After all, it's not like anybody in the White House at that time was a well-known philanderer with a brilliant but opportunistic wife who might want to track down some of his late-night "visitors", is it? Maybe it's just our new Secretary of State working on her enemies list. I'm not sure 1 TByte is enough to record all of the bimbos, but at least it's a start.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I call shenanigans (or bad reporting) on this story. There were no 1TB hard drives 9 years ago (except maybe in HD manufacturers labs). You might have had an external array, but not a drive. I don't remember for sure, but I'd say a single hard drive was max ~250GB in 2000?
Maybe the original data was archived on a modern device. If you are relying on hard disks it would make sense to move the asset (the data) on to media which you can maintain.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
4 milligrams of ram isn't even enough to make a lamb sandwich, let alone scream.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
They should check the London Underground train system. I hear a lot of missing secret government data ends up there.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
It depends on where you inject it, I suppose.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I've noticed a lot more conservative-leaning folks (and moderators) coming out of the woodwork in the last couple months.
I suspect it's not that people here have partisan motives so much as it's "cool" to be against whomever is in power. I kind of remember the Old Days of Slashdot in the last Clinton years being this way too.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I guess where you put the 4 mg WOULD make the ram scream!
In my other life, I eat cats.
TFA does shed some light:
-The drive loss occurred between Oct. 2008 and March 2009. TFA also states that the *data* was Clinton era, not the hardware itself. The data could've been census data from the Grover Cleveland administration for all that it matters to the incident. The disappearance occurred during the switch from the W. Bush to Obama administrations.
-The item stolen was an "external hard drive", which opens up the floor to discussion. Could have been a USB enclosure, could have been an externally attached Fibre Channel storage array.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
This wouldn't be your desktop PC 3.5" hard disk drive or a 2.5" laptop drive. This would be an server-class hard disk drive the size of a briefcase
Network attached storage
Lacie hard disk drive
The problem is, it probably didn't look like a piece of computer equipment and ended up being moved somewhere totally different.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Since the summary said the disk "is" missing, i was going to chime in (humourously) with "Whether it really IS missing depends on what the meaning of IS IS..."
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Who ever stole it reformatted and is using it for bit torrent porn downloads now.
And in an odd quirk of fate, filling it back up with the original contents...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
I call shenanigans (or bad reporting) on this story. There were no 1TB hard drives 9 years ago (except maybe in HD manufacturers labs). You might have had an external array, but not a drive. I don't remember for sure, but I'd say a single hard drive was max ~250GB in 2000?
I call shenanigans on your reply. The data was from the Clinton administration. Now I am nowhere near the geek/nerd/intellectual that most /.ers are, but maybe, just maybe, the data was transferred onto the device at some point?
From an article on the same website as the original linked story (http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=913335("Missing drive had no original Clinton records, says National Archives"): "According to the statement released this afternoon, the 2-TB drive was being used for "routine re-copying" as part of a records preservation process. The small 2.5-pound Western Digital MY Book external hard drive contained information from about 113, 4mm tape cartridges and weighs about 2.5 pounds. The tapes contained "snapshots" of the contents of hard drives of employees leaving from the Executive Offices of the President and contained both federal and Presidential records."
i r in ur
Maybe identity theft will become more of a concern when it happens to a somebody.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
but they didn't ruin the place like the most recent outgoing group did.
How do you know, if the data's been lost?
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
It'd be nicer if the real world would learn from the cryptography field. Meaning no White House security procedure would be considered really safe if it hasn't been publicly reviewed. Everything else is security through obscurity, and it's bound to be leaked as shown. Just speculating.
Ah, no public review is necessary when it clearly falls under the guise of Common Fucking Sense. When grasping for words to describe the incompetency here, I believe in the ramblings of of the Bull Durham Coach. This is a simple game. You get the data. You save the data. You encrypt the data. YOU GOT IT?!?
You proved the parents point I think, unless of course your more conservative than not.
Slashdot always is on the whole for things that you vehemently disagree with. I've been noticing /. become pro-religion, anti-science, and even more towards the libertarian fringe of late. But then again if I was a pro-science, anti-science, libertarian I would probably think that the atheistic pinkos were taking over.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
According to the article, "the loss is believed to have occurred between October 2008 and March 2009." Thus, the hard drive could have been lost during the Obama presidency.
I think it's just that you see people criticizing the current administration, and see it as "the Right bashing the Left".
Some of us just don't like power-hungry politicians, no matter which way they lean socially.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
Audio of interview with Monica Lewinski.
WJ 'Sax' Clinton: Step a little closer and speak into the mike...
If we start seeing lots of dirt being dug up on the Clinton administration, now we'll know why.
not that I'm terribly fond of them, but they didn't ruin the place like the most recent outgoing group did.
No, the Clinton White House had their own special brand of corruption and evil. The W administration didn't "ruin" the place; the country survived okay, but W acted like he was Caesar, not the President.
A pox on both their houses, Democrat and Republican, I say.
but they didn't ruin the place like most recent outgoing group did.
Pelosi ... still there ... still there ... still there ... still there ... got promoted ... still there
Dodd
Frank
Kennedy
Obama
I don't get it. Were you making a joke?
Check eBay.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
How do we put this in terms this gang can understand?
How often has an IT admin, just doing his job, backed up sensitive HR files to an unsecured backup medium stored in an unsecured area? What? Encrypt the backup just for a few HR files? The files are scattered all over the SAN. Too much trouble. Besides, they're safe here. There's just eighteen admins with access to the area. Yah--the same eighteen people who know the one password we use for all the databases.
In an Archive, the preservationists are the "techies". They keep the archive available. These are the guys who keep building indexes and copying stuff from old media to new media so it's always readable. They are the "backup people", and like most IT admins, they don't let anything get in the way of doing what they believe is their mission.
What most likely happened was that, instead of taking their equipment into the high security zone to process the sensitive information in there, they brought the sensitive information out to their equipment in the low security zone. It was the expedient thing to do. I think also illegal.
No conspiracy here, just laziness and a lack of security awareness.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I bet it turns up, through file sharing, on a PC in Iran.
Yeah, you sense partisanship, your own. The article didn't say or even imply the Clinton admin spirited away the data, fuck 1 tb drives didn't even exist in his administration. The article title is "Hard drive with Clinton-era data missing from National Archives". As in, a hard drive with Clinton era existed (ie they didnt destroy/lose the data before it was transferred to the archives) and now it is missing. The article clearly says "The drive was discovered missing in early April and the breach was immediately reported to senior officials at the NARA".
Furthermore it is being reported on by ComputerWorld, a site about tech news that doesn't exactly seem to have some grand political agenda (unless that agenda is to point out exactly how incompetent the IT staff at the National Archives is).
It's clear the partisan element here is you, and your thinking has become so clouded you are seeing conspiracies where there aren't any. We have a name for that, it is called paranoia. Paranoia seems to be behind a lot of the mistakes the Bush administration made, perhaps you should learn from their mistakes.
Data archives should be encrypted where possible, and data archives stored on external drives should always be encrypted. Furthermore, Social Security numbers of Clinton era staffers should have been purged in the first place, as there is no historical reason to save them and plenty of reason to delete them. This is a fuck-up by the National Archives, and they should be held accountable for their fuck-up. There is no reason to complicate the matter with politics.
They were actually reporting it as a single *2TB* external hard drive.
Of course it was one of the total airhead reporters and CNN is known for not even taking to their own IT folks down the hall to make sure something they are saying about technology even makes sense on their surface.
As well as that....nearly 1TB of data, if compressed, could take up 300GB of space, or less.
Depending on the data, of course.
If it's just a bunch of excel files with personal info in them, they'll compress quite well. .bmp files of everybody's fingerprints, it will also compress well.
If it's
If it's binary biometric data (unlikely) then it won't compress well at all.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
How do you know, if the data's been lost?
Because there's no evidence of it, of course!!
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
What? No.
Lacies are not enterprise class server drives, they are external HDDs intended for workstation and portable applications, and ioSafe didn't exist during the Clinton administration, they were founded in 2004. The ReadyNAS which you linked to a picture of didn't exist until a few years ago.
The products you link to are highly specialized consumer-grade/small-business solutions.
Enterprise class server drives REALLY are 3.5" standard drives, that you could plug into any workstation with the required SCSI/SAS support
Server grade NASes and SANs are not 'closed boxes' the size of a briefcase; some of them are 1U/2U (size of a briefcase), but multiple standard hard drives get plugged into them.
What sets apart Enterprise class server drives from consumer grade disk drives is: speed, interface, and reliability.
A typical enterprise-level server drive is: 3.5" SAS (or SCSI), 15,000 RPMs. With a high MBTF.
A typical consumer grade drive is: 3.5" or 2.5" SATA (or IDE/ATA), 5400 RPMs or slower. With a lower MBTF (shorter expected lifetime).
I think the only reasonable explanation here really is that the data was migrated to new hardware.
This makes sense; older drives will eventually fail due to bit rot and mechanical issues, if hard drives are placed in storage, they should be spun up at least once a month, to avoid mechanical degradations.
The safest most convenient way to keep info available for archives and safe from bit rot is to consolidate it on large disk drives
Though I think their practice of letting workers move the drives around is a mistake.
They _should_ be plugged into some type of server device.
Drives should never be allowed to leave a special secure area that personal possessions (things like bags) aren't allowed in.
And there should be thorough 24 hour video surveillance of said secure area.
Sandy Berger borrowed it. I'm sure he will return it soon with no revisions made. :-)
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/apr/02/nation/na-berger2
If it's .bmp files of everybody's fingerprints, it will also compress well.
Nope--it's one file. It's the .bmp of Monica Lewinski for her photo ID badge. It's a lot of pixels.
There's no place like
Also wag that finger on that dais.
I'll call your BS. Quote from article: "the loss is believed to have occurred between October 2008 and March 2009." Seems the time of uncertainly lies equally in both administrations, which you spin to the left. Partisanship indeed.
doosh
I have seen first hand the decommissioning processes for IT equipment. If companies and the general public had any ideas what happens to "your secure data" you would just be shocked and amazed. Your valuable data is put in a container and shipped over seas to various countries which basically pay per the KG. Your network may be secure, but once decommissioned your data is basically available to anyone.
This wouldn't be your desktop PC 3.5" hard disk drive or a 2.5" laptop drive. This would be an server-class hard disk drive the size of a briefcase
No.
It is a two terabyte Western Digital MY BOOK external hard drive, measuring 6.5 x 2.1 x 5.4 inches.
Citation here: http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/20/lost.hard.drive.clinton/index.html
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!