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Air Force Has Lost 100,000 Inspector General Records (thehill.com)
schwit1 shares an article from The Hill: The Air Force announced on Friday that it has lost thousands of records belonging to the service's inspector general due to a database crash. "We estimate we've lost information for 100,000 cases dating back to 2004," Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told The Hill in an email. "The database crashed and there is no data..." The database, called the Automated Case Tracking System (ACTS), holds all records related to IG complaints, investigations, appeals and Freedom of Information Act requests.... "We also use ACTS to track congressional/constituent inquiries."
The Air Force said they were "aggressively" trying to recover the data, adding that they had no evidence of malicious intent.
The Air Force said they were "aggressively" trying to recover the data, adding that they had no evidence of malicious intent.
Yep. Something was in those records someone wanted disappeared. This is SOP in government now; systematically destroying disk drives, deleting PST file content, wiping servers.... just another cover-up.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The reason why contractors are used is simple... Campaign contributions.
Campaign contributions are only part of the problem. Another big factor is revolving door jobs. Most senior military officers serve for 30 years, from their early 20s to their early 50s. Then they "retire" on 75% pay, and are ready to move on to a civilian career. If they steer deals to the contractor during their service, there is often a wink-wink deal that they will get a job offer upon retirement. Then they can use their connections and contacts to work out similar deals with their former subordinates who have now moved up in rank.
I used to work for a defence contractor, and all the senior executives were former generals or colonels.
Of course, you can avoid all the expense of hiring they officers, by instead just providing them with hookers and cigars.
You... do... have a backup, ... right?
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Sadly, I can attest to this being frighteningly common. I work in the data storage industry (on the software side) and some of our customers don't have proper backups. I don't want to think of all the times we've had a customer escalation that was almost exactly like this. The customers frequently expected our support staff to be able to wave a magic wand and get their data back. It's really impressive how incompetent some system and storage administrators can be. And incidentally, only one of the ones I remember was a government account. Most of them were medium or large sized companies that just didn't have good people running the place. Although, the one that was government was the most spectacular one. They ended up paying a big consulting team to actually go back in and reconstruct most of the data by hand from the bits and pieces left intact on the storage. It was also the one that was basically admitted to have been intentional sabotage.