In 1996, President Clinton enacted a computer reutilization act for all government property. If any item is deemed 'Educationally Useful' it is required to be made available to public schools and not-for-profits as a donation. Any items not picked up by schools or the like, are then made available by the pallet in a open auction. Whatever is left over is considered scrap and sent off for demanufacturing. Now before any of this equipment can be passed on to non-federal hands, it must be cleansed using the Dept. of Defense approved sanitization method dictated by NIST. Basically meaning it has to be wiped using the DoD algorithm, or if the equipment is non-functional it has to be degaussed, pulverized, shredded or the like depending on the type of item. Of course each Department and branch of government determine their own upgrade time frames based on budgets, projects, etc...like any other IT shop. And 3-4 years is about the average time frame in my experience most hardware is upgraded (and probably assumed given a 4 year Presidency, although the dates overlap his re-election). However, there is no chance that this data has magically disappeared because of this process unless it was setup to do so. And even then, you'd have to intentionally get rid of all email recipients local machines, their archives, PST files, etc...and then do the same to the entire server array AND the backup solution. And then you're also telling us the White House has no disaster recovery solution? No COOP plan, site, bank of servers that are cloned?
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In 1996, President Clinton enacted a computer reutilization act for all government property. If any item is deemed 'Educationally Useful' it is required to be made available to public schools and not-for-profits as a donation. Any items not picked up by schools or the like, are then made available by the pallet in a open auction. Whatever is left over is considered scrap and sent off for demanufacturing. Now before any of this equipment can be passed on to non-federal hands, it must be cleansed using the Dept. of Defense approved sanitization method dictated by NIST. Basically meaning it has to be wiped using the DoD algorithm, or if the equipment is non-functional it has to be degaussed, pulverized, shredded or the like depending on the type of item. Of course each Department and branch of government determine their own upgrade time frames based on budgets, projects, etc...like any other IT shop. And 3-4 years is about the average time frame in my experience most hardware is upgraded (and probably assumed given a 4 year Presidency, although the dates overlap his re-election). However, there is no chance that this data has magically disappeared because of this process unless it was setup to do so. And even then, you'd have to intentionally get rid of all email recipients local machines, their archives, PST files, etc...and then do the same to the entire server array AND the backup solution. And then you're also telling us the White House has no disaster recovery solution? No COOP plan, site, bank of servers that are cloned?