Posted on 05/10/2005 2:39:47 PM PDT by Libloather
Clinton tapes face destruction
BY Aliya Sternstein
Published on May 10, 2005
A proposal to get rid of Clinton-era backup tapes has drawn fire from some historians, but federal officials say all the data will be preserved.
According to a May 3 notice published in the Federal Register, the National Archives and Records Administration would discard 9,193 backup tapes containing duplicate versions of classified electronic records, mostly calendar data, for some staff members of the Clinton administration’s National Security Council.
The notice pertains to the data from a small number of NSC staffers and their secretaries, who continued to use older software known as Professional Office System, or PROFS, to maintain electronic calendars and call logs to schedule daily activities and appointments. A proprietary IBM office management tool, PROFS was used by a few NSC staff during the Clinton administration. It was not the council's main e-mail system, which NARA is retaining as a separate series.
The notice states that NARA will use other electronic media to store copies of the presidential records scheduled for disposal. It does not specify whether NARA will save the full set of copies in the same format or use another format that might not contain identical metadata, but NARA officials told Federal Computer Week that they will preserve all the data on the tapes.
Although the agency wants to get rid of physical tapes used for backups, the actual data will be preserved completely, said Nancy Smith, director of the presidential materials staff at NARA. That preservation will include calendar headings and all associated metadata, she said. "Additionally, all PROFS notes and documents contained on these backups -- applications only used for six months into the Clinton administration -- have been restored with metadata," Smith said.
NARA officials said they regret the confusion caused by the Federal Register notice. Historians have expressed concern that the wording left open the possibility of losing some of the data on the tapes.
"If they are doing a new set, then that is very risky," said Anna Kasten Nelson, a historian in residence at American University. She has experience with the Freedom of Information Act and has written about national security processes. "Various side comments or signatures may not be transferred.... They are very vague on this."
That incidental information could be revealing, Nelson said, citing as an example the importance of knowing who was informed of meetings and on what dates those meetings were held. The logs, for instance, might note that the national security adviser at the time, Sandy Berger, received a document at 9:05 a.m. and then sent it to the secretary of the State Department at 10:03 a.m.
"They tell us something about the way policy was made in that White House," Nelson said.
She added that the notice seems foggy on the subject content of the tapes and does not specify if calendar headings, such as "Berger to discuss Bosnia," are on the tapes.
Comments on the proposal are due by June 17. After NARA officials consider the feedback, they will issue a second notice constituting a final agency action if they decide to proceed with disposal.
"Someone should be writing an objection to this," said Scott Armstrong, a historian and frequent critic of NARA. "This is not material that should be destroyed. This is so poorly written."
Armstrong said the notice's wording makes it sound as though NARA will destroy the only versions of NSC’s classified records that are not among the small segment specifically designated by the NSC staff as of archival value and the few materials preserved under earlier litigation.
He is also concerned about losing all the metadata -- information that shows how, by whom and when the messages were created, edited, sent, received, forwarded, altered, replied to, copied, stored and retrieved.
"If the person in charge of arms control spent a large amount of time organizing a volleyball game, that would be of significance," Armstrong said. "It's hard to imagine what would not be of historical significance."
Electronic records reside on federal machines in the office, and NARA also creates tapes with periodic "snapshot" backups that capture data from the entire system at the end of a presidential administration. Those snapshots do not preserve information that Clinton era staffers chose to delete.
Historians have lost document preservation battles before. In 1995, the national archivist at the time, John Carlin, approved General Records Schedule 20, a records management plan that permitted federal agencies to delete electronic records if they made paper printouts for long-term storage. Although researchers warned that deleting the electronic copies meant erasing an important information trail, the disposal went forward anyway.
The current proposal would exclude the backup electronic records that Armstrong once successfully sued to preserve. The Federal Register notice states that NARA will keep all notes and other documentation related to backup tapes created between Jan. 20, 1993, and March 28, 1994. Those records went through a tape restoration project after Armstrong sued to preserve them.
In the early days of the nation, document writers kept careful notes and exchanged drafts, Armstrong said. Now people rely on e-mail and metadata for preliminary work and preserve only final versions of documents in many cases, he said.
"We have more complete records of the founding of the country than we do for the last 25 years," Armstrong said.
Wow, PROFS - that takes me back. Ford used to use it, and I had the misfortune of having to deal with it via a supplier company - we had to maintain a dedicated link to their mainframe and install 3270 mainframe terminal emulators on all our PCs.
IF YOU FIND ALL CAPS HIGHLY ANNOYING, THEN YOU WOULDN'T HAVE LIKED PROFS.
I thought maybe they found a bunch of his old 8-tracks.
Oh who wants to hear hours of a certain intern making sucking & slurping sounds...[/sarc
anybody believe that, I got a bridge for you
"We have more complete records of the founding of the country than we do for the last 25 years," Armstrong said.
That's a very powerful statement on the true state of politics in our country today.
> on 9-track tape, encoded in EBCDIC
Wow, that does take me back. Tapes are going to get bit rot anyway. Burn em onto CDs, then chuck em.
With the hellish machinations of the Clintoon White House, I'm not surprised to hear this at all. (Reminder to self: Go back to Alamo-Girl.com and refresh yourself about Al Gores' and others 'over-written hard drives'.)
That's fine with me. Hang the SOB, burn the body and scatter the ashes, and remove all records and every trace of his ever having existed. Now THAT would be a legacy...
Even at the highst storage density of 6350BPI, they could only hold 170 megabytes - just over one quarter of a compact disk. Prior to that, the maximum capacity was 40 megabytes, requiring sixteen and a quarter tapes to equal one compact disk.
Each tape, when wrapped, is about an inch wide and a bit under a foot in diameter. 9,316 tapes thus take up lineal 776 feet of shelf space.
A modern tape storage system, such as SDLT-II:
... has a capacity of 300 gigabytes per tape, which translates to SIX tapes for ALL the data on 9,316 9-track reels. Given the likely nature of PROFS data, you could probably compress it and fit it all on two tapes. You could stack them up and carry them around with you without a basket, or toss them all in your briefcase, instead of maintaining a room big enough to hold 130 six-foot tall shelving units full of tapes.
Clintoon skates again.
You mean someone still uses those dinosaurs? I don't think there are any companies still making that media. Most people I know who need to get tapes like that read go to a service bureau to get the data copied onto more modern media like DVDs.
ASCII and ye shall receive?
The reason these tapes should not be destroyed: Future technology will be able to decode the criminality contained on these tapes that current technology is incapable of decoding.
"but federal officials say all the data will be preserved.
anybody believe that, I got a bridge for you"
This smells funny to me, as well. Sounds to me like it is time to clean up those records... the HRC '08 express train is ready to leave the station.
I wonder if any of those NSC tapes have anything to do with Bin Laden? Or maybe North Korea?
I guess we'll never know.
That is my fervent hope and burning desire. I must have posted "remove ... every trace of his ever having existed." a hundred or more times in 2000-2001. Burning eternally in a lake of fire is far too good for that traitor trash and eminently unfair to all else in the universe.
Is Sandy Berger in charge of destroying the tapes?
They sure did back in the early '90s. I set up a brand new desktop-sized 9-track tape unit, with its own ISA interface card, for one client. When I worked at the university, from '88-'92, they still had plenty of those tape units, only they were the size of refrigerators. Data from the USGS for one of my friends' electronic mapping project was delivered on 9-track tapes.
I don't know any geophysicists who even have those drives anymore. Most of them have Exabyte Eliant 820 7GB 8mm tape drives, but nowadays they don't write new data to them just read existing data from them. Most really big data sets are written to DLTs, but I'm sure they'll be obsolete in a few years too.
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