Posted on 03/21/2008 7:37:36 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON - Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.
The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed.
"When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired ... the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction," the White House said in a sworn declaration filed with U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola.
It has been the goal of a White House Office of Administration "refresh program" to replace one-third of its workstations every year in the Executive Office of the President, according to the declaration.
Some, but not necessarily all, of the data on old hard drives is moved to new computer hard drives, the declaration added.
In proposing an e-mail recovery plan Tuesday, Facciola expressed concern that a large volume of electronic messages may be missing from White House computer servers, as two private groups that are suing the White House allege.
Facciola proposed the drastic approach of going to individual workstations of White House computer users after the White House disclosed in January that it recycled its computer backup tapes before October 2003. Recycling taping over existing data raises the possibility that any missing e-mails may not be recoverable.
At a House committee hearing last month, a computer expert who previously worked at the White House called the e-mail system "primitive" and said it was set up in a way that created a high risk that data would be lost from White House servers where it was being archived.
Under pressure to provide details about its computer system, the White House told the congressional committee that it never completed work that began in 2003 on a planned records management and e-mail archiving system. The White House canceled the project in late 2006 and says it is still working on a new version.
In the absence of a permanent archiving system, the White House has been archiving e-mails on White House servers since early in the administration.
The White House says it does not know if any e-mails are missing, but is looking into the matter.
It would be costly and time-consuming for the White House to institute an e-mail retrieval program that entails pulling data off each individual workstation, the court papers filed Friday state.
Indeed ;)
Depends on how it was set up. The WH mail system has been a goat rope for many years.
great for science projects.
Dang, missed that one. Who knows we might have been related.
Regards
This is the Federal Court, not the Democrat party. The reason the court wants the data off the workstations is because the data is (apparently) deleted from the servers and the backup tapes have been "overwritten").
I realize that a lot of people here think it's just ducky that the current Administration is increasingly taking a "the law is what we say it is" approach to the courts and congress.
But as some of us were pointing out when many here wanted the then Republican majority in the senate to pull the trigger on the "nuclear option" on judges, what happens where their is a Democrat majority and/or President?
Fast forward to 2006, as it happened the first half of that political turnover happened just a few months later. Then, such tactics don't look so attractive. And "The Rule of Law" and "Separation of Powers" - long-term conservative bedrock principles some conservative were willing to discard for short term political gain - start to look like a Very Good Idea. i
I love those magnets. They keep screws off the floor and the old lady off my back.
lol
It shouldn’t matter whether there’s a pubbie or a Dim in the WH - if the law says they have to archive the files, then they have to archive the files.
If they intentionally fail to archive files the law says they have to archive, then there is corruption in the WH. Whether the President is a Republican or a Democrat.
FR was founded on the principle of exposing corruption in government. Judging from some of the replies on this thread, it seems FR has a measure of corruption as well.
Physical destruction is REQUIRED.
And with good reason, and I don't mean to cover up misdeeds. But to protect vital and proprietary information.
True, but there are limits to that. The law may specify how long the retention period is, allowing deletion thereafter. If it does not specify any retention period, then they must be archived forever.
If they were archived to magnetic tapes, the tapes will be readable for about 10 years and then start to deteriorate. They may not be readable after that. The tapes may have been recycled due to the increasing difficulty of getting high quality magnetic tape.
It shouldnt matter whether theres a pubbie or a Dim in the WH - if the law says they have to archive the files, then they have to archive the files.
The article does offer this.. fwiw
“In the absence of a permanent archiving system, the White House has been archiving e-mails on White House servers since early in the administration.”
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I can’t speak to the entirety but I do know that things do go bump in the night , even on well managed networks. (I may be making a leap that the workstations/computers affected are technically involved are all networked)
it may strike folks odd that standards today for retaining an archive for corporations is an automatic just to allow for proper discovery for any number of legal or other reasons, yet I don’t believe that same government does not currently require the same.
In fairness, technology can be a real bugger to blend in an environment like the federal or state government.
as to FR, I am not sure what legal requirement might apply for saving of data. I know I must have thousands of old mail still clogging up the servers but I believe we have that luxury by the design of the operators behind the scenes at the FR server farm.
as to others opinions, maybe some have bad experiences with email in general or see how it could be used as the basis of a witch hunt by either party .. when we have more important issues at hand to address.
as drudge is want to do sometimes..
developing ..
If HUD could do it, the White House has no excuse. There’s no department more f-ed up than HUD.
btt
Judge Facciolo and some background re: e-discovery
has some interesting comments albeit this particular instance is about searching for dat/information, however it may shed some light on the Judge’s attitude as well.
scroll down a ways and you will find a piece
Criminal Case Raises Interesting e-Discovery Search Issues
http://ralphlosey.wordpress.com/
a brief snippet..
Overall, in this opinion, Judge Facciola demonstrates a tolerance for the mistakes made by both sides, and a willingness to move on and look for practical solutions to the problem. Again, Alexander Pope said it well almost 300 years ago: To err is human, to forgive divine. Also recall Popes lesser known quote: A man should never be ashamed to own that he is wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
That is an everyday reality in the fast changing world of e-discovery.
The next piece at same link above also specifically mentions the WH scenario and email snafus in general..
e-Discovery Teams: Self-Organization and Development of Evidence Preservation Protocols
February 17, 2008
http://ralphlosey.wordpress.com/
The preservation of discoverable ESI in litigation is a core activity of any e-discovery team. It is also a key component of risk management. Obviously, if you do not preserve electronically stored information, and it is deleted, then you will never be able to find it or collect it, much less review and produce it. Just ask the Bush White House about that; they failed to preserve over five million emails. The whole nine-step e-discovery process depends upon proper preservation. So too does risk management. Unless you are the White House, your failure to preserve after notice is a sure road to sanctions. Risk control in e-discovery begins with the routine employment of effective litigation hold procedures. This is the best way to minimize the chance of inadvertent or intentional destruction of relevant electronic records.
This is a difficult task in the best of circumstances. Intels email preservation losses in the AMD antitrust case demonstrate that. Intel was trying to implement a very complex litigation hold procedure to preserve relevant evidence, but despite strong efforts by its team, it lost thousands of emails. The loss was caused by a number of mistakes, including design flaws in the notice and collection procedures, and the failure to suspend an automatic file deletion program for certain key witnesses. Spoliation was also caused by the simple human error of forgetting to look at a second tab of an Excel spreadsheet listing more key custodians.
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fwiw
Umm, data can be recovered after as many as thirty-five such rewrites.
In addition to the 16 pound sledge, I recommend a 50 gallon drum, a few gallons of diesel oil, a blow torch, and raking the resulting ashes through a gravel parking lot.
Of course, your actual mileage may vary.
From a National Security standpoint, I would prefer that the White House NOT have a state of the art email archive, backup, and retrieval system. That would be one h*ll of a target for our cyber enemies to exploit.
That's not really true...A simple 0-write is sufficient, unless you have super critical data that someone with a couple million dollar lab really wants to get... Your average hacker isn't going to get anything off of a zero-written drive.
Umm, not really- I mean you might find a fragment or two, but unless there is really *really* important data, this is quite unnecessary. Few have the knowledge, and fewer have the resources to get that far. For the average Joe's data, and the average hacker (or even the lion's share of recovery services), there is *nothing* left after a zero-write.
In addition to the 16 pound sledge, I recommend a 50 gallon drum, a few gallons of diesel oil, a blow torch, and raking the resulting ashes through a gravel parking lot.
*rolls eyes*... If it is necessary to destroy a drive... coal fire. In 15 minutes there is nothing left. I defy you to get any information from one of my clinkers.
I did this in the days of full height drives, and I'm not sure that they are still used in the smaller drives of today. Thus, I don't exactly remember... but they were various shapes from different drives, an inch or two in length/height and perhaps 1/2" thick. Not sure how they were used exactly, which would be a clue to where in the drive you'd find them... but its gotta be near the stepping motor for the heads. I suspect they've been replaced in today's drives with electromagnets.
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