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Zip Disk Facts: White House Missing E-Mail Scandal

News/Current Events Opinion Keywords: E-MAIL, CLINTON
Source: House Government Reform Committee
Published: April 1, 2000 Author: mini-me
Posted on 04/01/2000 16:07:58 PST by SVTCobra

The lack of correct descriptions/facts about the Zip Disk and Missing E-Mail Scandal on FR are driving me nuts.

Zip Disk Facts:

The Zip Disk made by Robert Haas was created only weeks ago when the scandal hit the papers.

The Zip Disk is a copy of the Data on Haas's F: Drive which is a virtual drive on the Network Server, not his Computer Hard drive. S: and F: or G: Drive Letters are common letters used when creating Shared and User Directories on a Network Server throughout a company.

The Data on Haas's F: drive was created in June 1998. The data includes the "hits" or matches when Haaas did a search on the name "Monica Lewinsky" in Betty Curry's and Ashley Raines' Lotus Notes Mailboxes on E-Mail Server "Mail2" by hand. He took the matches and made a new Notes NSF (Database) File and copied it to his F: Drive. The NSF file contains all the E-mails that matched the search criteria. It is not just a list of matches but the full text of the E-mail messages themselves.

There is probably more data on Haas's F: Drive and the Zip Disk that relates to other Clinton scandal's but only Haas knows for sure. He could get fired for what is on the Zip Disk. That explains why he may not be telling the full truth.

The E-Mail search results on the Zip Disk were requested by the WH Counsel's Office based on a test search they asked Haas' to do. They thought there might be a problem with the completeness of their ARMS searches based on subpena requests.

Haas printed out the E-Mails and gave them to Mark Linday (OA Counsel) who gave them to Michelle Pettersen in the WH Counsel's Office. She compared the 2-3 binders worth (4000) of E-mails to E-Mails they already gave to OIC Starr under subpena. Pettersen determined that the E-mails were duplicates and had already been turned over by the WH to OIC Starr.

Burton's House Reform Committeee wanted to get these binders of duplicate E-mails (reviewed by Pettersen) but they didn't understand that the same data is in electronic form on the Zip Disk.

The Zip Disk was turned over to the Northrop Grumman Counsel this year when the scandal broke in the press. The NG Counsel gave it to the White House and it is now being kept by the Office of White House Security (Craig Livingston's old job). In an unusual act the WH tried to open the Zip Disk to view its contents. They could only see some of the files. I think there are password protected files on the Zip Disk or the Notes NSF file may have restricted security on it so that only Notes E-Mail Administrators can open it to view the Lewinsky E-Mails (not just any White House Flack).

The WH has no reason to view the Zip Disk. This is suspicous activity.

The WH after not being able to open the Zip Disk went to Haas' F: Drive on the Server and created another copy of the data on a Second Zip Disk. The Data on Haas' F: Drive could have been deleted or modified, but is easily recovered from a Server backup tape to verify its integrity.

The Zip Disk holds 100-250 MB of data. This matter has nothing to do with Zip (compressed) Files or WINZip.

Notice that Iomega which makes the Zip Drive/Disk is now advertizing heavily on CNN. I am serious...oh, the irony.

The reason the Zip Disk Data is important has nothing to do with recovering missing E-Mails from thousands of backup tapes. It only contains a few (maybe 4000 or less) of the missing E-mails (250,000-1 million). It was a test search of Lewinsky related E-mails in June 1998 to see if the missing e-mails were producted from sources other than the ARMS system.

What is imporant about the Zip Disk and the Lewinsky E-mails is that they are raw E-mails with no redactions. They may in fact be X-Rated and, in Betty Curry's case, may show criminal activity related to the Starr investigation and Impeachment. They are uncensored.....

Judicial Watch and The House Reform Committee had nothing to do with the Lweinsky investigation, but now may be able to get raw Lewinsky E-mails and put them into the public domain. Can't wait to read them. Although the Judge may not allow them to get the Lewinsky E-mails since they are not related to any civil cases or House investigations they are working on.

The recent WND/Sperry story about more missing e-mails and the number of Mail Servers is also misleading.

There are 5 WH Lotus Notes E-Mail Servers...Mail1, Mail2, Mail3, etc. That is meaningless. They missing E-mails are only on Mail2 which includes all of the White House West Wing and WH Counsel's Office including everyone involved in the Lewinsky Scandal. It doesn't matter that there are 4 other Mail Servers, since those E-mails were sent into the ARMS system and scanned for subpena matches.

Returned Receipt E-mails were not scanned into ARMS but they contain no (incriminating) Text at all. They are just receipts that tell you that a person read your E-mail. A red herring....

The most important scandal issue is that Al Gore's EOVP Office E-Mail is a bigger mess that could involve criminality. Remember Nixon was brought down by 18 minutes of missing audio tape. In this case, we have a few hundred Gigabytes of missing computer data on tape.

-None of the EOVP E-mail was ever scanned into the ARMS system. That means that subpena searches on ARMS never turned up EOVP E-mails (for Monicagate, Chinagate, Campaign FinanceGate, etc.).

-Subpena searches in the EOVP office had to be done by hand on each Lotus Notes Mailbox by the 27 users. That means if Al Gore does a search in his own E-mail Box and he gets 500 E-mails from Maria Hsia...he is the one who prints them out and hands them to the WH Counsel's Office to see if they are related to subpena requests. If he is dishonest, he could just delete the E-mails and not hand anything over. They (EOVP) are on the Honor System regarding subpena compliance and E-mail searches. There is already an Al Gore (Lotus Notes) E-Mail on FR. Search on "11 Reasons Al Gore Knew it was a Fundraiser by the RNC" and look for an E-mail/PDF Doc.

-The Lotus Notes E-Mail System in the EOVP Office goes back to 1993-1994. The EOP only got Lotus Notes in 1996.

-The EOVP Office E-Mail Server (EOVP_1) was records managed with ARMS only recently (not in 1996-1998 when the scandals were popping up). Why wasn't the computer glitch fixed with the Mail2 Server fix in November 1998? Scandal No. 1

-The problem of the incoming Internet E-mails to the EOVP Mail Server not being managed by ARMS that afflicted the Mail2 Server in the EOP is not fixed yet. It was fixed on the Mail2 Server in November 1998 5 months after it was discovered by Northup Grumman. When it only takes a day to fix it for 25 users in the EOVP why isn't it done yet? The EOP took longer since they had 525 users. Scandal No. 2

Al Gore in an AP story on his brushng off the E-mail scandal this week said that he never sent E-mails about Campign Fundraising in 1996. We have one online at FR (see above). That was a bald faced lie.

-The EOVP has 600 backup tapes that need to be restored as part of fixing the Mail2 Server Problem that will take 6 months. One problem is that there should be 6-7 years worth of backup tapes in the EOVP office for the time period 1993-2000. That is total, 2000-3000 tapes, since one server backup tape is made for each daily backup. That means that 80% of the EOVP backup tapes were probably overwritten. Scandal No 3.

Backup tapes are expensive and are usually rotated every mnoth and over written 4-5 times. It is not easy to find erased data on a backup tape compared to a hard drive. The FBI cannot restore overwritten data on a backup tape as stated by Rep. Horn.

Forget about the Clinton EOP E-mail Scandal and concentrate on the EOVP E-Mail scandal. You can't impeach Clinton after January 21, 2001. But we can get Al Gore into big trouble before the 2000 Election.

The other focus should be the coverup (remember the coverup is always worst than the original crime) at the Department of Justice and White House Counsel's Office.

The media and Congress have only a limited mental capacity to understand the technical details of this scandal. Don't look to them for action or help.

The WH Counsel Beth Nolan (Joni Mitchell anyone?) actually understood 90% of the technical details about the Missing E-Mail Problem while the Congresscritters only understood about 25%. She probably lied about who knew what when, but not about the technobable.

The Burton Committee is looking to make a criminal referral to the DOJ about possible purjury/obstruction of justice by David Bailey, an ARMS Administrator, for filing a false affidavit dated July 1999 in the Judicial Watch Filegate Case. He didn't mention the Mail2 Server Problem when describing ARMS searches for subpenaed White House Documents.

There is no real point to indicting a GS-15 computer tech until you look closer at the case. There is now a criminal DOJ investigation of the White House on the Missing E-Mail Scandal. The Justice Department (Civil Division)and White House Counsel's Office helped Bailey write his false affidavit one year after the computer tech knew about the Mail2 Server Problem. The Insight Mag article on the Missing E-Mails came out in December 1998 and a copy was sent by Judicial Watch to the DOJ lawyer working with Bailey. The WH Counsel also knew about the Mail2 Server problem in June 1998.

That means that the DOJ and WH Counsel may have conspired to create a false affidavit and committed a crime. The DOJ can therefore not investigate its own lawyers and this fact will mandate the appointment of a Special Outside Counsel to investigate the DOJ and the White House. It is a roundabout way to get an investigation started, but it could work. The key is the conflict of interest within the DOJ, they can't investigate themselves.


Cheers

1 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:07:59 PST by SVTCobra
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I thought the reference was to Iomega Zip Drive, a system that compresses to a type of 2 1/2 floppy.

2 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:12:18 PST by R. Scott
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A truly useful summary. Thank you.

3 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:14:58 PST by EternalHope
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Thank you for a very informative post. I had deduced some of what you told us, based on my own experience. But you filled in many holes in my knowledge about the whole email fiasco

4 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:19:21 PST by Vermonter
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ZipDisks are not 1.44MB 3.5" floppy disks and have nothing to do with file compression (ZipFiles, PKZIP or WINZip Shareware Programs).

A Iomega ZipDrive/Disk is a removeable disk with a very large storage capacity. They come in 100MB and 250 MB size disks.

Cheers

5 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:22:56 PST by SVTCobra
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Quick, turn up the heat in the Elian Gonzales case. We need distractions! Reno, make a speech. Get the White House counsel down there to "manage" the relatives! We need to keep the show going. Lets get some protests going in the streets! We need distractions! The sheeple need distractions! Gore, say something! Mayor, say something. Turn up the heat! We need distractions!

Psst....Discovery of obstruction of justice in email scandal....Huh?

Psst...Clinton found guilty of crime in Willey case?...Duh, What?

6 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:24:26 PST by SkiBum
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"I thought the reference was to Iomega Zip Drive, a system that compresses to a type of 2 1/2 floppy."

Points of fact-

1) Iomega Zip disks are either 100 or 250 Megabytes in size.
2) These disks are about the same physical size as a common 3 1/2 inch disk drive.
3) They may contain data/info/files in the identical format to any floppy disk or hard drive.
4) The Zip term is in NO WAY connected to a zip (compressed) file format algorithym.
5) Zip disks are removable and may be removed and exchanged at will.
6) Iomega drives do not compress data. They are a storage media only!

7 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:27:02 PST by K7TNW
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Ah heck - on a Saturday night; same-o-same-o

8 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:32:34 PST by R. Scott
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Ah heck; On a Saturday night, same-o-same-o

9 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:33:49 PST by R. Scott
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This cogent instructional post on this issue is being saved to my HD for further reading.

My suggestion is to take info like this, draw a simple flip chart and INSTRUCT the committee in SIMPLE TERMS. Their questions last week showed a really poor basic understanding of how servers work .vs. individual PC's etc.

Even I know more than any of those folks, and I ain't braggin about much here!

10 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:36:13 PST by ftrader
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The Congress has their own huge computer/IT Staff. If they aren't smart enough to ask their own staff for advice or information I can't help them.

I just hope the Congress gets better advice on defense and intelligence issues.

Cheers

11 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:39:53 PST by SVTCobra
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I wish to thank-you for clearing some of this up,So far even after watching the hearing and trying to keep track of it all , my head was kinda spinning from nolan's non-answers.
< / AL BORE >

12 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:45:26 PST by Boner1
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Thanks for the excellent lay translation from the polyglot technospeak, politobabble and mediaignorance that we've had to deal with so far.

13 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:46:41 PST by okie01
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Many thanks, I've saved this too.

Can you explain the procedure for searching the backup tapes?
Six months seems a long time to read, convert, and search them.

14 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:50:29 PST by mrsmith
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The WH Counsel Beth Nolan (Joni Mitchell anyone?) actually understood 90% of the technical details about the Missing E-Mail Problem while the Congresscritters only understood about 25%.

Zip Disk Facts: White House Missing E-Mail Scandal, Author: mini-me

Great analysis!

Congressional comprehension at 25%? You are being too kind.

The essence of Zip storage -- removability -- clearly eluded Rep. Horn; he actually asked a witness whether there was any relevant data on his Zip DRIVE.

03-31-00

COMPUTER EXPERTS: "WH-OBSTRUCTED E-MAIL CAN BE RETRIEVED IN WEEKS"

CLINTON-CLINTON-GORE-RENO CABAL TAMPERS WITH ZIP DISK, FLOUTS LAMBERTH'S ORDER

WH COUNSEL NOLAN A DELIBERATELY UNINFORMED CONDUIT FOR FORMER WH COUNSEL CHARLES "Say you can't recall and they can't get you for perjury" RUFF'S WILLFUL IGNORANCE &/OR LIES

 

Gore's e-mail MIA for next 6 months White House tampered with Zip disk against orders from federal judge     By Paul Sperry © 2000 WorldNetDaily.com   WASHINGTON -- E-mail sent to Vice President Al Gore's office is still not being recorded for subpoena searches, the White House's top lawyer revealed yesterday. And she claims the 625 back-up tapes of that e-mail can't be fully searched until around the November election.   In a related matter, the lawyer also revealed that the White House recently searched through a disk full of Monica Lewinsky e-mail -- a move that may have violated a court order.   White House Counsel Beth Nolan told Congress that all e-mail sent to Gore's office, located across from the White House, is "not being captured" by an automated archive system. And she testified that the White House "has not been able to correct the problem."   But she maintains that the messages are being recorded on emergency back-up tapes. She says the tapes, which number 625, are in the custody of the White House security office.   Nolan says the White House has hired a private contractor to convert the Gore tapes, as well as thousands that back up missing White House Office e-mail, to a format that can be easily searched.   "We could have the back-ups searched within six months," Nolan said -- which would delay until September compliance with several outstanding subpoenas from Congress, the independent counsel, the Justice Department and public interest law firm Judicial Watch Inc. All are conducting probes into various White House scandals, ranging from Chinagate to the Lewinsky case to Filegate.   The Chinagate scandal covers fund-raising abuses by Gore, including his 1996 hosting of a felonious fund-raiser at a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles.   Nolan stressed that the six-month projection is "preliminary" and is "subject to amendment as the project proceeds."   She claimed that it will take more than two months just to set up the equipment in the White House needed to restore the lost e-mail.   Nolan made the statements at an initially packed hearing held by the House Government Reform Committee, which is exploring whether the White House obstructed justice by not telling Congress and federal prosecutors about the missing e-mail.   One noteworthy visitor was President Clinton confidant Bruce Lindsey, who has been tasked with damage-control duties in past scandals. He lent support to Nolan during her testimony in this, the latest Clinton scandal -- "e-gate."   Much of the mainstream press attended the hearing, including New York Times and Washington Post reporters, as well as CNN correspondent Bob Franken. (Several weeks ago, Franken interviewed e-mail whistle-blower Sheryl Hall, a seven-year Clinton White House veteran, but his network has still failed to air the tape.)   To restore the missing e-mail, White House spokesman Jim Kennedy, who also attended the hearing, said the White House has hired a contractor -- Springfield-Va.-based ECS Technology -- as well as a subcontractor -- Fairfax, Va.-based Systems Research and Applications Corp.   Kennedy told WorldNetDaily that the White House inked contracts with the companies on Wednesday. Combined cost: $3 million.   After some quizzing, Nolan also disclosed that the White House recently took the liberty of opening a so-called Zip disk under subpoena by Judicial Watch in its Filegate lawsuit.   Larry Klayman, the watchdog group's chairman, told WorldNetDaily the disk was put "under seal" by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth. He argued that the White House flouted Lamberth's order not to tamper with the expanded-storage disk, which contains a large cache of e-mail from Lewinsky to the White House.   "They weren't supposed to touch that disk," said Klayman, who plans to file a complaint to Lamberth.   After White House officials opened the disk full of Lewinsky e-mails, which was made by a non-government technician, they decided to make their own disk.   They "couldn't read" all of the files in the original disk they opened, Nolan explained. So they got on the Northrop Grumman technician's computer and copied all the files off his hard drive onto the new Zip disk.   Nolan says the new Zip disk was turned over to Charles Easley, the White House security chief. But she failed to say what became of the original disk.   Panel chairman Dan Burton, R-Ind., vowed to subpoena both disks. He also said he will subpoena the hard copies of the Lewinsky messages that the technician, Robert Haas, printed from a file on his hard drive and handed over to the White House counsel's office in 1998.   Contrary to White House claims that recovering lost e-mail would be a long and costly task, computer-forensics experts tell WorldNetDaily that they doubt recovering the subpoenaed messages would take months.   Apparently experts are telling Burton's committee the same thing. Staffers there have been flooded with computer specialists from around the country offering their services to retrieve the missing e-mail.   "I've gotten e-mail and phone calls from all these computer people saying, 'Hey, my company can do it, and it doesn't take that long at all. It's really easy. All you have to do is write a program. We could have all the stuff in three weeks,'" said committee spokesman Mark Corallo.   The White House used a similar excuse when the Senate Whitewater committee subpoenaed e-mail for its probe in 1995.   On Jan. 7, Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, R-N.Y., complained to ABC News that the White House told him it couldn't send over e-mail to his panel because it would be "too expensive to retrieve."   It turns out that the White House counsel's office knew about the e-mail archiving problem as early as January 1998. And the White House chief of staff's office knew about it in June 1998, if not earlier.   Yet the White House never told Congress or any of the other investigative bodies that the subpoenaed records it was sending over had potentially huge gaps in them.   Nolan, who took over as chief counsel in September 1999, confessed she was briefed on the problem this past January.   But she failed to inform Congress until after the story broke in the Washington Times this month.   Lindsey, Clinton's special counsel, turns up on the list of White House officials whose in-coming e-mail wasn't archived from 1996 to 1998.   Asked if he knew his own e-mail account wasn't being archived, Lindsey replied frostily: "No." He then got up from his chair and walked off.

15 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:50:52 PST by Mia T
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Thanks for the informative post. Here's a Mountian Dew for ya.

I just turned the computer on and the first post I read is something about a Worldnet poll on whether or not to impeach Clinton over the e-mail scandals.

I thinks to meself, georgeous, were they watching the same hearings that I watched? There ain't no way that Clinton threatened anyone over this and barring that, I see no way to even link this to Clinton.

I refuse to get my hopes up again. I can stand on my head until he leaves office now.

Gore, on the other hand, is a totally different matter. I hope the stink, stirred up about this, so disgusts the sheeple that they'll elect someone else just to make it all go away.

Thanks again for the post, that's what I thought I heard during the hearings but I wished you had been saying it instead of the days of stumbling we had to sit through. Good job.

16 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:51:32 PST by Gramps
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Sound like they need one of those yellow and black "Networks for Dummies" books! Thanks again for researching the Haas statements and detailing out "how" this was done.

I have a question about "back-up" tapes (of the "rogue" server that AARMS wasn't operating on.) In our company, we had full backups, but when we had to restore, the software "ignored" duplicate info and only added what it viewed as "new". Can't they just set up a server, feed in the back-up tapes and when the time period had been "reconstructed", run AARMS against it? That shouldn't take even 6 months, and certainly they could skip some tapes whose data obviously would still be on a tape from a few days later, using date/times that the data starts and ends. We backed up daily, then an extra each Friday, then Monthly, and overwrote earlier tapes, until finally we had JUST monthly tapes which covered everything for 12 months.

Or is it more difficult?

17 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:52:30 PST by ftrader
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Thanks so much. After all the reading, television, radio and hearings it can get VERY confusing. Thanks for all your effort.

18 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:53:41 PST by penelopep
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All the folks who say that restoring the E-mails and doing the searches for Clintongate E-mails would take 2-3 days and they would do it for free are ridiculous.

There are something like 3000+ tapes (covering each day in 1996 thru 1998) of 20-80 Gigabytes each. It takes hours to restore tapes this large using the Arcserver Backup Program.

Anyone who says there are only 34 tapes must be joking....this involves data for 2 years backed up daily (one tape a day minimum for 700 days).

Since the reconstruction cannot be done on the live White House Computer System, you would have to set up an identical system offsite. You would need a Windows NT Notes Mail Server (Mail2) with 100 GB drive arrays and an ARMS Digital VAX minicomputer with a massive disk storeage capacity (it holds all White House Documents from 1993 to the Present). You would need another Notes Mail Server to restore the Vice President's E-mail with less disk capacity (named OEVP_1 or something close).

The tape backups are Incremental Backup's meaning only files changed each day are backed up on tape. To replicate a server and all its data/e-mail...you need to restore the main backup tape with the majority of the server on it and then restore each day's incremental backup of modified files.

After each day's tape is restored you have to run the ARMS VAX to suck Notes E-mails into it. Then you do an ARMS search based on the Subpenas at the end of the total 3000 tape restore process. You have to do searches on 200+ scandal keywords and print out the documents. In the end you have to merge the new ARMS database with the ARMS system at the White House as required by law to fill in the 2 year period of missing documents.

If you don't use ARMS then you have to search each of the individual 500 Notes Mail accounts for each day's tape with 200+ keywords (like Lewinsky or John Haung) manually or using a custom Notes program. The hits/matches then are printed or placed into new files. You will get overlapping duplicates of e-mail messages which will make a mess of the search results.

You have to restore every day's Notes Mail Server tape (for 1996-1998) since if someone were to delete an e-mail there is no way to tell when it was deleted. Restoring everything is the only way to be sure you don't miss anything.

Then repeat the Arcserve process of merging the tape, restore the data, search for keywords, archive the matches, 3000 times (having to wait hours in between each merge/restore). Merging a tape is used to read the tape and get a directory tree of the files backed up on it. It takes hours and must be done before a tape restore. vThere are probably fewer tapes something like 700 (for each day from 1996-1998). So, if you do 2-3 tapes a day you need 200-300 days of this kind of tedious work. If they have multiple servers on one tape and multiple tapes used per day (since we are talking about hundreds of gigabytes of data) then it could take more than a year to reconstruct the Mail2 data.

Most DLT backup tapes hold 20/40/80 GB of data. The White House Mail2 Server was 100 GB and they have 5-7 NT Notes Mail Servers.

If a tape is overwritten which is commonly done since the DLT tapes are expensive, you cannot get the data back like you can on a Hard Drive with erased files on it. It looks like 6 months of backup tapes were overwritten.

The only way to speed this up is to buy/set up 5-10 NT Mail2 Servers and do the restores of 5-10 tapes at one time on each Server. It will speed things up by 5-10 times but will require lots more equipment and bodies.

There is no guarrentee that the E-mails you find are incriminating either. The WH may have gotten dupicates to the OIC/Congress already.

Cheers

19 Posted on 04/01/2000 16:57:26 PST by SVTCobra
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So, in short, the American people get screwed, again?! The Clinton/Gore gang WIN, again?!

20 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:06:02 PST by kcvl
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btt

21 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:06:42 PST by flanew
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Thank you.

They missing E-mails are only on Mail2 which includes all of the White House West Wing and WH Counsel's Office including everyone involved in the Lewinsky Scandal.

So, are the 500 whose incoming e-mails were not archived everybody in the West Wing and the Counsel's Office? That would include the president, then, would it not?

22 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:07:20 PST by aristeides (demosthenes@olg.com)
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Even if it takes months to go through all this data, why is it necessary to wait until it is all done for the results to be reported to Congress and the other subpoenaing parties? Couldn't the data to be worked on be chosen randomly, and ongoing reports go to those parties?

23 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:09:54 PST by aristeides (demosthenes@olg.com)
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They have to search for E-mails which are contained inside Lotus Notes database files, one for each user. The Notes E-mail database files for each user change everyday.

You can setup up restores of backup tapes to overwrite all the data or just copy new files and ignore duplicate files (not individual duplicate E-mails). But the E-mail files change every day....not like Word data (letter/document) file that you create and then don't change.

You have to restore a day from tape then do a keyword search, and restore the next day's tape and do the same keyword search. You can automate the searches by writing a program or let ARMS search each day's restore. The restores take forever since the tapes hold lots of data (20GB+). The tapes are also incrimental backups not full daily backups.

The Tape Backup procedure you describe is typical. It is used to restore data in case of a computer breakdown from the previous day's tape. It is not helpful for doing E-mails searches over a time period since people delete and clean out their E-mail at random. No one tape holds ever single E-mail a person has sent or received since they started working at an office.


Cheers

24 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:13:09 PST by SVTCobra
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The FBI cannot restore overwritten data on a backup tape as stated by Rep. Horn.

Why not? It's sometimes possible to do so.

25 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:22:01 PST by bvw
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Wow!! Regards!

26 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:22:37 PST by ftrader
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Only E-mail coming from outside the White House (via the Internet) to Mail2 users in the West Wing were not archived. Internal E-mails among WHite House Employees were alway archived in ARMS.

NONE of the Internal/Outside E-mail in the Vice President's Office (EOVP) was ever archived in ARMS until recently. That is the major scandal since subpena searches missed all these potentially incriminating E-mail inside the EOVP.

The President, Vice President, and First Lady had different secure E-mail accounts. But, I think this info is being fuzzied for security reasons.

There is an Al Gore Lotus Notes E-Mail on FR (search "11 Reasons..."). So that is a lie.

There is also a Northrop Grumman Analysis on an estimate of the number of missing E-mails. The chart lists 2 next to Bill Clinton's name. That means that Clinton has a Notes account.

Considering that Al Gore and Clinton had E-mail accounts, then Hillary must have one, since she had her own Laptop. I doubt she was writing Word Documents or balancing the Federal Budget using Excel on it. The only other reason to have one is for remote E-mail access and to maintain a schedule, calender, and address book (PIM).

There is also a secure, classified, military NSC E-mail system that is separate from the White House Notes Mail System.

There may also be phoney internet mail accounts linked to the White House website for citizen's comments with names like Bill.Clinton@whitehouse.gov. But those are not real personal e-mail accounts, but read by a White House flack/volunteer.

Finally, do you think Bill Clinton did a subpena search on his computer E-mail for the word "Lewinsky" during Impeachment and handed those documents to Ken Starr?

Cheers

27 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:29:09 PST by SVTCobra
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The Congress gets plenty of expert information on defense and intelligence issues. That isn't the question.

What one must ask is why the oversight committees have been so quiet (and ineffective) on so many critical issues: (1) Chinagate (nobody has yet been put in jail for what amounts to a knowing transfer of nuclear warhead design data, the legacy codes and the supercomputers needed to tie all of it together); (2) A severely degraded and weakened military capability, to the point that the national security of the United States is in danger and the services have been reduced to functioning as a testbed for liberal social experiments (e.g., females in combat, on ships--submarines are next, if you can imagine that); (3) Why the foreign policy of the Clinton administration has gone virtually unchallenged even though it has been an utter failure by any standard--China will soon be a nuclear superpower and has shown no timidity whatsover about threatening the United States with nuclear attacks (this has become almost routine), India and Pakistan have accelerated development of their own nuclear weapons programs, Russia (despite our every attempt to buy them off with billions) is turning out newly developed nuclear strike weapons on a regular schedule and has adopted an "in your face" attitude when dealing with Clinton and the rest of his unbelievably incompetent nitwits), attempting to force Israel to cave on the Golan Heights issue, thereby threatening their national security, and the list goes on leading to the ineluctable conclusion that the United States is no longer viewed as immune from attack--our enemies see an opening that grows wider and more tempting with every passing month.

So what we must ask is simply this: if we no longer have an executive branch that we can trust (Clinton, DoJ, DoE, FBI and BATF) if we can no longer rely on the Congress to exercise properly their oversight (or legislative) responsibilities, and if we can no longer rely on the judicial branch to apply the constitution on an "original intent" basis, then what has become of the checks & balances form of government given to us by the founders?

28 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:32:02 PST by Czar (FedUptotheTeeth@Washington)
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When backup tapes are overwritten the tape is erased first by the Tape Device then new data is recorded. Like a VCR with a flying erase head. It you have old data on it then try to overwrite it, the data integrity could get screwed up.

On a floppy disk or Hard Drive when you delete a file there is just a flag switched on the file allocation table (FAT) that says this file is not longer needed, but it is still there to be unerased later unless it is overwritten with new data at a later date. It is not wiped off the disk.

There is a way to really delete data or format a Hard Drive to wipe it clean. But most common users don't know how to do it. That is how the FBI finds stuff on seized computers from criminals.

Servers also allow you to unerase data deleted by a user. They place data that has been deleted in a secure disk space for later retrieval. I forget the technical terms.

Digital Backup Tapes are entirely different than disks.

Cheers

29 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:38:30 PST by SVTCobra
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As my own level of understanding wasn't EVEN at the sad 25% you credit the congresscritters, I'd like to ask a question: Based on your own full understanding of what they were talking about, did you get the impression that Beth Nolan was intentionally making it as hard to understand as possible? The questioning was so adversarial that it was hard for me to tell whether the congressmen were simply not understanding her, or if she was simply not explaining it well. I sure as hell couldn't follow her, but I can't blame her for that...

30 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:40:11 PST by Lizzie
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Still the linear track of recording streams from prior recordings can be read when the track moves slightly left or right, when the depth of the magnetic flux varies from one session to the other, or as "ghost" residual flux changes after a prior recording. Of course the more times a tape is recorded the less one can recover. And the recovery requires much higher specification read and feeding mechanisms. -- this is not my field, but just based on my peripheral exposure to the technical aspects of tape equipment.

31 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:53:50 PST by bvw
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Because the Computer Backup Tapes are Incremental backups (not full backups) they have to be done from the oldest to the most current.

The WH Counsel Nolan said they are going to restore the newest tapes and work backward to the oldest tapes. All the scandals are from 1996-1998, so these tapes will be done last. Burton said, "no way...start from 1996." But I think those tapes have been overwritten.

The restores of tapes are the hard, time consuming part. The searches are easy and can be automated. You can do bunches of tapes and hand over relevant E-mails every week or two. But they may try to do all the restores of tapes first then the seaches last.

The EOVP Gore E-mail matters could be handled quicker since there are only 27 Notes Mail users. Wanna bet they are lost in the shuffle of the whole data reconstruction project? Congress doesn't know better.

The White House Counsel's Office has to review each E-mail document for priviledge considerations and relevance to each of the numerous OIC/Congressional/DOJ/Judicial Watch subpena's. The computer work may take 6 months, but the legal work could also take forever while they are trying to run out the clock on the Clinton Adminsitration.

Ask yourself this question....

After January 21, 2001 if Judicial Watch sends a subpena or the Filegate case goes to court who will be in the White House or Department of Justice to defend the Clinton Administration in court?

How do you get a Bill Clinton White House Document under subpena from a Bush White House?

Will the Bush White House Counsel represent the Clinton White House in the JW Filegate Case in civil court?

George W. Bush and his administration isn't going to help pay to defend the Clinton Administration in all these civil. Do you think they will leave the Clinton ARMS system documents inside a Bush White House? All the Judicial Watch and DOJ court cases fall apart.


Cheers

32 Posted on 04/01/2000 17:57:31 PST by SVTCobra
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Each tape holds 20GB to 80 GB of data. There are 4000 total backup tapes.

You want the job of seeing if there is hidden data on each tape that may have been overwritten?

Cheers

33 Posted on 04/01/2000 18:01:37 PST by SVTCobra
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The WH Counsel Beth Nolan (Joni Mitchell anyone?) actually understood 90% of the technical details about the Missing E-Mail Problem while the Congresscritters only understood about 25%. She probably lied about who knew what when, but not about the technobable.

Congresscritter were only interested in the threats made to the Northop Grumman employees and the Lewinsky E-mails. They didn't want to know anything else. They love to hear the sound of their own voice.

They missed the whole EOVP E-Mail scandal which is worst.

Nolan knew what she was talking about computerwise. The Congressmen haven't had a real job in years so they don't know anything about corporate computer networks/e-mail.


Cheers

34 Posted on 04/01/2000 18:07:46 PST by SVTCobra
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Thanks for a very comprehensive, informative post.

35 Posted on 04/01/2000 18:14:24 PST by hoot33
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While the backup may be incremental, this usually means a full backup is made once a week and the incremental backups are made for the next 6 days. This is done because a defective or missing tape will prevent the restoring of data, if all the backups are incremental.

The tapes could be processed on a week by week basis.

A problem may be that as a message is marked as ARMS, if the data is not processes sequentially, there may be duplicate submissions to ARMS.

This problem can be corrected with a minor programming change and would require a few days of programming (or a few weeks for government programmers) I am a Microsoft Certified System Engineer and a Microsoft Certified Data Base Administrator.

36 Posted on 04/01/2000 19:16:41 PST by HumbleIrishman
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Cobra,

When was the name of Mail2 changed? Was ARMS logging that Notes server before the name change? Whodunnit?

I thought that the information from the White House was public data, not to be destroyed. Remember the incoming Clinton administrations protests in late 1991 that Bush was erasing electronic data?

Any penalty for destroying EOP and EOVP data due to a political change?

Is removal of the WHODB to an offsite location a misuse of government property or security rules? Seems to be another scandal in the works.

37 Posted on 04/01/2000 20:18:37 PST by texas booster (Maybe_Castro _will_take _Bill_instead!)
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At least Dan Burton knows when someone is yanking his floppy disk.

38 Posted on 04/01/2000 21:07:37 PST by Michael Smith (gsmith6692@aol.com)
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I thought the reference was to Iomega Zip Drive, a system that compresses to a type of 2 1/2 floppy.

I think you're confusing the Iomega Zip Drive, which others on here have already described, with the ubiquitous "PKZIP" or "Zip" file compression algorithm.

The two aren't the same. The Iomega diskette can hold a lot more information than your regular floppy; the zip algorithm compresses data so that more information can be stored on a diskette.

39 Posted on 04/02/2000 01:21:11 PST by martin_fierro
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Just by way of saying that there's more data there than people may think. More email's and fragments can indeed be mined, and if done with one tape -- then by the rule of "it's damn cheap and easy to replicate hardware", the other thousands would cost (say) 1/1000th per, relative to the first.

40 Posted on 04/02/2000 08:48:17 PDT by bvw
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"The media and Congress have only a limited mental capacity to understand the technical details of this scandal. Don't look to them for action or help."

Understatment of the week. Government schooling I guess.

41 Posted on 04/02/2000 09:02:15 PDT by sgw587
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bttt

42 Posted on 04/02/2000 09:13:15 PDT by aristeides (demosthenes@olg.com)
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BTTT.

43 Posted on 04/02/2000 09:30:30 PDT by kristinn (kristinn@bellatlantic.net)
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bump

44 Posted on 04/02/2000 10:36:17 PDT by Angelwood
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nara.gov
"Criminal laws may also apply to removed documents or papers. The principal sanction is contained in 18 U.S.C. 2071, which makes it a crime to conceal, remove, mutilate, obliterate, or destroy any record, paper, or document that is filed or deposited in any public office. "
And, of course, it is somebody's job to make sure that system is working.

Some citations for research:
"The controlling law, the Presidential Records Act... says that all presidential records belong to the United States, and it prevents a president from destroying any records without the approval of the archivist.

(a) "Archivist" refers to the Archivist of the United States or his designee.
(b) "NARA" refers to the National Archives and Records Administration.
(c) "Presidential Records Act" refers to the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (Pub. L. No. 95-591, 92 Stat. 2523-27, as amended by Pub. L. No. 98-497, 98 Stat. 2287), codified at 44 U.S.C. 2201-2207.
(d) "NARA regulations" refers to the NARA regulations implementing the Presidential Records Act. 53 Fed. Reg. 50404 (1988), codified at 36 C.F.R. Part 1270.
(e) "Presidential records" refers to those documentary materials maintained by NARA pursuant to the Presidential Records Act and the NARA regulations.
http://webgopher.nara.gov/11/about/cfr/pres/1270.txt
"). Source: 53 FR 50404, Dec. 15, 1988, unless otherwisenoted. Subpart A -- General Provisions_1270.10 Scope of part. These regulations implement the provisions of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, Pub. L. No. 95 - 591, 92 Stat. 2523 - 27, as amended by Pub. L. No. 98 - 497, sec. 107(b)(7), 98 Stat. 2287 (1984) (codified at 44 U.S.C. 2201 - 07), by setting forth the policies and procedures governing preservation, protection, and disposal of, and access to Presidential and Vice-Presidential records created during a term of office of the President or Vice President beginning on or after January 20,1981. "
http://www.nara.gov/records/grs20/briefapp.html The relevant portions of the Records Disposal Act, 44 U.S.C. §§ 3301-24, and General Records Schedule 20, are reproduced in an addendum to this brief.

45 Posted on 04/02/2000 13:26:39 PDT by mrsmith
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I found it strange that they are doing the restores backwards.

They do incremental backups that take about 24 hours each day since they have a 100 GB Windows NT Server. They actually have 5-7 Notes Mail Windows NT Servers and I hope they use individual tape backup devices and tapes for each. If not then a central tape backup unit for all of the 5-7 Servers means a ton of data is on each tape and there may be multiple tapes per day. When you heard the Northrop Grumman folks testify, you got the feeling that the backup process was a mess. Can't guarentee that they do a full backup each week.

Also backup tapes had to be overwritten over the 2 year period...more of a mess

I was a Certified Netware Engineer, plus cc:Mail and Notes Mail Administrator. Oh, the stress...

Duplicate E-mails in ARMS is guarenteed since the sender and receiver of messages are captured. Not sure how they deal with it, although each message has a item number.

The ARMS Administrator (Digital Equipment VAX) is Daniel A. (Tony) Bailey another Irishman with a slight accent.

Cheers

46 Posted on 04/02/2000 14:07:44 PDT by SVTCobra
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The Lotus Notes Mail system was newly installed after an older E-mail System was scrapped and then tied into ARMS. They had to program the new system (Notes) to interface with ARMS and someone typed Mail2 or MAIL2 in the programming. So all the other Servers named Mail1, Mail3, etc. interfaced with ARMS, but the Mail2 System didnot from the beginning. Took them 5 months to fix the Mail2 programming error. (Anyone ever hear of find and replace?)

The old E-mail System worked with ARMS since the Bush days (I think 1992), but when it was scrapped a new program had to be written to interface ARMS and Lotus Notes in 1996.

The issue of removing EOP and EOVP documents is standard for a change in administration. The Clinton Documents go to the National Archives in DC or the Clinton Library (which won't be built by 2001).

So if you subpena a Clinton White House Document after January 2001 for a court case, who will retrieve it at the National Archives and who will review it for legal relevance or priviledge claims? Who pays the legal bill? The Bush White House certainly will not. All the Clinton White House legal folks will have washed their hands of the legal troubles.

Cheers

47 Posted on 04/02/2000 14:19:01 PDT by SVTCobra
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This post is so good,although a little technical in part.Do you mind if I e-mail it to Rush?

48 Posted on 04/02/2000 17:13:20 PDT by Lady In Blue
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You have combined facts I already knew to be accurate (the tech side of zips, networks, and et.al.) with facts I did not know, (the internal logistics of WH mail) to make a useful and complete summary.

Paging AG, please pick up the White Courtesy Phone.

49 Posted on 04/02/2000 17:18:57 PDT by Lazamataz
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