Bush White House "missing" millions of emails

crazyeddie · Jan 15, 2009

Gosh, what a surprise.  Mustn't leave any incriminating evidence of malfeasance, right? <div class="headlines" style="margin-bottom:10px"><h1 style="font:normalnormalbold1.44em/normalArial,Helvetica,sans-serif;padding:0px;margin:0px">Federal court hits Bush White House over e-mail</h1></div>By PETE YOST, Associated Press WriterThursday, January 15, 2009A federal court tore into the Bush White House on Thursday over the issue of millions of apparently missing e-mails, saying the administration failed in its obligation to safeguard all electronic messages.In a four-page opinion, Magistrate Judge John Facciola said the White House is ignoring the court's instructions to search a full range of locations for all electronic messages that may be missing.The Executive Office of the President, the magistrate said, is limiting its search to offices subject to the requirements of the Federal Records Act, while sidestepping offices subject to the preservation requirements of the Presidential Records Act.There is a profound societal interest as well as a legal obligation to preserve all records and "the importance of preserving the e-mails cannot be exaggerated," Facciola wrote.The Bush White House has represented to the court that no records created in an office covered by the Presidential Records Act are transmitted to offices covered by the Federal Records Act. But there is no factual record on which to base that conclusion, said Facciola.He ordered the EOP to conduct a search of all offices regardless of which law covers a White House office, saying the issues in the case must be dealt with in "true emergency conditions" because there are just two business days remaining before the Bush administration ends."The records at issue are not paper records that can be stored, but electronically stored information that can be deleted with a keystroke," Facciola wrote. "Additionally, I have no way of knowing what happens to computers and to hard drives in them when one administration replaces another."Facciola's opinion raises questions about the completeness of the Bush administration e-mail search. The Justice Department says the government has finished a search that entailed spending more than $10 million to locate 14 million e-mails.Facciola's opinion is the third time in two days that a federal court has taken the Bush White House to task for its handling of missing e-mail, a problem first publicly disclosed three years ago by the federal prosecutor investigating the administration's leaking of Valerie Plame's CIA identity.On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy issued a document preservation order, directing the White House to search employee workstations for e-mails created between March 2003 and October 2005.At a hearing Wednesday afternoon, Facciola admonished the White House for not previously conducting a search of individual workstations as the magistrate had recommended in a report last April.In response to Facciola's opinion, one of the private groups that sued in the case, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said it plans to pursue the matter in court after the Obama administration takes office.http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/01/14/national/w103034S39.DTL <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

dragon04 · Jan 15, 2009

And Clinton was missing millions of sperms.   C'est la Vie. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> "2012.. Year of the Dragon!! Get on the Dragon Wagon!". </div>

vogon13 · Jan 15, 2009

And I was worried this would mutate into a food thread . . .     <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> TPTB went to Dallas and all I got was Plucked !!So many people, so few recipes !!Let's clean up this stinkhole !! </div>

jim48 · Jan 15, 2009

Bush knows how to use a computer? <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

BoJangles · Jan 15, 2009

If i were hated as much as bush, id be deleting emails as well. there will be attempts to find bush guilty of a crime until the day he dies, and it probably wont stop then either.Which hunt <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> -------------- Let me start out with the standard disclaimer ... I am an idiot, I know almost nothing, I haven’t taken calculus, I don’t work for NASA, and I am one-quarter Bulgarian sheep dog. With that out of the way, I have several stupid questions... *** A few months blogging can save a few hours in research *** </div>

centsworth_II · Jan 15, 2009

Oh no!  Someone has lost all the congratulatory messages to Bush from across the country and around the world! <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

Mee_n_Mac · Jan 15, 2009

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>And Clinton was missing millions of sperms.   C'est la Vie. Posted by dragon04</DIV> And some e-mail too.http://research.csc.ncsu.edu/efg/ethics/papers/ASEE02.pdf  <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> -----------------------------------------------------Ask not what your Forum Software can do do on you,Ask it to, please for the love of all that's Holy, STOP ! </div>

crazyeddie · Jan 16, 2009

Replying to: <DIV CLASS='Discussion_PostQuote'>And some e-mail too.http://research.csc.ncsu.edu/efg/ethics/papers/ASEE02.pdf  Posted by Mee_n_Mac</DIV>In 1994, the Clinton administration reacted to the previous year's court decision by rolling out an automated e-mail-archiving system to work with the Lotus-Notes-based e-mail software that was in use at the time. The system automatically categorized e-mails based on the requirements of the FRA and PRA, and it included safeguards to ensure that e-mails were not deliberately or unintentionally altered or deleted.<h3 style="font:normalnormalbold16px/130%Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;margin-top:24px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;padding:0px">The Bush White House "upgrades" the e-mail system</h3>When the Bush administration took office, it decided to replace the Lotus Notes-based e-mail system used under the Clinton Administration with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. The transition broke compatibility with the old archiving system, and the White House IT shop did not immediately have a new one to put in its place.Instead, the White House has instituted a comically primitive system called "journaling," in which (to quote from a recent Congressional report) "a White House staffer or contractor would collect from a 'journal' e-mail folder in the Microsoft Exchange system copies of e-mails sent and received by White House employees." These would be manually named and saved as ".pst" files on White House servers.One of the more vocal critics of the White House's e-mail-retention policies is Steven McDevitt, who was a senior official in the White House IT shop from September 2002 until he left in disgust in October 2006. He points out what would be obvious to anyone with IT experience: the system wasn't especially reliable or tamper-proof. In detailed testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, he detailed the "journaling" system's flaws. Because the archiving process was conducted manually and in an ad hoc fashion, human error could easily lead to the inadvertent omission of e-mails that are required to be preserved under federal law. Files were "scattered across various servers" on the network of the Executive Office of the President, and there "was no consistently applied naming convention" for the files. It's hardly surprising that things tended to get lost.Even more troubling, due to a lack of redundancy and proper access controls, anyone with access to the White House servers could have tampered with or deleted the e-mails in the archives. And without adequate logging facilities, there might be no way to determine who might have tampered with the files or what might have been changed. http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/bush-lost-e-mails.arsWhy doesn't any of this surprise me....... <img src="http://sitelife.space.com/ver1.0/content/scripts/tinymce/plugins/emotions/images/smiley-undecided.gif" border="0" alt="Undecided" title="Undecided" />  <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

adrenalynn · Jan 16, 2009

I came in to correct you, that it was probably only hundreds of thousands of missing emails - then I realized you weren't talking about Clinton.I guess 246,000 emails is OK - 'cause you weren't starting any threads about your buddy's missing emails. . .EXACTLY how many is OK for you?  EXACTLY what is the number cut-off before you paint with the uppity-brush? <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> .bipartisan (bī-pär'tĭ-zən, -sən) [Adj.] Maintaining the ability to blame republications when your stimulus plan proves to be a devastating failure.IMPEACH OBAMA! </div>

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