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Whitehouse Emails Were Lost Due to "Upgrade"
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Apr 30, 2008 09:48 AM
from the upgrading-to-orwell dept.
from the upgrading-to-orwell dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "We now know how the Whitehouse managed to lose about five million emails. It seems that they 'upgraded' their Lotus Notes system, which had an automatic retention and backup system, for Microsoft Exchange, which did not support the automatic system. So they changed it to a manual process, where aides would manually sort emails one by one into individual PST files, which they call a 'journaling' archive system. They're still building a replacement for the retention system. Right when they had one finished, the White House CIO complained that it made Microsoft Exchange too slow, so they hired yet another contractor to build another one, causing a senior IT official to quit in protest. So they still haven't completed the project after almost eight years, and rely on humans to sort millions of emails."
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Submission: Whitehouse Emails Were Lost Due to "Upgrade by Anonymous Coward
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22 Million Missing Bush White House Emails Found 326 comments
ctmurray writes "Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days' worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that had filed a lawsuit — which has now been dropped — over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system. Earlier we discussed the Obama White House's opposition to the lawsuit that led to this discovery." The related links reflect our discussions about the missing emails over two years.
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This is a classic case of... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is a classic case of... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:This is a classic case of... (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone be sure to send me the talking points when we're back to "The Bush administration is staffed by morons", k?
(Such amazing IQ swings we see. Genius! Moronic! Brilliant! Ape-like! Bing-bam-boom! Sometimes several flip-flops in one day! One would almost wonder if the problem lies in the observers, rather than the observed.)
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." I think "incompetence" covers it just fine; I'm sure this is hardly the first migration screwed up this way.
Parent
Re:This is a classic case of... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem lies in this ridiculous line of thinking where someone can only ever have one adjective applied, and that adjective must apply to everything they do.
Here's the dope: The Bush White House is quite adept at playing politics -- genius when Rove was involved -- including yes the ability to make apparent incompetence into a strength. They are skilled at making the organizations they control work for them, producing the information they want to hear, and failing to find or losing the information they don't want anyone to hear, to support their political goals. When it comes to actually executing policies outside of Washington, they're terrible failures because in reality you can't get rid of facts you don't like and keep only the ones you do.
What's so contradictory about that? I'm "brilliant" with computers, I'm "moronic" with cars. To think that one precludes the other is idiotic. But then again, so is the whole "flip-flop" figure of speech.
Parent
Re:This is a classic case of... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, yeah, except: what happened to the final backup tapes of the first installation?
Since it's the last backup of that system it should definitely be marked for retention. And surely, as they realized that they had a retention issue with the new system, they would have ensured to maintain those tapes due to the Presidential Records Act that Bush himself amended?
Also, doesn't it concern anyone that he changed the law regarding what communications can be released and when on Nov 1 2001, [fas.org] just three weeks after 9/11? Coincidence and circumstantial, perhaps, but concerning...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You can get a long line of IT admins from around the country to testify how big the lies coming from the Administration are, put the white house IT admins on the stand and rip them to shreds, then throw their asses in JAIL when they show gross incompetence in following the law, instead of coming right out with the truth of what happened and who encouraged it to happen. Plausible deniability only succeeds when noone has the balls and patience to search for the truth. This is not som
Am I the only one that (Score:4, Funny)
There is nothing that will happen for the rest of the week that can make me more light hearted than this. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Re: (Score:3)
Or that the aides are manually sorting emails. What a crappy job.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Am I the only one that (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sucks more?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I think that's what they did. They turned on journaling, and then archived the journaling account to PST files.
Unfortunately, this meant that a person was manually copying to PST, which introduces an opportunity for either human error or tampering. In addition, PST files aren't very good for this sort of archive. They've long had a history of getting corrupt as they grow in size, they're hard to search, and they don't have much in the way of built-in security controls. It'd be better to dump the files i
These days... (Score:5, Insightful)
These days? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:These days? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:These days? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:These days? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:These days... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
sounds plausible enough (Score:3, Insightful)
What was that quote about never ascribing to malice?
It's a well put-together story (plausible enough) but I'm still skeptic though.
Maybe we've just seen too many lies :)
Six P's (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Six P's (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps an example of really good planning. If I was planning to make sure a few million potentially incriminating emails never found their way into the public eye, that is how I might do it. Certainly if I had spent a number of meetings discussing how and when Americans should torture people [washingtonpost.com] I would be motivated to do so.
Parent
So to summarize (Score:5, Funny)
I predict this will lead to a civil, thoughtful Slashdot discussion which results in many useful recommendations for avoiding similar problems in the future.
I recommend fire.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And it was completely unnecessary as Notes will happily set emails to zero length, without warning, if you archive them to a drive with no remaining space. No Microsoft products needed!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Still, how did such volumes of e-mail actually disappear? Either aides were sorting all e-mails into individual PST files and thus all the e-
so to summarize... (Score:3, Funny)
The Government was Incompetent.
or...
The Government is lying and covering up.
Hmmm.... Mr Rock, meet Mr Hardplace.
Re:so to summarize... (Score:5, Funny)
It fits the results better, actually.
Parent
The dog ate my incriminating evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Even given the staggering incompetence of the Bush administration in nearly all aspects, this just doesn't pass the laugh test.
Seems like a market for e-mail archiving... (Score:5, Insightful)
2) To bad the requirement for e-mail archiving and retention is unique to government. Wait, most publicly traded companies have legal and compliance requirements to do so.
3) To bad there is no market for software to archive and retain e-mail on one of the most common e-mail platforms. Wait, there is, and its huge.
4) To bad nobody has nobody has developed technology for this market. Wait, there are dozens of solutions.
To bad no one is getting fired, imprisoned or impeached over this one.
Re:Seems like a market for e-mail archiving... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
This may be the secret (Score:3, Funny)
Nothing to worry about. (Score:4, Funny)
No problem. They had the job outsourced to India.
bloody hell. (Score:4, Insightful)
*every* backup system should result in a set a of data offsite or in a storage area never to be touched again.
even if you use incremental backup every nth backup should be a complete archival read only copy re the previous sentence.
the *very* worst case should be the last major backup is in a format that is not readable with the current system and some red faced admins need help to read read the data.
5 million emails? jesus wept.
add the conspiracy theory factor into the mix and you have something that, on the face of it, sounds unbelievable.
as one of our politicians in the UK said to another a short while ago "you cannot have it both ways, you were either ignorant or incompetent - and neither is acceptable".
Criminal? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, No. I don't believe it. (Score:4, Insightful)
However, there has *always* been a way to retain and archive emails automatically from Exchange and no shortage of migration utilities from notes to Exchange. The reasons stated in the article just don't wash. No one, not even the newest tech school grad could come up with a system like that currently in use.
However, it may in fact not be intentional malice from the start but more likely an existing state of incompetence that was taken advantage of to hide traces or misdeeds or at least to make finding any evidence difficult.
This still doesn't address the use of non-government email systems for official business by Rove and other Republican members. According to the laws of the United States this is all highly illegal. Don't you care at all about what your government is doing or do you think whatever you do won't make any difference?
They are still lying (Score:4, Informative)
a: saved to tape and sent to a vault on a daily basis
b: recorded by the NSA, who also saves and backs up data
So, it's all a load of bullshit - they're thinking that the public is stupid enough to buy it, or, simply kick it down the road another month or two until the ADHD press finds something shiny to get distracted by like Miley Cyrus Boobs or another blast from Trainwreck Spears.
RS
They were warned of this... (Score:3, Informative)
De-centralized email storage and PST files?? COME ON!
It is almost CERTAIN to expect that they knew this would cause emails to be lost and take the system from bad to worse. Even a junior IT person fresh off the boat would say this was CRAZY to attempt, with FEWER benefits and increased risk. In the corporate world, this would be met by massive civil lawsuits and possibly criminal charges. Any "contractor" the WH employed would know this for a fact.
So given that such warnings had to have been given and they went ahead anyways, you have to wonder if strategic "loss" of emails was perfect cover for an email purge. Given the shady nature of these characters, I'm sure this was a calculated "feature".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A friend of mine used to work for IBM. They (his department, at least) used Outlook.
If that doesn't say it I'm not sure what does. I've heard some probably justified horror stories about being the person who needs to admin the Exchange server, but from the perspective of a normal user who just wants to read their e-mail, schedule meetings, etc... Outlook is ridiculously better. (Or was. I haven't used the latest major version of Notes.)
Re:yes it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this frankly impossible to believe, and insulting on top of that.
Parent
Lotus Notes is involved here (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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You too can be a CIO! Just learn how to play golf, join the right country club, and let one of Microsoft's sales representatives nibble on your sweet, sweet braaiinnnsss!
Re:This, my friends, is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:But Exchange is supposed to be better! (Score:4, Insightful)
Because "works" in this case is a means by which they can get caught?
If I was going to be as corrupt/incompetent as this administration, I'd try to limit how much that criminality/idiocy could be directly documented for criminal proceedings/historical study.
Parent
Re:The moral of the story (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The moral of the story (Score:4, Insightful)
However, the reason it must be malice (aka intentional incompetence), is that for these purposes it doesn't matter whether the files were correctly converted from one format to another. They could have given over all the records to Congress in whatever disordered form it was in, and let Congress figure out how to sort through it. There are very easy ways to pull information out of a complete morass of files. For example, just text index the whole mess, and search for any text containing interesting phrases, and then follow the references in those text blocks to related text blocks. You could probably get 90% of the meaning of a collection of email in random formats just by doing things like that. But obviously the whole point is to block that from happening, not enable it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
With versions of Exchange prior to 2007, it was trivial to export an entire mailbox directly from the Exchange store (and reimport it later). I don't know why it would be necessary to delete an Exchange mailbox like that to fix a problem, but at the very least you could have copied everything from within Outlook to a local
There are, and have always been, many good way
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)