Whitehouse Emails Were Lost Due to "Upgrade"

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."

yes it is.

[twitter]

It's almost dumb enough to be true but it's a transparent lie. They made backups before they switched systems and those backups should still exist. If nothing else, M$ has a copy of the pst files because they can and would. Windows is no way to run a government.

They are still lying

[Ralph Spoilsport]

everything that goes through the WH is:

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

Re:Am I the only one that

[nine-times]

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 into a DB that could then be accessed any number of ways.

Re:Believable

[atamido]

I call FUD. Exchange supports POP3, IMAP, etc. Enabling/disabling it is trivial.

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 .PST. This would have saved everything except your rules.

There are, and have always been, many good ways to backup an Exchange server. (Restoring was a bit tricky in the past, but is simple now.) The built in windows backup program MSBackup will backup/restore an entire Exchange store. Probably 10 clicks total from sitting at the desktop, or can be done from the command line. If you're using a real backup program, these will typically let you restore individual emails back into the Exchange store.

Exchange has issues, but they aren't anything you list.

They were warned of this...

[Sleepy]

The industry is full of stories like this, for years. Exchange by default can't handle it - it's still a workgroup server at heart, and subject to many OS and filesystem limits. Does Hotmail.com even rely 100% on Exchange, or is it still UNIX at the core?

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:So to summarize

[DigitAl56K]

The part that I find difficult to swallow is that they decided to change to Exchange knowing that it didn't meet the retention requirements and knowing that they've have to have aides sorting through millions of e-mails. I can't even imagine the kind of thinking that allowed that to happen, other than to make a *cough* "plausible" *cough* case for e-mail going missing.

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-mails are archived, or they were selectively failing to sort some of the e-mails into the archives, which is illegal.

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.

No, it is surprising. Unless someone was deleting the files and the network drive was not backed up (e.g. to tape), all the files should be recoverable and it seems like it should be quite easy to write some software that runs through backups and the network drive, grabs all the files that have mail headers, and compile all the unique message ID's into one archive.

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.

So what you're saying there is the White House has a huge file share with archives of everyones e-mails, the kind we can't even see because of the risk to national security, and it's not possible to know who might have deleted files because the list of people with access is so vast and there was no access control? Jesus. Public companies have stricter requirements than the US government.

Payton claims that the White House is working on yet another archiving system. But until it's completed--and it's now looking increasingly unlikely that it will be operational before the end of the administration

Well there is a shocker. Imagine the Bush administration failing to finish a project during their term that might lead to them being held accountable later. I mean, it's not like they have tried to grant themselves retroactive immunity or anything..

A 2005 analysis performed by McDevitt (while he was still on the White House Staff) found over 700 days with e-mails apparently missing from the "journaling" archives, including 12 days in which all e-mails from the president's immediate office were missing, and 16 days when all e-mails from the Vice President's office were missing.

So we aren't just talking about aides failing to archive the occasional e-mail.

As if that weren't bad enough, there is also evidence that some senior Bush administration officials have taken to using non-government e-mail accounts as a way to skirt the requirements of federal law.

Great! How many senior Bush administration officials have faced federal prosecution for this? Nobody gets prosecuted = nobody cares about the law.

Re:This, my friends, is...

[Mongoose Disciple]

Wait, does that mean a Microsoft product is actually better?

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:This, my friends, is...

[TheP4st]

Indeed I do mean that a MS product is better. From a end user perspective it can a nightmare to configure LN with a UI that have next to no consistency. High crash rate, caused by extremely poor/bloated coding. Ridicously inefficient slow search function in large mailboxes (often) leading to crashes/freezes. Parts of the UI dissapearing mysteriously, something that often can require quite some extensive trouble shooting to resolve. Regular failure of backing up mails and being able to retrive them from the backup. And this is just a fraction of the issues I can list that I was faced with on a daily basis. Granted the more frequent problems were relatively quick and easy to resolve, however that do not apply to your average computer user.

In short, the only person I would recommend LN to is my ex who out of spite put down my dog without consulting me.

Trifecta

[bxwatso]

This story is the /. trifecta:

1. Nerdy content that average people can't fathom

2. Anti MS

3. Anti Bush