Whitehouse Emails Were Lost Due to "Upgrade" 482
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."
This is a classic case of... (Score:5, Insightful)
These days... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 :)
Re:yes it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this frankly impossible to believe, and insulting on top of that.
Re:These days? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:These days... (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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.
Anyone for the high-jump? (Score:2, Insightful)
They're being heavily fined and potentially imprisoned for a blatant disregard for government policy?
Is there anybody in a position to make in-depth enquiries regarding the processes involved in this fiasco, who has the wherewithal and political clout to actually do something about it?
I didn't think so. Now bend over and get ready for another "Oops, we did it again!" situation.
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.
Re:These days? (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
Re:This, my friends, is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:yes it is. (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, for the love of fucking god. I'm getting awfully tired of this public spat about twitter, his sock puppets, and the people who want us to know about them.
Since most of us don't have a friggin clue what this is all about, make it go away. It really isn't better than the rest of the trolls and ACs spewing crap into Slashdot nowdays.
And, for the record, I am not twitter, one of his sock puppets, or whatever. But this whole on-going thing is getting pretty tedious.
Twitter, if you have nothing better to do than post under a few pseudonyms so you can get mod points and generally be an ass
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?
Re:The moral of the story (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:This, my friends, is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is a classic case of... (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 some chickenshit run of the mill SOX compliance failure, this is the most important single office in the country requiring the utmost diligence from people working there. (yeah, I guess that last point there really set the stage)
There is no way such incompetence exists, unless they were hiring 18 year old MCSE's just out of high school with no real world IT experience to configure the fucking system. In that case, we have a lot more important people that get a free visit to jail.
Cheers.
Emails still on the backups for all recipients (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:These days? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:They were warned of this... (Score:2, Insightful)
also Lotus--->Exchange is not exactly new frontiers. there's even built in tools to make it a snap.