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White House Email Follies
Journal written by Presto Vivace (882157) and posted by
kdawson
on Sat Mar 08, 2008 03:40 PM
from the exchanging-notes dept.
from the exchanging-notes dept.
Presto Vivace forwards a link detailing a recent House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the White House missing emails mess. David Gewirtz's report, carried in OutlookPower and DominoPower (in 6 parts, keep clicking), makes for scary reading. "If, in fact, the bulk of the White House email records are now stored in bundles of rotting PST files, all at or above their maximum safe load-level, that ain't good in a very big way... I object to using the inaccurate and inflated claim of excessive cost as a reason to avoid compliance with the Presidential Records Act."
Related Stories
[+]
Politics: White House Says Hard Drives Were Destroyed 411 comments
wanderindiana brings us an update on the White House missing emails mess, which we have discussed before. It seems the hard drives of many White House computers are gone beyond the possibility of recovery. Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy? "Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005. The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed."
[+]
Judge Demands Information About Missing White House Emails 209 comments
Lucas123 writes "A District Court judge has ordered the Executive Office of the President to tell the court by May 5 whether any e-mail server backup tapes were kept for a period from March to October 2003 to cover controversial issues such as reasons for starting the war in Iraq, the release of a former CIA operative's name and the US Department of Justice's actions. The White House has been working for months trying to fend off a lawsuit filed last May in federal court in Washington by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. The judge cited what he called an apparent contradiction by White House CIO Theresa Payton as to whether backup tapes had been preserved. He also recommended that White House employees be ordered to turn over any flash drives or other portable media that may contain e-mails. The White House missing email scandal has been developing for some time now."
[+]
Politics: Karl Rove's IT Guru Dies In Small Plane Crash 377 comments
A dozen readers have submitted the story of the death in a plane crash of Mike Connell, Karl Rove's IT adviser, the man who set up and ran the gwb43.com mail server, and an important figure in GOP tech circles since 1997. The closest thing to straight reporting to be found in a mainstream media outlet is a piece from KDKA in Pittsburgh giving a detailed backgrounder on Connell's work for Rove, two generations of the Bush family, and many GOP congressmen and committees. CBSNews.com is now mirroring the KDKA reporting. Almost all the early media coverage comes from the left and some of it is frankly conspiratorial. Among the milder pieces (although it could not be called balanced) is this interview with Mark Crispin Miller, NYU professor and author of two books about the 2004 election in Ohio. Connell was compelled to testify on the day before the US election in a lawsuit involving Ohio election irregularities in 2004. Connell, an experienced pilot, died on Sunday when his plane crashed two miles short of the runway of Akron-Canton Airport in Ohio.
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What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
as to the amount of data , email systems are the largest systems on earth these days encompassing tens of terabytes of data in their live stores and tens of petabytes on tape
and yes they should have an archiving system not just doing tape back up tape
p.S if they used an enterprise email system like lotus domino this would not be a problem after all thats what the CIA uses
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends. Starting with outlook 2003, there is a new format of
and yes they should have an archiving system not just doing tape back up tape
Well, that depends if you want your email to be subpoenaed/leaked or not! G.W. Bush is on the record saying he deliberately doesn't use email for that reason.
p.S if they used an enterprise email system like lotus
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the Bush Administration. It started subject to corruption.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Have emails that you don't want any more, regulatory authorities breathing down your neck, keeping embarrassing emails becoming a worry, then switch to M$ exchange, we guarantee to 'legally' corrupt and destroy all those pesky records of your corruption, not one incriminating email shall survive.
Based upon the latest M$ Vista email shenanigans, that exchange pst excuse doesn't s
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The Exchange database gives me the heebie-jeebies
It used to give me no end of grief, and I'd specialised in the product for several years since the first test release. It's not really designed as a low level server, it was always strictly targeted at the large enterprise. The record structure was very close to full X.500 (I'd gone through the Exchange DB in raw mode and have studied the full X.500 standard) and I was tempted to publish the term "irrelational" for the DB structure, but I had to act the apologist because I made my living off the product.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's primary function would be to store, send and receive emails. Does it do that well? Sure, it sends and receives emails fine, but it sure as heck can't store them correctly. Like the parent says, what sort of idiot decided that a 2GB limitation would be a good idea for a PST file? And what sort of moron let's it save past this point, corrupting the file?!?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How good can a product be if it periodically trashes all of the data entrusted to it? Even better, when it does trash the data, it's in a proprietary format that makes it hard to try to parse through and salvage anything. The proprietary format also means that (like all MS products) if you'd like to use the data in a way MS didn't anticipate, you're SOL.
Based on comparing my experiance with non-MS mail programs (for DOS, Windows, and Unix over the years) to the experiances of MS users, I'd have to say tha
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
About 1.9 GB on an older PST file and anymore will crap out.
Outlook 2003 and greater will allow 20gb files, but they become horrendously slow after 5 to 10 gb.
And yes.. People will store gigabytes of email on an exchange server... Usually when they are emailing large videos, photoshop files, or do Desktop publishing work. Though I wonder what the Whitehouse doing to take up that much space.
Certainaly it wasn't powerpoints on intelligence reports.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
Based the general stream of diarrhea coming from the White House (especially this past week), I'll wager $500 that it's torture/bondage porn.
Parent
Email Needs Rethink (Score:3, Interesting)
Most email systems are poorly factored information because they duplicate a message for every last reader of a given message. It would save a lot of space and traffic if a given attachment or message was stored in one and only one place rather than replicated en-mass.
Of cours
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Single Instance Storage (Score:3, Informative)
Outlook storage (Score:5, Informative)
Outlook has PST (Personal Store) and OST (Offline Store) files. PSTs are basically just local mail folder collections. OSTs are used to maintain local replicates of Exchange server mailboxes (so you can still use your email even if you're on the road). In Outlook 2003 "Cached Mode", Outlook also uses OSTs even when connected to the Exchange server, and synchronizes to the server in the background.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208480 [microsoft.com]
PST and OST files -- I'll call them "Outlook stores" -- are both built around the same file format. There are two variants. The original format, which Microsoft sometimes called "ANSI", is limited to 2 Gi byte total size, and 64 Ki items per table. The table limit affects the number of items you can have in a folder, as well as the total number of folders you can have in a PST. (Outlook stores from Outlook 97 and earlier also had a table limit of 16 Ki items, but could be auto-upgraded in place to large tables in newer Outlook versions.)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197430 [microsoft.com]
These store limits affected OST and PST alike, so even if you had a nice, capable Exchange server, you could still encounter problems with Outlook store limits.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/288283 [microsoft.com]
With Outlook 2003, Microsoft introduced a new Outlook store format. It's sometimes called the "Unicode" format. I'm aware of no documented limits on the file format. I'm sure there are some, but Microsoft doesn't document them. Microsoft didn't document the ANSI PST limits until long after they started causing data loss, either.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830336 [microsoft.com]
In versions of Outlook prior to 2002, if you exceeded the store format limits, Outlook would give no immediate indication. The file would keep getting bigger, as the software didn't have checks for the limits. But it would corrupting things, too. In short, silently loosing data.
Eventually, the Outlook store would get so damaged it would stop working. Microsoft provided a utility to truncate the file to 2 GiB to make it work again, loosing more data in the process.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088 [microsoft.com]
In Outlook 2002, Microsoft added some code to check the limits of the store, and warn/stop if you reach them.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305108 [microsoft.com]
In Outlook 2003, along with the Unicode format, Microsoft added a parameter at which it would consider a Unicode store "full", even though the format can keep going. The stock limit is 20 GiB; you can increase it with a registry tweak.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832925/ [microsoft.com]
"ANSI PST" does not mean PST is a standard file format; that refers to the character sets/encodings the file uses.
Exchange Server uses an entirely different on-disk storage format, called EDB. There are technical limits, but they're insanely huge (16 TiB per store, 5 stores per database group). Exchange starts to run out of hardware resources (memory, mainly) long before you hit the file size limits. There are license-based size limits in some versions/editions of Exchange. 16 GiB in 2000 Standard, and 75 GiB in 2000 Standard SP2.
Parent
Lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Those who can't do Teach, those who can't teach, Teach Gym.
Re:Mod this guy up (Score:4, Funny)
Those who, cant Use Punctuation; post to Slashdot
Parent
PST files for archiving (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, it's not like there aren't answers to the question "how shall I archive my user's email for legal and regulatory purposes?" [google.com] (Disclaimer- I work for a player in that market, but we're not on the first page of results for that search. So I don't feel too bad. Oh, wait - )
digitally signed and time stamped archive (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:digitally signed and time stamped archive (Score:4, Informative)
You can sign the tarball if you like afterwards.
Parent
The real question (Score:5, Insightful)
What really bothers me is that not this white house makes nixon and reagan look like boy scouts, but that the dems PROMISED to go after them, and really has done nothing.
Re:The real question (Score:4, Insightful)
What really bothers me is that not this white house makes nixon and reagan look like boy scouts, but that the dems PROMISED to go after them, and really has done nothing.
Politicians making promises and then failing to keep them? I'm shocked....SHOCKED...
Parent
Re:The real question (Score:4, Interesting)
Just because something has always been done a certain way doesn't mean a time won't come where its necessary to put re-election odds by the wayside and do whats right. The caveat we all despise being that such people do not seem to win elections beyond the small to mid-sized municipal level from what I've seen.
I do not know of a better system overall myself, but this is definitely one of the biggest issues with democracy. Not only can doing whats right get you on your ends without any means (like say, doing nothing) but it can also be entirely undone shortly thereafter. Of course, I do not expect this to change unless we survive the next worldwide readjustment when we either can no longer maintain the food supply thats maintaining worldwide overpopulation, blow our selves the hell up, or simply forget that water isn't just for toilets.
If the current level of strife in the world isn't enough to make people want to think for themselves to be able to navigate the sea of bullshit on all sides, i doubt anything will until we see massive imminent worldwide peril with projected massive die-offs within a generation. Then the question will be, will we survive it.
Parent
Delete the White House (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone still think all this incompetence that always protects Bush and his team is some kind of accident?
Re:Delete the White House (Score:5, Insightful)
We should be so lucky to see such a high standard.
> Anyone still think all this incompetence that always protects Bush and his team is some kind of accident?
I would rather. The alternative explanation is EVIL and probably treasonous.
Parent
Re:Delete the White House (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, but a great many people have gone tribal: they like it that the President is willfully violating oath, honor, duty and law. It means the man at the top of the hierarchy they worship, and therefore the hierarchy itself, is above all, and they're part of that hierarchy. The only rules they have to follow are what Big Men say.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Realize that the Peter Principle [wikipedia.org] applies to everyone. Especially the incompetents at all levels in government - even POTUS hisself.
This is not a normal example of the Peter Principle. Bush would have already been promoted to his level of incompetence if they'd hired him as assistant to the secretary of the White House caterer. He'd already been "promoted" beyond his level of competence when he was governor of Texas.
Lotus Notes? (Score:4, Funny)
I bet if you go over to the IRS, those guys have a rock-solid backup going back many years.....
Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
There, I helped you out with a few BOLD tags. Your mistake is assuming that an email either falls under the scope of partisian political activity or represents communication at official levels regarding government business. They sent emails that were both.
When you're having an email conversation (for example) about which U.S. Attorneys should be fired by the president for prosecuting Republican offenses or for not going after Democrats in election years, and what the cover stories for the firings should be, you're mixing political partisan activity and official government business. Since these emails were illegal for government officials to be sending, they obviously didn't use the White House email infrastructure to send them. Even these guys weren't that stupid. They were dumb enough, though, to indicate in WH emails when they were going to continue certain conversations, regarding planned activities to be carried out in an official capacity, in nongovernmental channels (RNC, gwb43.com, Yahoo Mail) to avoid them from ever becoming public.
But the purpose of the Hatch Act (passed in 1939) isn't just to protect Outlook servers from private or partisan use- it forbids the use of any federal agencies or resources to assist in partisan activities. That would include both WH email servers and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Parent
wow (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Either they are that incompetent, and it's just a symptom of big government not knowing it's ass from it's face
OR
2) These people are purposefully appearing this inept.
Either option isn't pleasant, and both lead to a serious problem with our government where there will likely be no repercussions from this.
But then, we all knew that already, didn't we?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not simply a case of incompetent IT staff setting up a system badly. The White House had an email system that by all accounts worked very well, archiving everything properly, and it was shut down and the staff let go, and the new system was set up by someone over-ruling their own IT staff in order to make sure that it couldn't work properly. That means that someone made the decision to spend a lot of time and money to eliminate a system that worked properly, to replace it with a system that didn't, over-ruling the recommendations of their own IT staff, which can only have been done intentionally.
What would be ideal would be for the PRA to be given real teeth so that the cost of violating it becomes clearly higher than the cost of not hiding whatever it is you want hidden. Given the extremely high value of keeping embarrassing or illegal behavior secret, the penalty needs to be extremely high as well, as it is for destroying evidence. That is to say, courts should presume that the records that were destroyed were incriminating. Judges take destroying evidence of a crime quite seriously.
Parent
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"pendulum's gonna fcuking swing in November, baby. Gerald Ford gave amnesty to Nixon. Obama won't. They better torch the place on the way out and learn how to drink tea 'cause the UK's the only place that's gonna let those jokers stay and not hang."
While primitive, it's got a certain flavor.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Excessive Cost" (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering how much we're spending in what are arguably other countries' wars, I'd find a claim of "excessive cost" for anything laughable.
Solution (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The SPCA has a much easier time recruiting when there's a serial puppy-kicker on the loose.
I watched this on TV (Score:4, Interesting)
The article, despite being spread across multiple pages, characterises the hearing fairly, so I won't bother reiterating except to say that the committee members were indeed uninformed, the witnesses were somewhere between clueless and dishonest, and the politics injected into the situation (notably from the Republicans) was so thick that I wondered whether anything could be agreed upon or any of the issues resolved. Hell, by the end of it, I doubt anyone really knew what the technical issues were, myself included.
The saving grace was watching (no one could hear what he was saying) the soft-spoken White House archivist and remembering the joke about how to tell the difference between an introverted and extroverted geek. Instead of shoes, it was microphones.
Your government in action, folks. The bad guys trying to cover up, the good guys trying to find out what's going on, and both groups taking its cues Microsoft weenies.
Big, corrupted PST files? No problem. (Score:5, Informative)
Big, corrupted PST files? No problem. Just get Stellar Phoenix PST Repair [repair-outlook-pst.com]. "Stellar Phoenix can repair PST files in all scenarios including the common issues listed below ... Oversized PST files with 2Gb problem.
Recovers from encrypted files. Recovers deleted e-mails." U.S. Government price $249 with CD. Immediate download available. Recommended by PC Magazine.
This little problem can be overcome. Just get some image copies of those tapes out to the Internet Archive or Wikileaks, and all the technical problems will be quickly dealt with, the data will go on line, and it will all be indexed.
Haha - anybody surprised? (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, this is a classic, almost Hollywood-style presidential-aid-villain-style tactic.
First, you dry up all the funding to something so that you can later claim there was not enough money to do it right.
And in the process of doing it "not right" some important stuff gets lost so the people in charge can't be charged later (which they can't anyway, because presidents make a habit of indemnifying their successors and most of the senior staff around them, because if they wouldn't, their successor wouldn't indemnify them...).
Still wondering why people actually get out of their bed and vote?
Mission Critical Email - why I won't use MS Prods (Score:4, Interesting)
In my former place of employment we used a lot of OSS for things like web, email, database, etc. Even Samba. We had a few MS-SQL environments but I stayed as far from those as I could. For email we used Qmail with a SquirrelMail front end, and for web it was Apache/Plone and databases were MySQL.
The nice thing about Qmail is it stores email in user home folders. They're flat files that are easily replicated and backed up.
When the new administration came in the Director of Admin was paranoid about the fact that I.T. could see her email folder. So they went out and spent a shitload of money on AD, Exchange, etc.
That was a year ago. They still don't have it all running.
The reason the White House won't give up the email (Score:3, Insightful)
With the morons they have on staff up there - and that includes Bush - they can't be sure all sorts of incriminating stuff isn't in them. In fact, they probably assume there is.
So they stonewall.
Read TFA. They're making estimates of the cost of recovery of the PST files as wildly off the mark. They're claiming it would cost $50K just to recover ONE PST file! And half a million bucks to recover 5,000 PST files!
That's deliberately false testimony - i.e., perjury.
Face it, folks. This country is being run by criminals now - just like in Warren Ellis' comic, "Reload". Look up Sibel Edmonds [justacitizen.org] on Google and see just how bad it is.
Re:Strangling kittens (Score:4, Insightful)
In the USA, it matters a whole lot who you're talking about whether or not XYZ counts as guilt.
Parent
Is not (Score:3, Informative)