White House Ordered to Preserve All Email 259
Verunks writes "A federal judge Monday ordered the White House to preserve copies of all its e-mails in response to two lawsuits that seek to determine whether e-mails have been destroyed in violation of federal law. The issue surfaced in the leak probe of administration officials who disclosed Valerie Plame's CIA identity. ' The Federal Records Act details strict standards prohibiting the destruction of government documents including electronic messages, unless first approved by the archivist of the United States. Justice Department lawyers had urged the courts to accept a proposed White House declaration promising to preserve all backup tapes. The judge's order "should stop any future destruction of e-mails, but the White House stopped archiving its e-mail in 2003 and we don't know if some backup tapes for those e-mails were already taped over before we went to court. It's a mystery," said Meredith Fuchs, a lawyer for the National Security Archive.'"
Storage requirements? (Score:3, Interesting)
Our company was required to delete emails (Score:4, Interesting)
Another question. (Score:2, Interesting)
First, how do yo prove that emails were deleted? And if you can prove it, how do you prove that they weren't deleted maliciously?
Second, I once asked a member of the Bar here in GA (a lawyer) about deleting emails and the legal ramifications. He said that as long as I have a company policy of deleting them after X amount of time, then nobody could claim that I was deleting them for malicious or fraudulent reasons. Because, a lot of folks, when they get sued, will delete all of their emails right before discovery. Then the judge rules something that I can't remember, but basically you, the email deleter, gets into trouble and possibly loses the case.
As a smart ass, I said that my policy is to delete them as soon as I get them. That's OK, actually. I just have to live with trying remember what was in the email. Or print them - then that's yet more problems.
Re:Careful what freedoms we give away (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Storage requirements? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Storage requirements? (Score:2, Interesting)
With our system, all email end up on a WORM device (see permabit) so we can assure all parties the data has not been tampered with.
Now - the interesting part - the amount of disk space needed can vary based on the customer's retention policy - which is general dictated by various federal standards (SAS70, etc), so really, you don't need an insane amount of disk space. Generally we see customers needing retention policies of 3 or 7 years. Anyway - there's no real hard and fast way to estimate how much space the white house would need (its based on number of mailboxes, number of messages per day, and size of messages) - but one of my larger customers, about 4 years worth of uncompressed data added up to about 300gigs. With the size of NAS and SAN devices today, it's quite feasible they could use a pair of 2TB disk arrays replicating to each other and probably be ok.
Re:Careful what freedoms we give away (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea that we can't or shouldn't be able to get at this information is absurd.
The funny part of all this is that most of the administration uses GOP-provided email services to protect themselves from such requests anyway - even though the legality of this is extremely questionable.
Re:Careful what freedoms we give away (Score:3, Interesting)
~Pev
Re:Our company was required to delete emails (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Careful what freedoms we give away (Score:3, Interesting)
Authority of the Courts (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I'm afraid they're too late (Score:5, Interesting)
Getting the facts out into the open. Yes it would be nice if lawbreakers were punished for breaking the law but as we've seen sometimes that's practically impossible. In lieu of that, we can look for a conviction in the court of public opinion, a decision no pardon can reverse -- see Nixon. Or Scooter Libby for that matter. Scooter's conviction was damaging to the administration and the Republican party. If we can score even more solid dirt on someone as high or higher up than Scooter was, that would be even more damaging.
That's a reason for them to stop breaking the law -- getting people to believe that these are lawbreakers and can't be trusted in office. Irreparable damage to political careers may not be as satisfying as jail time, but it is something. The fear of losing elections should help keep the rest of them in line. For a while anyway. I know how this goes. But if you don't do anything, just throw up your hands and say there's no point, then you've done worse than a token gesture of dissatisfaction, you've given tacit permission.
Re:Storage requirements? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, given the nature of the decisions which are coming out of the White House
This stuff is supposed to be historical record; I thought they were already obligated to keep all of this stuff (except for that whole sending through Republican Party addresses debacle). The White House has helicopters, airplanes, fleets of limousines, chase cars, private chefs, security personnel, communications officers, Stewards, housekeepers, and what have you.
If the official correspondence of the head of state isn't worth keeping, then, WTF is worth keeping?? A tremendous amount of resources go into keeping the President doing his work and plugged in. Surely to fsck the technical issues of archiving this shit is a surmountable problem.
If they're not archiving it now, it's because someone decided to stop the audit trail, not because the resources weren't there.
Cheers
Re:Way too late (Score:4, Interesting)
The parent of my answer started in this thread with dismissiveness. I've seen it used before by many others as a tactic to downplay the gravity of a situation they don't wish people to openly discuss, especially when it comes to politics (and in this case, American politics). It gets marked as funny, fair enough. But +3? Really?
The post I specifically answered mentioned one historically inaccurate sleight concerning Slick Willy Clinton in that he didn't go after OBL. This post, a few minutes ago, was at +3. I showed, with no error, he did. I countered with two links. Both from the same week in 1998. One showing Clinton going after OBL, the second one showing the lack of support the American C-in-C received from 'across the aisle', as they'd say in Washington.
This was marked down one point before being marked +1 for informative.
Disagreeing with me politically? Makes the world go around. But seriously: if you think that fellow geeks, or history, or myself, will think the facts are anything other than the facts because I get marked down by a few people with a conservative American political agenda on Slashdot? Good luck with that. How's that working for you in Iraq and possibly Iran?
Hell, I'd accept a Flamebait for this clarification as justification of just how much many Americans (and some are in this forum) will dismiss cited facts because of the cognitive dissonance [wikipedia.org] it sets up in their minds, if it strokes their poor delicate and shattered egos. It's not as though that mental process is particularly complex [chowk.com].
Re:Check with AT&T? (Score:2, Interesting)
Since when is your party affiliation listed on your driver's license? Mine certainly isn't.