White House Email Follies 205
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."
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?
Strangling kittens (Score:-1, Interesting)
Sooner or later someone is going to stumble on them and they will be posted on Wikileaks.
And right after that, I expect Bush and his henchmen to brazenly turn around and say "Yeah, so what?"
Right now you could post video evidence of them strangling kittens amd the American people would say "Meh... they were probably terrist kittens that deserved it"
The failure to produce the emails when we all know that it's pretty well technically inpossible to "lose" them already indicates corruption and coverup to any reasonable person.
Elsewhere in the world destruction of evidence is taken as guilt. Is that not the case in the USA?
So why bother with actual evidence in making our judgements. It's not like the US administration hold themselves to such high standards is it?
Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:wow (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
So what is new? (Score:-1, Interesting)
Subpeonaed records were reported as not existing for two years untill a maid found them in one of the current presidential canidate's closets.
At least one cabinet secretary was found in contempt of court for not producing documents.
The president was found in civil contempt of court for lying under oath in a civil trial. The president was disbarred for the same offense.
Official records were removed from an office at the White House while the office occupant's unnatural death was being investigated (it was later ruled suicide but that was not initially clear).
White House career employees were fired, and the records associated with those firings mysteriously disappeared when Congress requested to see them.
Personal FBI files were transfeered to the White House political staff.
If anything the current White House occupants had very good teachers. And one of those teachers is running for president now.
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.
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.
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.
Re:The reason the White House won't give up the em (Score:2, Interesting)
But really, what are the odds that ANYONE in govt would want this? Too bad though.
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 course, the security for centralizing items properly without being read by non-recipients complicates things, but shouldn't be a show-stopper. Also, the retainment date cutoff of the central server and individuals may be different, which makes some people want to be pack-rats if they can't trust the central system to keep stuff long enough.
A related problem is that people often CC copy everybody and their dog to cover their butts. Thus, we get bajillion messages that don't relate to us.
The whole idea of email needs a big rethink. It's become a jungle monster.
Re:What? (Score:-1, Interesting)
Not true. Prior to outlook 2003, there is a hard limit of 2GB, but if you keep getting email, outlook would happily store the email in the
Since the file is now over the limit, outlook will stop working. Not the best design.
The only solution if you went over the limit is to truncate the file to below 2GB, then use a program like scanpst to repair it.
Re:wow (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.