Trying To Find White House Missing E-mails

Gov IT writes "On Wednesday a federal court ordered all employees working in the Bush White House to surrender media that might contain e-mails sent or received during a two and a half year period in hope of locating missing messages before President-elect Barack Obama takes over next week."

Seperation of Powers & Impeachment

[darkwing_bmf]

It's not the judge's prerogative to rule over the executive branch. The Constitution specifically grants Congress the authority to judge the President via impeachment, not the courts.

Re:Contempt of Court

[1u3hr]

, but either possibility (purposely deleted or accident) seems equally likely to me.

700 days' worth of email are missing. I think you'd have to work pretty hard to "accidentally lose" that. You might neglect a backup or two. To do it for two years ... well, Bush can just isue himself and his staff pardons to cover it.

Re:And then what?

[EsJay]

You fail [youtube.com]

Fight or Flight

[not_hylas( )]

Review IT architecture of (the late) Mike Connell for the GOP:
Read the links, Videos with Spoonamore, another GOP IT Guru.

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F23%2F2128209 [slashdot.org]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJi7ViN35O8 [youtube.com]

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Foul_play_not_suspected_in_GOP_0113.html [rawstory.com]

http://www.velvetrevolution.us/prosecute_rove/ [velvetrevolution.us]

You telling me Systems people don't do backups?
Thought not.

Lawsuit versus Impeachment

[Anonymous Coward]

The people have the right to sue the executive branch. The venue for such suit is naturally the courts. In that case, it is indeed the prerogative of a judge to resolve the suit according to law.

Impeachment is a different beast entirely, which could result in actual punishment instead of just forcing them to hand over their documents.

Re:And then what?

[Comatose51]

NPR had a segment talking about the oath of office today.

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

See that sentence? The President is not above the law since he swears to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." The Constitution trumps the President. The NPR segment even mentions how the words "my Judgment" was changed to "my Ability" to make sure that the President doesn't even get a choice in this. He's there to obey and execute the law, not overrule it.

Re:Oh hey, look, in the distance, that ship...

[2Bits]

And I sure hope that someone, Noam Chomsky or someone else, will write a book that explains to the public what the two Bushes have done during all these years, as eloquently as in The Culture of Terrorism [amazon.com].

Now, if you are going to try Bush and company, then I'd say that almost every single American president of the 20th century must be dragged into court as well, except the newly elected Obama (but we'll see).

Disclosure: I was the survivor of a country that was devastated as a result of the terrorist foreign policies of the USA. Our extended, very well-off family of 60 persons were reduced to less than 7 after four years of war, famine, epidemic outbreak, torture, mass killing, ... Talking about silkworm in an earlier article, you'd be lucky if you had that to eat. I have eaten all those things that would make the majority of ./ers scream of horror by just mentioning them.

Re:Seperation of Powers & Impeachment

[KiltedKnight]

Yet the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is in charge of the Senate as it hears the Impeachment Trial, not the Vice President. Remember that in all other cases, the Vice President is, constitutionally, the President of the Senate and only casts a vote there in the event of a tie.

Re:Cut GW some slack

[AK Marc]

But what about the claim that he was tied to terrorism? The only "tie" they found was that al Qaeda contacted him, asked to train in his country, and Saddam turned them down. Yes, he spoke with them, that was the "tie" to terrorism. He refused to let them in. As for the WMDs, there were lies about yellow cake. Bush stated things in public after his administration was told that information was incorrect. Either false information propogates instantly and corrections take until the media notices, or they knew and lied. No usable WMDs were ever found. They weren't there. He may have had some facilities, but the only WMDs he had were essentially provided by the US and he was never really able to manufacture them effectively on his own. Not that he didn't want to. And yes, Saddam lied to indicate that he did have them. His people probably believed he had them. If he didn't have the appearance of having them, there was the real possibility of invasion or revolt. So Saddam was lying in saying that he had them. But, of course, no inspection ever revealed them and none were found.

Re:Cut GW some slack

[maladroit]

Where's the 'delusional' mod when you need it?

How about this lie? : http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/09/16/Armey_Cheney_misled_me_on_Iraq/UPI-53871221586641/ [upi.com]

Re:And then what?

[sumdumass]

You do realize that Nixon was never impeached nor convicted of anything right?

How can you expect anything you say to be taken seriously when you don't even have basic history right? It isn't like Nixon was another no eventful minor era in the history of the united states. You should at least have a basic understanding of it if your going to open your mouth on it.

Re:Contempt of Court

[Anonymous Coward]

Now now. Cheney is the evil mastermind, Bush the bumbling idiot. That wasn't so hard, was it?

Re:Contempt of Court

[Anonymous Coward]

Important data is deleted by accident all the time. In other words, "real" IT people get it wrong all the time. You're expecting government IT people to get it right? Let's just say government employees aren't typically known for their competence.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Bush and the gang, but either possibility (purposely deleted or accident) seems equally likely to me.

We have a word for this too. "Criminal Negligence"

If you fuck up big enough it doesn't matter if it was an accident.

Re:Contempt of Court

[ericspinder]

Why would he need to? There are no penalties over the deleted files.

From the Presidential Records Act [archives.gov]

Places the responsibility for the custody and management of incumbent Presidential records with the President.

John Dean had it right when he called it 'Worse than Watergate'.

Re:Your an idiot.

[chuckymonkey]

Having met, talked to, and worked with people from various three letter agencies I will argue the fact about them hiring the best and brightest. Some of the people that work for the government are scary intelligent. The best data recovery tools I have ever seen or used came out of one of said agencies, the same that came up with SELinux. So I'm going to say that lost email in this instance, while certainly inside the realm of possibility and more than likely, is borderline criminal negligence.

Re:Contempt of Court

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they'll magically reappear in the Lincoln Bedroom or someplace, like Hillary's Rose Law Firm billing records.

Re:Contempt of Court

[HiThere]

1) This information is out of date, so don't rely on it. It's only for checkpoint use.
2) We had data stored on 800 BPI odd parity tapes. After 20 years most of them were still readable. Most of them had not been looked at in the intervening time. The tapes *were* stored in an air conditioned room, so there wasn't lots of thermal cycling, but it temperature wasn't closely controlled. Variations of 10 to 20 degrees were common occurrences.

However, saying the tapes were readable doesn't imply that there weren't any non-recoverable errors. There was an average of two or three per tape. This gives a grossly distorted picture, however. Most tapes were clean. Some had multiple errors throughout.

We did this check while moving to 9-track tapes. (The move was never completed, because about then the 6250 tapes came out, etc.)

I don't know what the tolerances of the current tapes are. I suspect that they've gotten increasingly sensitive. And with the introduction of block coding, an unrecoverable error means not the loss of a record, but rather the loss of a block, which probably bears no logical relationship to the data being stored. (Actually, in most cases a block is probably some large number of records, but one can't really presume that. Some programs have switched to writing an entire batch of output as a single record the size of the file that will hold it. In such cases losing a block or two may mean that nothing can be recovered from the file [given a proprietary file format]. Presumably there are specialist who could easily recover files that I would just give up on.)

Actually, based on my recent reading, the best backup media currently are external hard disks. But this is short term only.

Professional data librarians still seem to prefer tapes, but they aren't the tapes of yore. They seem to require more maintenance, and they store a tremendous amount more.

And as always, if you really care use multiple copies at different sites. (And thermostatically controlled rooms. And read the tapes every year or two to be sure that they're still legible. If they aren't, pull a copy from one of the other sites.)

20 years isn't a long time. Sometimes it's not long enough. We really regretted one of the tapes that turned out to be unreadable. But at the time automated tape verification wasn't an option...not with our budget. Now nearly anyone who can afford a tape could afford to verify it. (Not all do, admittedly. Small organizations frequently try to make too few people do too many different things.)