Hard Drive With Clinton-Era Data Missing From Nat'l Archives 180
CWmike writes "An external hard drive that's believed to contain nearly 1TB of data from the Clinton Administration is missing from the US National Archives and Recording Administration (NARA). The drive includes more than 100,000 Social Security numbers and home addresses of people who visited or worked at the White House. Among those whose information is on the list is one of then-Vice President Al Gore's three daughters. The drive also contained details on the security procedures used by the Secret Service at the White House, as well as event logs, social gathering logs, political records and other information from the Clinton administration. Rep. Darrell Issa, (R-Calif.) said the Archives was in the process of converting information from the drive to a digital records system when it apparently disappeared. The hard drive was apparently removed from a secure storage area to a workplace where at least 100 'badge-holders' had access to it, Issa noted."
What does this have to do with the Clinton Admin? (Score:5, Informative)
Besides having data from back in that time frame. It's interesting that the summary doesn't point out that it was lost in the latter part of the Bush administration, and the story mentions the timeframe without being as balatant about who was in power.
I sense partisanship.
Re:1TB from ten years ago? (Score:5, Informative)
This wouldn't be your desktop PC 3.5" hard disk drive or a 2.5" laptop drive. This would be an server-class hard disk drive the size of a briefcase
Network attached storage [hddfiresafe.com]
Lacie hard disk drive [slipperybrick.com]
The problem is, it probably didn't look like a piece of computer equipment and ended up being moved somewhere totally different.
Re:What does this have to do with the Clinton Admi (Score:4, Informative)
According to the article, "the loss is believed to have occurred between October 2008 and March 2009." Thus, the hard drive could have been lost during the Obama presidency.
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
Wait what? What major encryption algorithms have been cracked in the last 15 years or been computationally overpowered?
MD5 has had a few weaknesses found, but nothing has broken it completely.
Stuff like RSA have been around for 35 years and are still uncracked.
Re:But... (Score:3, Informative)
The Government has the NSA advising it, so no weak encryption would be used.
But it wasnt encrypted in the first place which shows that they were lazy, but not *completely* incompetent.
This is the least of our problems (Score:3, Informative)
Re:1TB from ten years ago? (Score:2, Informative)
This wouldn't be your desktop PC 3.5" hard disk drive or a 2.5" laptop drive. This would be an server-class hard disk drive the size of a briefcase
No.
It is a two terabyte Western Digital MY BOOK external hard drive, measuring 6.5 x 2.1 x 5.4 inches.
Citation here: http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/20/lost.hard.drive.clinton/index.html [cnn.com]