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."
Data missing again (Score:4, Interesting)
Any finance-sensitive and/or war crime reports on that disk I wonder...
Re:A 1 TB drive 9+ years ago? (Score:5, Interesting)
I call shenanigans (or bad reporting) on this story. There were no 1TB hard drives 9 years ago (except maybe in HD manufacturers labs). You might have had an external array, but not a drive. I don't remember for sure, but I'd say a single hard drive was max ~250GB in 2000?
Maybe the original data was archived on a modern device. If you are relying on hard disks it would make sense to move the asset (the data) on to media which you can maintain.
Re:What does this have to do with the Clinton Admi (Score:4, Interesting)
I've noticed a lot more conservative-leaning folks (and moderators) coming out of the woodwork in the last couple months.
I suspect it's not that people here have partisan motives so much as it's "cool" to be against whomever is in power. I kind of remember the Old Days of Slashdot in the last Clinton years being this way too.
Identity Theft (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Incoming (Score:3, Interesting)
but they didn't ruin the place like the most recent outgoing group did.
How do you know, if the data's been lost?
Re:What does this have to do with the Clinton Admi (Score:3, Interesting)
You proved the parents point I think, unless of course your more conservative than not.
Slashdot always is on the whole for things that you vehemently disagree with. I've been noticing /. become pro-religion, anti-science, and even more towards the libertarian fringe of late. But then again if I was a pro-science, anti-science, libertarian I would probably think that the atheistic pinkos were taking over.
File Sharing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But... (Score:4, Interesting)
I still don't understand, though, why the National Archive would think that 100,000 personal records including social security numbers are something that they should be keeping around. Since we've already established that there were no 1TB hard drives in 2000, this archive must have been created sometime later. Maybe someone should have thought about it a little bit.
Re:1TB from ten years ago? (Score:2, Interesting)
What? No.
Lacies are not enterprise class server drives, they are external HDDs intended for workstation and portable applications, and ioSafe didn't exist during the Clinton administration, they were founded in 2004. The ReadyNAS which you linked to a picture of didn't exist until a few years ago.
The products you link to are highly specialized consumer-grade/small-business solutions.
Enterprise class server drives REALLY are 3.5" standard drives, that you could plug into any workstation with the required SCSI/SAS support
Server grade NASes and SANs are not 'closed boxes' the size of a briefcase; some of them are 1U/2U (size of a briefcase), but multiple standard hard drives get plugged into them.
What sets apart Enterprise class server drives from consumer grade disk drives is: speed, interface, and reliability.
A typical enterprise-level server drive is: 3.5" SAS (or SCSI), 15,000 RPMs. With a high MBTF.
A typical consumer grade drive is: 3.5" or 2.5" SATA (or IDE/ATA), 5400 RPMs or slower. With a lower MBTF (shorter expected lifetime).
I think the only reasonable explanation here really is that the data was migrated to new hardware.
This makes sense; older drives will eventually fail due to bit rot and mechanical issues, if hard drives are placed in storage, they should be spun up at least once a month, to avoid mechanical degradations.
The safest most convenient way to keep info available for archives and safe from bit rot is to consolidate it on large disk drives
Though I think their practice of letting workers move the drives around is a mistake.
They _should_ be plugged into some type of server device.
Drives should never be allowed to leave a special secure area that personal possessions (things like bags) aren't allowed in.
And there should be thorough 24 hour video surveillance of said secure area.