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? (Score:4, Funny)
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Maybe they meant a 1 Gigawatt HDD?
But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But... (Score:4, Insightful)
It'd be nicer if the real world would learn from the cryptography field. Meaning no White House security procedure would be considered really safe if it hasn't been publicly reviewed. Everything else is security through obscurity, and it's bound to be leaked as shown. Just speculating.
Common F. Sense needs no "public review" (Score:4, Insightful)
It'd be nicer if the real world would learn from the cryptography field. Meaning no White House security procedure would be considered really safe if it hasn't been publicly reviewed. Everything else is security through obscurity, and it's bound to be leaked as shown. Just speculating.
Ah, no public review is necessary when it clearly falls under the guise of Common Fucking Sense. When grasping for words to describe the incompetency here, I believe in the ramblings of of the Bull Durham Coach. This is a simple game. You get the data. You save the data. You encrypt the data. YOU GOT IT?!?
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.
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Could be one of those "mini" hard drive vaults. How uncommon were 4 320GB drives be back then? (enough to do nearly a terabyte with one drive dedicated to parity, a near-requirement for NAS's like that)
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Is it also possible that as larger hard drives were available that the data from other smaller drives was combined on? This is the government we're talking about here.
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Somewhat irrelevant at this point, as most encryption methods in use in 2000 have either been broken, or advances in computer power have rendered them easily crackable.
There are exceptions, of course, but it would be pure dumb luck that one of these exceptions was used to encrypt, rather than a broken one.
The real question is, will the current crop of retards realize "Hey....since this info was lost from previous administrations, maybe stuff can be lost for us, too! Maybe these electronic health records fo
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By current crop of retards, do you mean the administration? The people who put them in office, both, or government in general? I'm wondering because some of them can't bother to be consistently outraged by important things like those required by the PRA to be retained coming up missing when someone attempts to archive them into the digital records system.
I mean we should be hearing shouts of incompetence and dirty dealings with some conspiracy connected to Hillary
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By current crop of retards, do you mean the administration? The people who put them in office, both, or government in general?
Yes.
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.
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If they used RSA, yes. It would still be unbreakable, that we know of.
But when we're talking about government information here, I'm sure there are certain other governments around the world that would throw a significant amount of computing power at breaking whatever encryption was used.
If it was something involving MD5, you can be pretty sure it would be broken into fairly quickly.
And this is the US government we're talking about. If they encrypted this stuff in 2000, it wouldn't surprise me at all to fi
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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.
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But it's OK, because the data was encrypted, right? RIGHT?
Except that the purpose of putting this data on this hard drive was so that the National Archives would have free access to it, so that they could convert it into another format, encrypting as necessary. Yes, they could have encrypted it first, and given the National Archives the password along with the drive, but I'd be willing to bet they didn't.
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
If this harddrive was from the Bush administration, would we be worried about the encryption or screaming of another cover up?
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Re:But... (Score:4, Funny)
... when ever I enter a classified area we are searched.
And when you exit, I hope ...
Hmm. (Score:2, Funny)
Is it just me, or is "Clinton-era data" slang for "jizz"?
A "secure" area (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously not secure enough.
Re:A "secure" area (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously not secure enough.
C'mon. There was a sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard".
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"beware of the leopard"
I didn't know anyone in the government used a mac!
Re:A "secure" area (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously not secure enough.
C'mon. There was a sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard".
...At the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory... In the basement, where the lights and stairs had gone out...
I'm not quite enough of a geek to quote it verbatim, though.
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Good God [wikipedia.org]! He has an account! [slashdot.org]
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Uhh, the security is the issue. Why was such a sensitive device allowed to be removed from a secure area into an "area where 1000 badge holders had access"? As with all "secure" systems, the biggest security issue is people. If you're not going to enforce security then there's no point having it.
Data missing again (Score:4, Interesting)
Any finance-sensitive and/or war crime reports on that disk I wonder...
QUICK!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Somebody check Sandy Berger's underwear!!!
Re:QUICK!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
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His socks couldn't be reached for comment
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In case you are wondering what Vinegar Joe is talking about...
http://gogov.com/bergerwatch.htm [gogov.com]
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:What does this have to do with the Clinton Admi (Score:5, Funny)
Since the summary said the disk "is" missing, i was going to chime in (humourously) with "Whether it really IS missing depends on what the meaning of IS IS..."
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:What does this have to do with the Clinton Admi (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, you sense partisanship, your own. The article didn't say or even imply the Clinton admin spirited away the data, fuck 1 tb drives didn't even exist in his administration. The article title is "Hard drive with Clinton-era data missing from National Archives". As in, a hard drive with Clinton era existed (ie they didnt destroy/lose the data before it was transferred to the archives) and now it is missing. The article clearly says "The drive was discovered missing in early April and the breach was immediately reported to senior officials at the NARA".
Furthermore it is being reported on by ComputerWorld, a site about tech news that doesn't exactly seem to have some grand political agenda (unless that agenda is to point out exactly how incompetent the IT staff at the National Archives is).
It's clear the partisan element here is you, and your thinking has become so clouded you are seeing conspiracies where there aren't any. We have a name for that, it is called paranoia. Paranoia seems to be behind a lot of the mistakes the Bush administration made, perhaps you should learn from their mistakes.
Data archives should be encrypted where possible, and data archives stored on external drives should always be encrypted. Furthermore, Social Security numbers of Clinton era staffers should have been purged in the first place, as there is no historical reason to save them and plenty of reason to delete them. This is a fuck-up by the National Archives, and they should be held accountable for their fuck-up. There is no reason to complicate the matter with politics.
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Personally, it seems likely to me that someone took it in order to get a free external hard drive and it has already been wiped (probably not securely).
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.
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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.
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I was a pro-science, anti-science, libertarian...
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Just because there is an apparent contradiction doesn't make it untrue.
Science is flawed when it surmises that there is no relevant biological difference between races, or that human pollution is devastating to the environment and needs to be curbed. Science is absolutely true when it indicates that... um... well you get the idea.
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[from his sig]
--
I completely disagree with every word of the above post.
I completely disagree with every word of the above post, including the sig at the end.
Re:What does this have to do with the Clinton Admi (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's just that you see people criticizing the current administration, and see it as "the Right bashing the Left".
Some of us just don't like power-hungry politicians, no matter which way they lean socially.
Remember? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Remember? (Score:5, Funny)
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You know you're a nerd when a joke about a typo in the specification of units makes you laugh out loud. *holds out card to be stamped* Stuff like this is why I keep coming back here.
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Hmm.... (Score:5, Funny)
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1 TB = Terra-Bimbo?
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Actually the NSA did a warrentless search, and has as of yet to ask for a FISA warrant, as they were unable to find a link between the Clinton Administration and Al Quaeda before the Bush administration ended.
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What do you mean a link between Al Quaeda and Clinton? We know Clinton bailed on a couple of opportunities to assassinate Bin Laden, We know that Clinton and many democrats of the era constantly complained about how big of a threat Al Quaeda and Iraq was. I don't think anyone has ever looked for a link between them other then that nor have they stated one existed.
Clinton and Al Quaeda were not operating together in any way.
No worries (Score:2)
Who ever stole it reformatted and is using it for bit torrent porn downloads now.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Who ever stole it reformatted and is using it for bit torrent porn downloads now.
You mean uploads, no?
Hey... (Score:3, Funny)
Pants? (Score:2)
Identity Theft (Score:3, Interesting)
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Worked for slamming the door on "The Auto Warranty Company".
Also in missing data... (Score:5, Funny)
Audio of interview with Monica Lewinski.
WJ 'Sax' Clinton: Step a little closer and speak into the mike...
eBay (Score:5, Funny)
Check eBay.
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Actually considering this was from the Clinton Administration, check the Adult Section at Craigslist.
No car analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
How do we put this in terms this gang can understand?
How often has an IT admin, just doing his job, backed up sensitive HR files to an unsecured backup medium stored in an unsecured area? What? Encrypt the backup just for a few HR files? The files are scattered all over the SAN. Too much trouble. Besides, they're safe here. There's just eighteen admins with access to the area. Yah--the same eighteen people who know the one password we use for all the databases.
In an Archive, the preservationists are the "techies". They keep the archive available. These are the guys who keep building indexes and copying stuff from old media to new media so it's always readable. They are the "backup people", and like most IT admins, they don't let anything get in the way of doing what they believe is their mission.
What most likely happened was that, instead of taking their equipment into the high security zone to process the sensitive information in there, they brought the sensitive information out to their equipment in the low security zone. It was the expedient thing to do. I think also illegal.
No conspiracy here, just laziness and a lack of security awareness.
Re:No car analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
You have absolutely *no* basis for any of what you just said.
You've fabricated a complete fantasy and presented it as fact, you are the person you rail against - a conspiracy theorist of a slightly different stripe.
There's a million explanations of what could have happened. The only rational thing to do is wait for some ort of investigation to produce results. To present a fantasy of your own making then state that it's case closed is the hieght of stupidity.
The fact that you are modded to +5 insightful glaringly shows the extreme need for the people in this tiny little group to believe that everything in life is peachy squeaky clean and just an innocent accident. Thank god none of you are cops, nobody would ever be arrested!
"See officer what happened is the person was just cleaning my gun and it accidently shot and then the wind blew their money into my pocket. As you know there's no such thing as malice!"
File Sharing (Score:3, Interesting)
Sandy Berger (Score:4, Funny)
No, he didn't have relations with that hard drive. (Score:3, Funny)
Also wag that finger on that dais.
I'm doubting that... (Score:2)
...the thief was interested in the SS numbers of White House visitors. ("Score! The social security numbers of all the NCAA and World Series champions of the '90s!") Much more likely is that someone saw the drive on the shelf and said to themselves: "Whoa! A terabyte?! That'll hold all of my pr0n collection with some room left over for more."
This is the least of our problems (Score:3, Informative)
CNN reports (Score:2)
Still, this plainly says: dysfunctional gov't.
And in the end, the gov't doesn't care about your private information: it's to expensive to maintain and they would be held accountable. They rather sell it to the highest bidder or sell the maintenance to the lowest bidder.
Was it because it contained the address (Score:2)
It was a last minute attempt to avoid being caught with his pants down by his wife, he told the SS
to erase or remove any trace of Monica's address so his wife could not find out....too bad he couldn't burn the dress.
Re:1TB from ten years ago? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article says "data from the Clinton administration", not "hard drive from the Clinton administration".
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Yeah all the 100GB drives the data was on originally have been taken home by employees or sold on ebay already.
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.
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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 requ
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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]
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The National Archive could very reasonably have already moved a copy of the data off a NAS and onto a modern external USB drive.
In what universe would this be reasonable?
The only thing that really makes sense is to move the data off a NAS and onto tape, which lasts a hell of a lot longer than hard disks. Or, of course, to move the data off of one NAS, and onto another.
Perhaps they copied the data, and then the old NAS went out the door in the wrong direction, i.e. instead of going to the destruction facility, it went into someone's truck. The question then becomes, was the data of strategic importance, or did some geek who felt unde
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...and the hilarious part is, that I am wrong. They certainly copied it off of something onto a disk. The only question in my mind is, why the fuck would you ever do that? Adding a copy step? Fail.
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.
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s/drive/drives/;
Seems like a plausible enough explanation for me.
Re:A 1 TB drive 9+ years ago? (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA does shed some light:
-The drive loss occurred between Oct. 2008 and March 2009. TFA also states that the *data* was Clinton era, not the hardware itself. The data could've been census data from the Grover Cleveland administration for all that it matters to the incident. The disappearance occurred during the switch from the W. Bush to Obama administrations.
-The item stolen was an "external hard drive", which opens up the floor to discussion. Could have been a USB enclosure, could have been an externally attached Fibre Channel storage array.
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Well, let's say this twinkie represents the normal size of an external hard drive in the Clinton era . . .
That's a big twinkie. [youtube.com]
-Peter
Re:A 1 TB drive 9+ years ago? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
I call shenanigans on your reply. The data was from the Clinton administration. Now I am nowhere near the geek/nerd/intellectual that most /.ers are, but maybe, just maybe, the data was transferred onto the device at some point?
From an article on the same website as the original linked story (http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=913335 [computerworld.com]("Missing drive had no original Clinton records, says National Archives"): "According to the statement released this afternoon, the 2-TB drive was being used for "routine re-copying" as part of a records preservation process. The small 2.5-pound Western Digital MY Book external hard drive contained information from about 113, 4mm tape cartridges and weighs about 2.5 pounds. The tapes contained "snapshots" of the contents of hard drives of employees leaving from the Executive Offices of the President and contained both federal and Presidential records."
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This:
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This makes me wonder -- is the data truly lost, or is there just a copy of it floating around in locations unknown? If that drive was used to back up something else, it probably isn't the only copy they have left, thus no data was lost. Inappropriately shared, certainly, but not lost. There appear to be files of a sensitive nature that shouldn't be out in the wild, but this is not losing data, rather it is losing control over the distribution of data.
Mal-2
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Heck, the drive might not even be lost. Have they checked near the copy machines, like that missing Los Alamos drive?
Wouldn't be the first time some idiot clerk was asked to copy something and left the original on the platen:)
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CNN was reporting it was 2TB (Score:2, Insightful)
They were actually reporting it as a single *2TB* external hard drive.
Of course it was one of the total airhead reporters and CNN is known for not even taking to their own IT folks down the hall to make sure something they are saying about technology even makes sense on their surface.
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but they didn't ruin the place like the most recent outgoing group did.
How do you know, if the data's been lost?
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How do you know, if the data's been lost?
Because there's no evidence of it, of course!!
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If we start seeing lots of dirt being dug up on the Clinton administration, now we'll know why.
not that I'm terribly fond of them, but they didn't ruin the place like the most recent outgoing group did.
No, the Clinton White House had their own special brand of corruption and evil. The W administration didn't "ruin" the place; the country survived okay, but W acted like he was Caesar, not the President.
A pox on both their houses, Democrat and Republican, I say.
Re:Incoming (Score:5, Insightful)
but they didn't ruin the place like most recent outgoing group did.
Pelosi ... still there ... still there ... still there ... still there ... got promoted ... still there
Dodd
Frank
Kennedy
Obama
I don't get it. Were you making a joke?
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whoosh
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its probably them who took it on their way out
If it was, they would have been smarter to take the time machine they used to get a 1 TB external drive in 2000.
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Maybe it's a 1TB storage device, containing many disks?
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Maybe it's a 1TB storage device, containing many disks?
I know this is Slashdot but the first sentence in TFS is: "An external hard drive that's believed to contain nearly 1TB of data..."
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As well as that....nearly 1TB of data, if compressed, could take up 300GB of space, or less.
Depending on the data, of course.
If it's just a bunch of excel files with personal info in them, they'll compress quite well. .bmp files of everybody's fingerprints, it will also compress well.
If it's
If it's binary biometric data (unlikely) then it won't compress well at all.
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If it's .bmp files of everybody's fingerprints, it will also compress well.
Nope--it's one file. It's the .bmp of Monica Lewinski for her photo ID badge. It's a lot of pixels.