White House: Computer Hard Drives Tossed

Found on Associated Press on Saturday, 22 March 2008
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Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.

In proposing an e-mail recovery plan Tuesday, Facciola expressed concern that a large volume of electronic messages may be missing from White House computer servers, as two private groups that are suing the White House allege.

At a House committee hearing last month, a computer expert who previously worked at the White House called the e-mail system "primitive" and said it was set up in a way that created a high risk that data would be lost from White House servers where it was being archived.

Under pressure to provide details about its computer system, the White House told the congressional committee that it never completed work that began in 2003 on a planned records management and e-mail archiving system.

How convenient. By a lucky coincidence, problematic emails are suddenly missing. Despite the fact that backups have to exist; in fact, destroying those emails would be a violation of the Presidential Records Act. On one side, they continuously fail basic security guidelines and leak top secret information on a daily basis, but at the same time they physically destroy data that is required to be archived. That wasn't a mistake, there was intention behind it.