White House Email Users Could Have Erased Records

[babylonsister]

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White House Email Users Could Have Erased Records
By Matt Renner
t r u t h o u t | Report

Wednesday 27 February 2008

Destroyed email records may not be recovered before Bush leaves office.


During a technical and tense Congressional hearing, the testimony of current and former White House officials and the head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) revealed a possible explanation for the loss of millions of White House email records.

Previous investigations revealed the Bush administration removed the White House email archiving system put in place by the Clinton administration, and failed to replace it. Instead of implementing a standard archiving system like the ones used by businesses or other Federal agencies, the White House set up a procedure that amounted to taking email records and manually storing them on a hard drive.

The Bush archiving system was characterized as "primitive" by Steven McDevitt, a former information technology specialist in the White House Office of Administration. In 2002, McDevitt warned White House lawyers and administrative staff the stopgap system of manually archiving records was deeply flawed because an individual user could tamper with the records without leaving any evidence of their malfeasance behind.

"In mid-2005, prior to the discovery of the potential email issues, a critical security issue was identified and corrected. During this period it was discovered that the file servers and the file directories used to store the retained email .pst files were accessible by everyone on the EOP network," McDevitt wrote on page nine of his sworn statement. The storage method "provided no mechanism or audit trail that tracked changes to data files or the activities performed by users or system administrators. The integrity of the data could be called into question because it was not possible to ensure that inappropriate action, either intentional or unintentional, could not occur," McDevitt wrote in his statement.

Congressman John Sarbanes (D-Maryland) implied the archiving system had been intentionally destroyed by the Bush administration to allow White House staff to cover their tracks and erase evidence of wrongdoing.

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022708A.shtml