Mark Crispin Miller: There Are Back-Ups Of The White House E-Mails

[Hissyspit]

From Paul Sullivan:

Mark,

According to IT experts I know, there are back-ups of the White House e-mails. Furthermore, the NSA would have all copies since they were sent from a U.S. government building using U.S. government computers. It is a lie to say the e-mails are lost because a few hard drives were destroyed.

Best, Paul.


http://atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/3622/81/

White House Official Tells Judge Searching for Missing Emails Requires Too Much Work

by Jason Leopold

The White House's chief information officer said the Bush administration should not be compelled to search for millions of emails on individual computers and hard drives that may have been lost between 2003 and 2005 because it would be too expensive and require hundreds of hours of work, according to a filing the White House made with a federal court late Friday.

Friday's court filing by the White House came in response to an order issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola last week demanding that the White House show cause why it should not be ordered to create and preserve a "forensic copy" of emails from individual hard drives. Facciola entered the order in part because the White House admitted that it did not preserve back-up tapes prior to October 2003.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and George Washington University's National Security Archive sued the Bush administration last year alleging the White House violated the Presidential Records Act by not archiving emails sent and received between 2003 and 2005.

In documents filed with Faciolla Friday, Theresa Payton, the chief information officer at the White House Office of Administration, said the White House routinely destroyed its hard drives every three years "in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance, and enhance security assurance. So its unlikely that any lost emails would be retrieved anyway.

[snot]

1. ARE WE NOT MEN??

as Devo would say -- must we Dems, or at least our leaders, be such total inept morans?? Why hasn't all this sh*t impounded long ago???

[tom_paine]

2. Send in the Federal Marshalls to impound the servers.

Aw, who am I kidding? The Bushies would tell them "no", then they'd turn around and go right home.

And that was IF you could find some Democratic Leaders with the balls to dare to dircetly confront tyranny using the law!

Which you can't. Sure, the NSA has backups of the e-mails, but they'll never see the light of day.

[notadmblnd]

3. Of course there are backups

and the costs of backups and restores are in every SLA the government signs with an IT contractor. They are on tape, probably at an off site data storage facility. They need to work backwards starting with the yearlies. The retention on the yearly backups are probably no less than seven years. It's been my experience that people don't clean up their e-mail very often in the corporate world. They like to keep a paper trail in order to cover their asses (I know I did). I will admit, looking for one particular e-mail to restore can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but a mass restore of all e-mails they've backed up should be no problem. Now, they need to set up a rack of servers, pull the tapes and start the restore process so these e-mails can be gone through by the authorities.

[bleever]

4. Thank you!

:kick:

[lapfog_1]

9. As a former manager of a federal data facility

and directly responsible for the storage of 3 PB (PetaBytes) of data... I can tell you definitively that there are backups somewhere. I had data on my system from the 1970s.

[McCamy Taylor]

5. And the AT&T domestic spyng operation intercepts all emails, so they have them too.

:rofl:

[HuffleClaw]

6. such half-hearted clumsy excuses

are they really trying anymore?

[Amonester]

7. yep. they STILL think we're all idiots...

or they're STILL certain many spineless critters are...

[EFerrari]

8. It's not even good theater, is it? n/t

[tavalon]

10. Nope,

just phoning it in, at this point.

[bluesmail]

11. it absolutely insults my intelligence

over and over, then again.

[Supersedeas]

12. Mz Payton probably has a book to sell after all this