Color me shocked.
The White House has acknowledged recycling its backup computer tapes of e-mail before October 2003, raising the possibility that many electronic messages — including those pertaining to the CIA leak case — have been taped over and are gone forever.
The disclosure came minutes before midnight Tuesday under a court-ordered deadline that forced the White House to reveal information it has previously refused to provide.
Among the e-mails that could be lost are messages swapped by any White House officials involved in discussions about leaking the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.
Before October 2003, the White House recycled its backup tapes “consistent with industry best practices,” according to a sworn statement by a White House aide.
Um, industry best practices also call for keeping permanent copies off-site, or recycling permanent copies only in keeping with a published document retention policy (usually written and reviewed to adhere to legal document retention requirements).
Unless, of course, we’re talking about Enron-style man-sized shredder types of best practices.
I remember when the Clinton administration said that some crucial emails had been eaten by Iomega Zip Disks. Shades of Rose Mary Woods. Few believed it, though I was regional service manager for a chain of computer stores at the time and we had constant problems with the “click of death” in which a Zip disk became essentially unreadable. So I believed it, though it seemed to me that given the importance of the data that a data recovery company should have been called in.
It is way past time for a nonpartisan White House data archivist position.
Indeed.
The story, btw, notes that the Clinton administration started *not* recycling backup tapes at some point after some e-mails got reported lost. For reasons as yet undetermined, the Bush administration reversed that policy.
In other words, read between the lines. Bush and his cronies have obviously learned from Enron and other such cases.
And I too agree with DOF, we need a position to watch over backups in the WH. Obviously Presidents can’t govern themselves.