Attn Dems – don’t bother supboenaing any emails about to the Plame outing, 2001 terrorist warnings or Ahmad Chalabi mash notes during the runup to Iraq. The White House erased its emails from before October 2003, written over the disks and lost the backups. Convenient!
It will shock the hell out of me if junior doesn’t pull a Fletcher and pardon everyone on his way out the door.
Quiddity
You say “disks”, but all the stories are about “tapes”.
Who uses tapes in 2003?
And as a storage media, cheap blank write-only CDs hold tons more than floppies (even the super-floppies that hold 100M).
I’d like to know what the computers were, the OS, the application, etc. Sometimes a technical inquiry can reveal lies.
BTW, I’m reminded that shortly after the Florida 2000 election fiasco, when folks were wondering about Katherine Harris’ email communicaion with Jeb and the governor’s office, she reloaded the OS on her computer (presumably Windows) which totally erased whatever was on her PC.
PaulW
That depends on if he goes out. The way this admin is going, he’s gonna find an excuse to stay in there forever. That’s the final shocking thing that people are expecting now…
Ed Drone
I would be surprised if full backups aren’t being kept by NSA or CIA or some other such organization; now if only a whistle-blower in whichever group has the disks/tapes would see his way clear to say, “To hell with it, I’m tired of these mofos and their illegal ways.”
Sigh. That’ll be the day!
Ed
Kirk Spencer
I remember seeing today, but cannot find the link, that this “industry best practice” (writing over the backups) was stopped during the clinton administration, and restarted well after the current administration took office. Basically, about the time they had stuff they might not want in the records.
But since it’s memory right now, I could be wrong.
RandyH
…And let’s not forget about that big fire in Cheney’s office at the Executive Office Building around Christmas time. That one is a good catch-all for any future subpoenas on virtually ANY subject.
Jake
What do you liberals want? All the time you’re going on about global warming and the environment and light bulbs and recycling. Well, the White House recycled some back up tapes. Now shaddup, we’re trying to heat the place with industrial strength paper shredders.
/T. Fratto
Dennis - SGMM
The administration that is monitoring petabytes of our calls, emails, etc. to keep us safe has lost its own email. Fucking bin Laden could be tending bar in Santa Monica for all these Keystone Fascists know.
Ripley
The question I haven’t seen asked is: Who’s the Chief IT guy for the White House and why, exactly, did he approve this? You don’t get to that position and not understand that erasing/overwriting those tapes is unethical, illegal, or, at very best, questionable.
Who cares what Tony Fratto has to say? Let’s drag IT Guy in front of Congress for some Q&A.
scarshapedstar
Yeah, I’ll bet. No stone will be left unturned in their evidence-destroying efforts.
Your daily reminder of why you can go to your grave happy that you did not vote for this shit.
myiq2xu
Gee, and my son (the one who make more money than me working in the IT Dept of the local community college and was a presenter at DEFCON in Las Vegas when he was still a junior in high school) tells me that the NSA can recover data from hard drives even after they have been overwritten.
I would guess that the same principle applies to magnetic tapes.
myiq2xu
Fixt
râŹnato
If you or I had conveniently and coincidentally lost evidence which was the matter of a criminal or government investigation, wouldn’t we be found in contempt by an angry judge or charged with a felony? I can’t believe that judges would be so stupid that they might blindly buy this ‘the dog ate my homework’ crap. IOKIYAR, I guess.
that is hardly sufficient to completely delete for all time, the contents of the hard drive. I would like to assume that those charged with investigating this convenient disappearance, didn’t simply leave it at that.
oh absolutely, in fact it doesn’t necessarily require the NSA. I would assume the same principle would apply to reels of computer backup tape. I find it perfectly plausible that the gov’t may still be using mainframe computers which use tape for backup purposes. Magnetic tape still beats the shit out of hard drives and optical media (CD/DVD) for massive storage capacity needs, though I would imagine the Blu-ray technology may begin to change that.
cleek
don’t pay their phone bills, don’t keep backups, can’t balance a budget. and these guys are the grown-ups?
these shitstains should be banned from ever setting foot inside the DC city limits ever again: yes, the whole fucking party!
myiq2xu
They sure are “special” aren’t they?
Redhand
Yeah, ah, tape backups. Nobody can tell me this wasn’t planned. What a lawless groups of scumbags these people are; they feel utterly free to ignore the law about preserving Presidential records. I guess there are simply no sanctions for breaking these statutes.
Not to mention the thousands of illegal e-mails sent over RNC servers. You can’t tell me that wasn’t planned, either.
The Bush-Cheney Administration: worst Presidency ever.
Incertus (Brian)
My only question is whether he’ll try pardon himself on the way out, or if he’ll just retire to his ranch in Paraguay, flashing the finger all the way.
jrg
I’ll bet if Bill Clinton jizzed on the backup tapes, they would have been forensically analyzed come hell or high water.
Too bad for the Dems (and the troops), starting a war to win an election is just not as serious as getting a BJ from a fat girl.
True. When the head of a hard drive passes over a bit to write on disk, it does not pass over the same spot exactly every time. By analyzing the edge of where a bit is stored, very sophisticated statistical algorithms can be used to “guess” what was on the drive. A drive needs to be written over many times to fully “erase” the data.
This data is out there, somewhere.
Tom G
Well based on this, Mike Huckabee should fit right in – you all have heard the stories about what happened to a LOT of hard drives in the Governor’s office shortly before he left office?
(They somehow, mysteriously, were ordered destroyed. As in, physically)
Even Computerworld had an article on that.
Huckabee hard drives destroyed
Gus
Waaaaayyy off topic, but it’s breaking news (to me at least). The Poorman is back!
myiq2xu
These are the same guys who freaked out over the WH Travel Office firings.
SpotWeld
Has anyone used the phase “Nixonian” yet?
D-Chance.
These are the same guys who freaked out over 900-something FBI files. Kinda pales in comparison to millions of erased or overwritten e-mails. And total silence in Conservative Blaghistan.
F. Frederson
Anyone running a serious IT operation. Even if they were only DLT4000 drives (20GB on DLTIV tape, $100/tape, released in 1996) tape is a proven and cheap method for long-term storage. Provided, of course, you send them off site and don’t re-use them. I worked at a place that nearly lost 15 years of seismic data because the DBA overwrote the same tape every week.
Anybody who is minimally competent at running a data center has on retention policy, an off site location, and a tape rotation policy. I’m surprised that nobody (that I know of) has demanded to see this documentation (or the lack of it) from the White House. (Ok, I’m not really surprised, but still). I can only conclude the loss was purposeful and/or they are lying about it.
Floppies, CDs, ZIPs, etc. are for amateurs.
LiberalTarian
Awesome. I was just looking for http://www.thepoorman.net yesterday.
The Grand Panjandrum
Not exactly. But, if it came down to a choice between Nixon or the former Cheerleader as President, it wouldn’t be close. I’d vote for Nixon.
bago
Notice how conveniently the tapes were recycled, so that they would be overwritten many times to destroy the ghosts of data that a forensic analyst would use.
Goseph Gerbils
F.Frederson has it right – tape is still the industry-grade backup medium. You’d be amazed how much you can get onto a top-of-the-line cartidge, and when even fairly modest IT shops have a need to back up terabytes of data, optical media don’t cut it.
The issue here is a crude attempt to obfuscate the distinction between backup and archive, between disaster recovery and record retention. The two are utterly distinct requirements, and the administration knows it.
The lying sacks of shit deliberately destroyed evidence. There’s only one possible outcome to that: Presidential Medals of Honor.
gypsy howell
Pull a Fletcher? How about “Pull a Poppy?” Remember Iran-Contra?
tofubo
question
what takes precedence: “industry best practices” or the “The Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978, 44 U.S.C. Ă2201-2207” ??
just askin’
Bob In Pacifica
Wouldn’t the disappearance of the torture videotapes, or the missing White House emails, suggest a conspiracy? Does that make those of you concerned with disappearing evidence conspiracy theorists?
Meanwhile, in New Hampshire in the town of Manchester Clinton’s vote total is different in nine of the twelve precincts. Edward’s is different in four of the twelve. Obama’s is different in nine of the twelve, at least as I read the recounts from the Secretary of State’s office.
In the town of Stratham 550 votes were cancelled out to zero because the poll workers apparently gave voters the wrong pens to use to mark their ballots.
And apparently the State of NH doesn’t have the memory cards from the LHS Diebold machines. You know, the thingies that gave the vote totals for over 80 percent of the state can’t be examined or reviewed, so you can’t see if they were tampered with. Gone, like White House emails and the torture videotapes. By law the Secretary of State is supposed to keep all voting records for 22 months after the election, but the very thingies that record the count are missing.
There isn’t even a protected chain of custody for the paper ballots.
+++
Just saying.
Sinister eyebrow
What’s the felony count up to on these guys now? 28? 106? The legal term for destruction of evidence that is the subject of civil or criminal litigation/investigation is “spoliation” and Courts take it very, very seriously. People are held in contempt, sanctioned, barred from presenting evidence to refute the other side’s claims, and put in jail for this sort of thing. That the Administration’s preposterous explanations for why it utterly failed to comply with federal law (and not an obscure statute either) needs a bit more press scrutiny and congressional hearings. Not holding my breath, however.
Jill
This is reason # 12,345 to impeach. But, that would be bad for the country.
Dreggas
Tape backup, as has been said, is standard it still maintains a larger capacity than current cd/dvd tech.
As for “wiping” a disk and reinstalling. Most formats are hardly even formats, they remove stuff in the file allocation table and free space but they don’t completely eliminate everything. Even a retail program can recover most data off your disk, things you thought deleted long ago.
As for tape, I am not sure but I believe data could be recovered as well. In this case though we need a D33pT|-|R0At not a Deepthroat.
bago
If they recycle the tape that means that subsequent overwrites to sectors cloud the ghosts.
Mil grade disk destruction is 5-7 random datawrites to a given sector, to make sure the ghosts of previous data are thoroughly scrambled.
At my company we use ridiculous key lengths plus a custom schema to protect our secrets. Also this means shipping the HD with the certs through mail and a timebomb.
Gregory
Who controls the present controls the past.
Who controls the past controls the future.
I’m sick of the Republicans using 1984 as a how-to manual.