Furthermore, no IT technician or manager would take it upon themselves to change backup procedures without explicit orders from their superiors. Someone gave the orders to change backup strategy or to destroy specific tapes. The documentation of those orders may be gone, but the people remain.
The White House’s current denial that any backups are missing can be easily verified by a standard technology audit. If I were House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, I would obtain a list of all present and former White House data center technicians, and one-by-one, under oath, I would ask them who gave the order to change backup procedures, or the order to delete certain tapes. I would follow the IT chain of command as far as it goes.
Deletion of data, including presidential e-mails, is a form of industrial espionage. If the White House can’t prevent this sort of terrorism within their own staff, how can they protect us from foreign terrorists?
Article comments
1 - Chris Bancells
Nixon had actual tapes. Bush has e-mail tapes. My how times have changed.
2 - bliffle
The author is correct. Tapes are not customarily reused because they deteriorate, so they are sent offsite for very longtrem storage in a bomb-proof, storm-proof, etc., facility, such as an old unused railroad tunnel through a mountain. This is true even for small businesses.
The administration spokesperson is telling a lie.
3 - Dr Dreadful
Have I wandered too far into the future? Do servers still actually use magnetic tapes to store data? Or is tape just a colloquialism in the industry? I'm interested to know.
4 - STM
You folks should never have got rid of the Queen. (You just can't trust those presidents ...)
It's not too late though - she had the Guards play the Star Spangled Banner during the changing of the guard at Buck House after 9/11, so I'm sure she'd be amenable to the return of the prodigal son.
I reckon it'd be a simple matter of sending an email.
5 - Charlie
Random note (as someone who's run backup systems at various points in my career)...
When backing up email that, for whatever reason, is of an archival nature, you don't just snapshot the data at various points. You would back up transaction logs in such a way that you could restore anything to a particular point in time. Any system that allows you to delete everything before the backup runs to avoid it hitting tape is flawed.
If Bush sent a message to Cheney at 11:32 and Cheney deleted it at 11:33, that message should still be available for discovery. Anything less doesn't meet up with industry best practices.