Comments on: White House: Old Computers Were Destroyed

Admin. Tells Judge Seeking Missing E-Mail Data That Hard Drives Were Removed For Physical Destruction

[xlib]

Check the WH attic. You''ll find all kinds of stuff. Files, etc, etc. Some may even be left over from bubba and the madame.

[alphaa10-2009]

AheadACE asks, "WHY DONT THEY IMPEACH BUSH CAN SOMEONE TELL ME WHY THEY WANT TO IMPEACH SOMEONE FOR HAVING ORAL *** AND LET THESE NO GOOD PEICES OF SHI! JUST KEEP BREAKING THE LAW. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG!(?)"
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You are right-- the GOP tried to carry out a political assassination on Clinton without sufficient legal basis for impeachment.

The constitutional mandate for impeachment is "high crimes and misdemeanors", and misdemeanor in this context does not mean a petty offense, subject to a $25 fine and case dismissal.

The Lewinsky affair got plenty of press, which the GOP relied upon when it needed a "liberal, biased media" to do its work. But to hear Sen. Lindsey Graham and others in the GOP choir of indignation, you might have thought this was a more serious matter, somehow.

Why, then, did the very indignation driving Clinton impeachment came from boosters for a Bush misadministration now widely noted for shamefully low compliance with decency under any rubric?

Pelosi and Reid, however, understand the GOP in 1998 was bent on tying up the nation''s business for more than a year simply to remove Clinton by any measure, legal or alegal. Today, Pelosi and Reid credibly could host the Kucinich measure to impech Cheney, but wisely have put the nation''s busines on priority.

Bush will be out of office soon, and the only task for Pelosi and Reid is to keep Bush honest. That is a full-time job.

[thomas22ee]

How about checking the computers that these emails were likely sent to??? You know like VP Chaney''s old company in Houston, oh, I mean in Berhain, or maybe look in the remains of Enron, or CIA, or NSA, or HOMELAND SECURITY (who''ll probable be saving this thread) or ..., etc.

[erasmus6]

"I''''m sad to say that I have little optimism for the future of America." posted by NAUcoming4U

I also have little optimism for the future of your country. The only hope I see for your country is Hillary Clinton and even then it will take a miracle to turn things around.

[alphaa10-2009]

TheGateway1 said, "Well, duh! Destroying hard-drives has been standard government and military procedure since the 1990''s. You are not allowed to transfer a computer, or take it out of service, without first having the hard-drive deguassed or physically destroyed..."
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As you say, "Well, duh!" The investigators, Bubba, are going by the book on computer forensics. They want to know first, (1) why no archives of the data are available.

Having been told by Bush people no arhives exist, they turned to (2) evidence that might remain on the workstations. At best, workstation data should be simply a subset of the entire dataset, but it might tell investigators enough to be interesting-- if not damning to certain White House claims and White House chronologies.

(see IT Bubba-2)

[alphaa10-2009]

IT Bubba--2

And investigators did that (despite your "Duh!") because, like you, they know every computer workstation was not necessarily refreshed (mistakes happen) and (2) even when hard drives should have been wiped by a DES utility, people like the NSA can recover much of the data, anyway.

More than likely, since Bush has stalled the court demand for data for months, the Bush IT people have had ample opportunity to go through every hard drive and wipe them of data, then rebuild each workstation from the ground up-- minus the data at issue. Bush IT people prefer not to call their operation obstructing justice but a "critical career challenge".

In contrast, the normal recovery procedure in most offices is simply to restore from a data image of the drive, if data is missing-- it is far quicker. Such a recovery-from-image is minimal security for even small businesses, so it is unthinkable the Bush IT people did not have that capability unless told to keep the system primitive and-- at all costs-- keep intentional destruction of data credibly deniable.

What might be interesting is to place the IT administrators under oath. But guess who would claim "executive privilege"? No, not Nixon this time, but Bush.

[excoachken]

To quote the Church Lady, "How Convenient!"

[n4cjx-2009]

Bush uses the INTERNETS, most republicans are not computer friendly.

[alphaa10-2009]

CBS reports, "... a computer expert who previously worked at the White House called the e-mail system "primitive" and said it was set up in a way that created a high risk that data would be lost ..."
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This, after more than seven years of opportunity to upgrade the email system? More likely, this is the hardware equialent of "the dog ate my data", or perhaps Gonzales asking, "Did I say that...?"

Any administration which wanted to leave no evidence would claim the data was simply "lost"-- and then make sure the email system remained so "primitive" and failure-prone, it could be sabotaged anywhere.

The various ways in which Bush White House data loss has been explained, so far, would have brought dismissal to anybody working under normal rules of IT best practices and safeguards.

And if matters were supposedly left to drift for so long for the email system, why has it also been so imperative to "refresh" one-third of White House workstations? The policy doesn''t seem credible.

Like Nixon, Bush and Cheney are stonewalling the investigation-- and earlier, direct orders of a federal court to retain all email data.

[naucoming4u]

Nothing THIS corrupt has come along in MY life time and I don''''t think it has in our history. This goes beyond bad...

Posted by MCVet at 06:24 PM : Mar 22, 2008
..........

I''m only 33, and I (we) are living in a time similar to what is written in the History text books, and I remember thinking to myself, "gee, I''m glad I''m not living in that time period." Sadly, we are, if not worse.

I''m sad to say that I have little optimism for the future of America.