In all seriousness, I’m all for the Iraq War and what we’re accomplishing there, but, upon reading the latest about the White House’s ongoing efforts at showing the world that the most technologically advanced country in the world doesn’t know how to back up data, well, I had to get cute with the headline. It just needed to be done. A quick summary, courtesy of the Washington Post:

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study — whose credibility the White House attacked this week — identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

This isn’t the first time that somebody connected to the administration has been involved in some data losing shenanigans, though, in the case of Scott Bloch, he was investigating Karl Rove, which makes one wonder… well, okay, it makes ME wonder:

Did the White House lose the e-mail in retaliation?

Of course, as an IT consultant, I have to wonder where the e-mails went in the first place. Clearly, there were no backup procedures, which I find curious - I would think the White House hosts its own e-mail, or, at the very least, that it’s hosted by a federal agency somewhere. A quick MX record search of whitehouse.gov reveals that their mail does, in fact, go to a server somewhere. More importantly, it’s a server that’s in the White House’s subnet. What this means is that the e-mail system for the White House (at least, the externally facing one) uses a server that is using federal infrastructure - this would imply that it’s not just your mom and dad’s POP e-mail that gets deleted from the server every 7 days or something without getting backed up somewhere at some time. Most importantly of all, however, is that we have a name for a technical contact for the White House:

William Reynolds

Sadly, a quick Google search reveals nothing. Worse yet, the chances that the tech contact on that IP’s WHOIS being an actual, legitimate tech contact are relatively slim, though better than they would be in the commercial world - heaven knows that the White House wouldn’t be the first organization to falsify or forget to update their WHOIS information.

Of course, all of this technical digging could be for naught - there’s no way to know for sure whether or not the White House uses the same e-mail infrastructure for intra-office communications as they do to contact the outside world. That said, I do find it interesting that the same administration that signed Sarbanes-Oxley is also the same one that inadvertantly “lost e-mail” that might be useful in the course of an investigation, flying directly in the face of Section 802.

Ah well. Wouldn’t be the first time the federal government flew by a different set of rules than the rest of us, now would it?

Trackback URI | Comments RSS