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White House: Computer Hard Drives Tossed
By Pete Yost
The Associated Press
Friday 21 March 2008
Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House
disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly
missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.
The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers
in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake
an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed.
"When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired ... the
hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical
destruction," the White House said in a sworn declaration filed with U.S.
Magistrate Judge John Facciola.
It has been the goal of a White House Office of Administration "refresh
program" to replace one-third of its workstations every year in the Executive
Office of the President, according to the declaration.
Some, but not necessarily all, of the data on old hard drives is moved to new
computer hard drives, the declaration added.
In proposing an e-mail recovery plan Tuesday, Facciola expressed concern that
a large volume of electronic messages may be missing from White House computer
servers, as two private groups that are suing the White House allege.
Facciola proposed the drastic approach of going to individual workstations
of White House computer users after the White House disclosed in January that
it recycled its computer backup tapes before October 2003. Recycling -
taping over existing data - raises the possibility that any missing e-mails
may not be recoverable.
At a House committee hearing last month, 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 from White
House servers where it was being archived.
Under pressure to provide details about its computer system, the White House
told the congressional committee that it never completed work that began in
2003 on a planned records management and e-mail archiving system. The White
House canceled the project in late 2006 and says it is still working on a new
version.
In the absence of a permanent archiving system, the White House has been archiving
e-mails on White House servers since early in the administration.
The White House says it does not know if any e-mails are missing, but is looking
into the matter.
It would be costly and time-consuming for the White House to institute an e-mail
retrieval program that entails pulling data off each individual workstation,
the court papers filed Friday state.
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