Today’s Topic: Once Again the Bush White House is lying to America
The Bush administration has stated that they are handling email system backup tapes "in accordance with the strictest industry standards".
Unfortunately, they probably won’t be caught in the lie. There are three possibilities, none of which jibe with the above statement in any way whatsoever.
- The White House is operating within the strictest standards of the industry and they have the tapes. This is plain and simple. They cannot do one without having possession of the other.
- The White House is purposely lying about backup tapes being reused, which in itself is a problem with law and White House communications being a part of the official records guaranteed by law to be sacrosanct against destruction.
- The White House technical contractors are an inept bunch of bozos who should be fired from the contract and never again able to bid on a government contract. In this particular case collusion is suggested between the White House and the contractor. As usual following the money would point up who profits from this collusion.
In two of the three above scenarios, the tapes and data are intact and being hidden from Congress and the public. In the third, if any contractor is worth their salt and has some level of intelligence, backup tapes will still be available to protect themselves from obstruction of justice charges at the least. Destruction of public records is even a worse crime, so what would you do? But the analysis here is that the tapes exist regardless of which scenario presents itself as the truth.
So here’s how backups go. It’s fairly easy in design but complex in execution, at least in how one can write about it. And yes, backups are time consuming, but then they are automated and besides, if you get paid to do backups, then that is how you are supposed to spend your time to make your living. Regardless, there are some stringent rules about backup storage, particularly when we’re talking about records of our government doing the people’s business.
The basic system is a grandfather-father-son system, whereby backups are initiated on a daily basis (the son), the last (7th) of those being considered a weekly backup (the father) and each month’s ending backup is the grandfather. By maintaining ending week and ending month backups, both on-sight for quick retrieval for system crashes, one can restore a system to a particular state by loading all of the backups into the system in oldest to newest order.
However, for purposes of the storage of governmental backup tapes one is required to have a secure off-sight storage facility that could even require being shock hardened, meaning that some catastrophe which could conceivably destroy even an entire IT center wouldn’t destroy all the information.
That entire center could be remotely rebuilt and the system could be returned to a state as recent as yesterday’s backup. The choice is either distance from an IT center as an acceptable off-sight storage parameter, or some local facility which could withstand a direct assault with conventional weapons. And nothing in this scenario even considers the fact of system redundancy. All governmental systems have some level of redundancy, whether local or remote.
These are the "strictest industry standards". There is no such thing as simply reusing tapes and destroying years of records that belong to the people, even if the people themselves are not privy to the contents of the information stored.
I have personally worked on projects within the US Government which aren’t even as important to maintain as White House records, and never once have I ever designed a system which didn’t have all of the above attributes and fulfill the requirements, including redundancy. The preeminent concern is for the secure storage of the records, not saving a few lousy dollars in backup tape purchases whilst reusing tapes and destroying records that are, by law, required to be maintained in perpetuity.
If one wishes to question the above, then one only has to look at the legal battle between Nixon’s White House and Congress when Nixon’s tapes were discovered to have been recorded. These were the people’s records even if President Nixon was allowed to maintain possession of them. Within his library those very tapes are available for research to the public and have turned out to be a font of knowledge about Nixon’s interactions with his inner circle, including discussions on how to handle Watergate and the attendant payments to hush up the Plumbers.
Of course, Presidential records were one of the first things that President Bush decided to reclassify as secret. In fact, he felt so strongly about establishing control over these records that he did so within the first 10 days of his presidency, which was 8 months prior to 9/11, so one has to wonder just what he had in mind at the time. It was obvious to me that this president favored secrecy over accountability and I’ve written about that in a number of previous blogs.
Now I’m not saying that presidential records shouldn’t be classified nor should they be available at a whim to whomever wishes to peruse them. But the fact is that Congress has the oversight requirement which places the onus on complete and accurate records being maintained by the executive branch in general, and the White House in specific.
So no matter how one wishes to view the subject there can only be one overall assessment of the situation and that is that the White House is lying to the American people yet again. We’re not talking about spin control, or a missing 18 minutes of conversation. No, we’re talking about something as large as 5 million emails, of which you can believe none are spam or phishing.
Nor does what I’ve covered so far even come close to the abuse of public law on White House communications when this administration chooses to circumvent the laws by using outside and unprotected communications via the Republican National Committee’s email system, of which neither security of the plain text messages nor the appropriate backup and storage of said plain text messages is assured.
I mean, just how stupid can this administration be to employ wide ranging and unwarranted wiretapping of all internet data including plain text emails, and then suggest that all of their emails have been destroyed? If those messages are inside the White House then there ARE backup tapes off-sight, and if those messages are via the RNC then the NSA most certainly has them.
"More than two years after this problem was first discovered by White House staff," Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said, "the White House still has not identified the cause of the problem, determined the volume of emails lost, or developed a plan for restoring those emails that were lost."
Welp, I just told you. The White House either has them or has means to recover them. One has to assume that there are people running around their office, looking under their desk or plants, and saying "Nope, not over here."
So what is more easily believed, America? That the industry standard for maintaining information isn't good enough or that Bush wants to have those emails missing?
George W. Bush has been a fuckup his entire life. That's the only history you have to look at to be able to point the finger. But watch out. Bush will pull it thinking it a good fart joke. And Cheney will laugh and laugh as he sticks the latest bundle of White House emails up his butt and walks out stiffly.
11:08:23 AM 
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