Oxymoron of the day: Help Desk
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Whitehouse "lost" email scandal gains traction
SO HOW DID the White House "lose" thousands - or millions - of e-mails written by the president and his advisers.
Embarrassed White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told journalists: "I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential five million e-mails lost". This humiliating disclosure comes just a few days after Perino confessed that the White House had "screwed up" by not insisting that e-mails from Republican Party and campaign accounts be saved. They say they are now desperately trying to recover those e-mails too.
According to a report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the e-mails seem to have mysteriously disappeared from the President's Office servers in a period of 473 days between 2003 and 2005.
Republican Tom Davis told CNET that the White House had managed to cut the number of days' worth of stray e-mails from a mortifying 473 to an only shameful 202 after realising that someone had obviously shoved those messages "in the wrong digital drawer" back when the White House swapped from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange e-mail in 2002.
Bush's administration also apparently decided to get rid of the automated records storage system set up by the Clintons, replacing it with a system described in the words of its own experts as "primitive".
The system, known as "journaling", entails a staff member manually copying the emails and then saving them on various different servers.
CNET quotes White House Chief Information Officer, Theresa Payton, as saying that she felt "very comfortable" that they would find the lost files by sifting through disaster recovery backup tapes in a time-consuming effort that could cost over $15 million.
Losing the files is a potentially considerable problem for the Bush Administration because federal laws require that all documents linked to the president and vice president's official business be turned over to the National Archives.
CNN reports that Sen. Patrick Leahy has accused the White House of trying to bury messages on the Republican Party system. "You can't erase e-mails, not today," he said, "They've gone through too many servers. They can't say they've been lost. That's like saying, 'The dog ate my homework.' " ยต
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So they went from an environment that had backups to one where the backup was manually copying a mail on different servers.
That is supposed to be progress ?
Shooting is too good for these morons. The whole White House should be nuked from orbit.
"Well, I see you're a graduate of Regent University. Do you have any previous experience running an Exchange server?"
"Uhh... no."
"Well then, are you a loyal Republican?"
"Yes!"
"You're hired!"
journaling isn't a manual process you turn on journaling and an external system processes and archives the information sent/received by that mail server.

My only guess it that claiming stupidity of lost e-mail carries a lesser fine than what the truth would carry.

The funny part is the attorneys will never question the right people who can answer what really happened with the e-mail.
You mean "destroyed evidence" I presume.

Delibrate or otherwise it seems that every single Government agency and their contractors around the world are totally unable to manage the basics in IT. Everything from lost personal data, lost laptops, crap online implementations, blown budgets, to "disappearing" emails and non-existent backup. Congratulations clowns.
I would think the email equivalent of "the dog ate my homework" is something like "a worm ate my mail-server"