White House Computers are Colecovisions

WASHINGTON (AP) _ 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.

"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.

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.

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.

DevilsReject said:
I just can't believe how far behind the White House must be when it comes to servers and workstations if they can't produce official e-mails that should by all means be backed up. I can honestly see saying "Hey we need a week to get you these things" buy saying "Well we don't even know if we can retrieve them" is just completely insane to me.

I keep picturing George Bush playing "Oregon Trail" on an Apple IIc.

lil_tuffy said:
I wish I could disclose the work I did for various gov't agencies a few years ago. All I can really say is that very, very, very important decisions were made based on an individuals power point presentation.Seriously. Like global impact type of decisions.

lil_tuffy said:
I wish I could disclose the work I did for various gov't agencies a few years ago. All I can really say is that very, very, very important decisions were made based on an individuals power point presentation.Seriously. Like global impact type of decisions.

By way of contrast, every night when Burton went home, he was reminded of how good the everyday Internet had become at connecting dots. "Web 2.0" technologies that encourage people to share information - blogs, photo-posting sites like Flickr or the reader-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia - often made it easier to collaborate with others. When the Orange Revolution erupted in Ukraine in late 2004, Burton went to Technorati, a search engine that scours the "blogosphere," to find the most authoritative blog postings on the subject. Within minutes, he had found sites with insightful commentary from American expatriates who were talking to locals in Kiev and on-the-fly debates among political analysts over what it meant. Because he and his fellow spies were stuck with outdated technology, they had no comparable way to cooperate - to find colleagues with common interests and brainstorm online.

Burton, who has since left the D.I.A., is not alone in his concern. Indeed, throughout the intelligence community, spies are beginning to wonder why their technology has fallen so far behind - and talk among themselves about how to catch up. Some of the country's most senior intelligence thinkers have joined the discussion, and surprisingly, many of them believe the answer may lie in the interactive tools the world's teenagers are using to pass around YouTube videos and bicker online about their favorite bands. Billions of dollars' worth of ultrasecret data networks couldn't help spies piece together the clues to the worst terrorist plot ever. So perhaps, they argue, it' s time to try something radically different. Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?

lil_tuffy said:

The clip art stealth bombers were to die for.

lil_tuffy said:

The clip art stealth bombers were to die for.

Kindle said:

Was this one of them?



This kind of excites me.

lil_tuffy said:
I wish I could disclose the work I did for various gov't agencies a few years ago. All I can really say is that very, very, very important decisions were made based on an individuals power point presentation.Seriously. Like global impact type of decisions.

Subrosa said:

As your attorney, I recommend you not disclose U.S. government defense agency secrets.

Stiles said:
not to mention the need for sometimes moronic levels of backwards compatibility with comparatively stone age pre-existing hardware and software already in use.

dreamergirl said:
#1 They were not destroyed.
#2 They are in the hands of Homeland Security.
#3 They are also in the hands of others who had motive.

Stiles said:
When you buy equipment via bid contract and take several years to write the specs and requirements in the process, you're gonna get hardware that is obsolete years before you get it out of the box...

...not to mention the need for sometimes moronic levels of backwards compatibility with comparatively stone age pre-existing hardware and software already in use.

Some companies subcontracting repair and troubleshooting for the government hire people proficient in obsolete computer languages exclusively for government work, kind of like having to learn Latin to read the owner's manual on an Abacus.

lil_tuffy said:
I wish I could disclose the work I did for various gov't agencies a few years ago. All I can really say is that very, very, very important decisions were made based on an individuals power point presentation.Seriously. Like global impact type of decisions.

starbuck42 said:
Sounds like the government could use a gmail account. We shoud all send them invites.