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Tag(s): Email Tapes; Federal Investigations; Investigations; Issa-Darrell; Software; Technology; White House Coverups; Whitehouse-Admin
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May 11, 2008 at 09:13:55

Headlined on 5/11/08:
IBM, Darrell Issa, and Millions of "Lost" White House Emails

by Jason Leopold Page 1 of 3 page(s)

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IBM, Darrell Issa, and Millions of "Lost" White House Emails

By Jason Leopold
The Public Record
May 08, 2008

Published in : Nation/World

click here

At a Congressional committee hearing in February, Theresa Payton, the chief information officer at the White House Office of Administration, testified that White House emails sent and received between 2003 and 2005 fell into a virtual black hole when the Bush administration transitioned from Lotus Notes to the Microsoft Outlook email exchange-a system that apparently was incapable of copying and archiving emails from Lotus.

For Congressman Darrell Issa, (R-Calif.), who sits on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and accused the committee's Democratic leadership of trying to embarrass President Bush, Payton's succinct testimony solved the mystery surrounding the disappearance of perhaps millions of emails, many of which are said to coincide with high-profile political scandals, such as the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and a Supreme Court ruling involving Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force documents.

Issa stated unequivocally that Payton's testimony confirmed that the missing communications were not the result of deliberate malfeasance by the White House or negligence by the administration's technology staff, but simply a computer glitch that ensued when the White House wanted to phase out an archaic email program.

In an exchange with Payton, Issa characterized Lotus notes as "wagon-wheel" technology.

"I wouldn't want to do business with somebody still using Lotus Notes or still using wooden wagon wheels," Issa responded. "If I understand correctly, though, certainly I checked with the House of Representatives, we can no longer support it for members who want to stay on it."

In the far corners of the Internet where people engage in online discussions about computer-related issues and computer-related issues only, Issa's characterization of Lotus Notes as a Betamax type of technology was the equivalent of blasphemy. Moreover, to suggest that a switch from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook is the reason that the White House cannot locate millions of emails shows a level of incompetence by Payton, the White House's chief information technology officer, according to several email technology experts.

Shortly after the February 26 committee hearing, several users of Lotus Notes contacted Ed Brill, an executive at IBM who specializes in the Lotus Notes software, concerned that the way Issa and Payton characterized Lotus Notes would be bad for business if they continued using the software.

In a blog http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/where-have-all-the-e-mails-gone?opendocument&comments#anc1 maintained by Brill, the IBM executive wrote that calls from users and "partners" of Lotus Notes became so "dramatic" and created such a terrible public relations problem for the company that he was forced to call Congressman Issa's office and demand that he amend his testimony about Lotus Notes.

"The sequence of events that followed that was quite dramatic for me, even after 20 years in the industry," Brill wrote in a March 23 blog post. "I ended up on the phone with [Issa]. I have received a letter from the Congressman, which I hope to publish in the next week or so. The hearing testimony will also receive an amendment clarifying the intent of the commentary about Lotus Notes."

In a brief interview, Brill said he was not authorized to speak on behalf of IBM, but said he found it "suspicious" that the White House had not recovered "old data" prior to the switch from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook. He added that he could not provide me with a copy of Issa's letter because it contained confidential information about Lotus Notes software. However, Brill said that Issa agreed to amend his testimony to reflect that "Lotus Notes is a viable product" and that he erred when he characterized it as "wagon-wheel" technology.

Issa's office did not return emails or phone calls for comment.

These turn of events in the yearlong case of missing White House emails underscores a deep disconnect that exists between computer experts who believe Bush administration officials have either been incompetent in archiving presidential records or have knowingly destroyed the data to cover-up their actions, and officials like Issa and Payton who blame the implementation of new technology to explain the disappearance of the emails.

David Gewirtz, a former computer science professor who has written more than 600 articles about email and recently published a book on the email controversy, "Where Have All the Emails Gone," believes administration officials including Payton have been playing fast and loose with the facts, particularly as it relates to the cost of recovering lost emails and the time it would take to retrieve it.

Gewirtz said Payton has misrepresented "the cost to manage data recovery by at least an order of magnitude" and has done so in an attempt to "dissuade Congress from pushing recovery."

At the committee hearing in February, Payton pegged the total cost of recovery at about $15 million. In a sworn affidavit filed last week with U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola, Payton said the White House should not be forced to undertake a search for missing emails on individual computers and hard drives because it would be too time consuming and very expensive.

"That's just plain silly," Gewirtz wrote in an article http://www..outlookpower.com/issues/issue200802/00002139004.html published in the February issue of Outlook Power Magazine.

"We're talking about mounting a tape or a disk and running a program," Gewirtz wrote. "You can buy an IT guy for nearly a year for $50,000. But if it takes that IT guy a full year to run one restore, that's a dude you need to fire. Also from the Wildly Exaggerated Claims Department, Payton said it would cost $500,000 to buy the servers to do the restores. That's quite off the mark. I just checked with the Dell site. A nice PowerEdge server with 4GB of RAM and four one-terabyte hard drives is $4,377. A half a million bucks will buy you 114 of these servers."

Additionally, Payton stated in response to a show cause order issued by Facciola that the White House had a "refresh policy" that resulted in the destruction of its hard drives every three years "in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance, and enhance security assurance." As a result of this policy, Payton said, any emails that are missing would unlikely be found.

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http://www.pubrecord.org

Jason Leopold is editor of the online investigative news magazine The Public Record, http://www.pubrecord.org, and the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie," a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. He is also a two-time winner of the Project Censored award, most recently, in 2007, for an investigative story related to Halliburton's work in Iran. He was recently named the recipient of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation's Thomas Jefferson Award for a series of stories he wrote that exposed how soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been pressured to accept fundamentalist Christianity.

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4 comments

Wolfie

SINCE THE ADVENT OF THE TYPEWRITER, WE NO LONGER CAN

be able to retain our hand written files of doggy recipes for corn dogs.
Just when you think you can save your bacon, you find out that the Pam
has reassembled into spam!
The irony of it all. The chutzpa of believing in faery tales. The unknown
formed miasma that permeates in this world by dupes for the intellectuals
has made us dumb downed to the point of accepting as Shinola the "other"!

Wolfie has to open the window with his paws and a pause to make carnate
this unfathomable fiasco!

by Wolfie (8 articles, 0 quicklinks, 31 diaries, 1189 comments) on Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 11:36:01 AM

I am a college graduate, a loyal patriot of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, a person whose convictions and pessimism drive my thought invoking others to think, and enjoy some politcal debate. I like truth even if it doesn't set you "free" in this US of A any longer. I am a liberal.
I do a bit of painting mostly in Acrylic. I do a bit of poetry writng mostly inspired by tragic thought. I do a ton of reading, mostly online. I speak straightforwardly and don't plan on changing. It's wor...

to see more of bio, click on member name
shirley reeseI am a college graduate, a loyal patriot of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, a person whose convictions and pessimism drive my thought invoking others to think, and enjoy some politcal debate. I like truth even if it doesn't set you "free" in this US of A any longer. I am a liberal.
I do a bit of painting mostly in Acrylic. I do a bit of poetry writng mostly inspired by tragic thought. I do a ton of reading, mostly online. I speak straightforwardly and don't plan on changing. It's wor...

to see more of bio, click on member name

"lost" emails, right

I stick to my original statement about this. Emails and any thing else can be retrieved and I highly doubt that it would take a good IT a year to do so. Back in the late 70's we used Lotus but it was before the Internet. Apparently "Lotus notes" must be something less renaissance than the original Lotus program that I used way back when Noah was loading the Ark (haha). They CAN retrieve those emails, notes etc, unless they used the ole sledge hammer on the computers. I can delete all I want, but I am still running low on memory and it doesn't give me "more" memory to delete, maybe enough space to keep getting OEN.
When I watch the commission hearings on CSPAN, I just hate listening to Darrell Issa. He is sarcastic and condescending in nature with his speeches and diatribe. Half the time he appears not to have all that much knowledge (other than the latest spin) about the the topic in regard to the hearings.
I hope when or IF Bush leaves office, those computers can be accessed and we can get to some truth.

by shirley reese (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 316 comments) on Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 5:21:42 PM

August Adams is a CPA and holds a Masters Degree in Psychology. He is an activist striving to create a fair and just world for all.
August AdamsAugust Adams is a CPA and holds a Masters Degree in Psychology. He is an activist striving to create a fair and just world for all.

No Lost e-mails - they were flushed

The criminals in the White House flushed those e-mails down the same rabbit hole they flush everything else they don't want the people to know about...
Time to indict these bastards for Obstruction of Justice.
But alas, we have a Congress that REFUSES to act.
THROW THEM OUT!!!

by August Adams (10 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 442 comments) on Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 8:47:36 PM

Retired NASA systems engineer for Earth Science data systems. I consider myself a citizen of planet Earth and consider Nationalism and other such beliefs which separate ourselves from each other are outmoded and are detrimental to the well being of the earth and all of the creatures that inhabit it.
Philip PeaseRetired NASA systems engineer for Earth Science data systems. I consider myself a citizen of planet Earth and consider Nationalism and other such beliefs which separate ourselves from each other are outmoded and are detrimental to the well being of the earth and all of the creatures that inhabit it.

Incompetent or illegal?

I think that if those emails were uncovered they would prove that the case they made for invading Iraq was a cover story to sell the invasion to the American people and Congress. Their deceit would be brought to light and impeachment would result. They learned from what Nixon didn't do - destroy the evidence.
I also suspect those missing emails would show other deceitful operations; like they know that global warming needs to be curtailed but chose a tactic of changing scientific reports to play down the threat as requested by those industries who would be hurt by dealing with the condition. That they fired judges who did not play ball with things they wanted to get done that were illegal. That they instituted measures to affect the vote in the 2004 elections that were illegal. That they knew certain rules were unconstitutional and ordered their lawyers to write legal briefs to sanction their acts. That they directly ordered main-stream media to feature stories that they wanted told and avoid any stories that might be critical to their purposes. Those emails may have even disclosed that the 9/11 attack was not really what they made it out to be.

by Philip Pease (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 128 comments) on Monday, May 12, 2008 at 9:32:33 AM

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