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IP: Fmore on From the White House that Invented ..
From: David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2000 04:51:58 -0500
X-Sender: jwarren () mail well com Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2000 19:32:40 -0800 To: farber () cis upenn edu From: Jim Warren <jwarren () well com> BTW, last night (Friday), C-SPAN was airing the complete congressional hearing where the White House's email-system programmers and administrators were testifying and being questioned ... and in some cases directly contradicting each other. VERY interesting! Knowing how C-SPAN operates, it wouldn't surprise me to find that they are being re-aired on the other of their two channels, today or tommorrow.From the sound of the testimony and comments however,(1) there *was* a misplacing -- though probably not a loss (probably still available on routine system backup tapes) -- of many thousands, and perhaps a few hundred thousand! -- messages, involving 400-500 staffers; (2) the loss apparently was NOT intentional; just another programming error ... like the one that sent one of the Mars probes blasting off into never-never land; (3) there apparently *was* many months of stone-walling and foot-dragging by the political overseers, once the problem was discovered -- although one of their legitimate quandries was how to pay for the significant programmer and staff time that it would [will!] take to find, retrieve and properly file these *public* records; (4) there was definately a consist effort to keep it hidden from the press, the public, Ken Starr's investigators, and congressional investigators -- a cover-up effort that included at least 3-4 off the tech staff being threatened with jail if they dared to disclose the problem to anyone outside of their group (not even to their own supervisors!); and, (5) it is certain -- by all the accounts -- that there *were* MANY messages that were never even searched, much less disclosed, in responding to the Starr and congressional subpoenas ... simply because they weren't on the email storage system (called ARMS) where they were supposed to be. YAFU -- Yet Another ... Yup -- With computers, we can make *millions* of misteaks <sic> per second! --jim, Jim Warren; jwarren () well com Contributing Editor & technology public-policy columnist, MicroTimes Magazine Also GovAccess list-owner/editor; 345 Swett Rd, Woodside CA 94062 voice/650-851-7075; fax-for-the-quaint/650-851-2814 [self-inflating puff: Hugh Hefner First-Amendment Award, Playboy Foundation; Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award (in its first year); James Madison Freedom-of-Information Award, Soc.of Prof.Journalists-Nor.Calif founded InfoWorld; the Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conferences; etc etc etc.]
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- IP: Fmore on From the White House that Invented .. David Farber (Mar 26)