Secret off-site e-mail tape depot revealed

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_sperry_news/20000907_xnspy_secret_off.shtml


Thursday, September 7, 2000

by Paul Sperry

WASHINGTON -- Contrary to official denials, the White House has been
rotating emergency back-up tapes of e-mail to and from an off-site
storage facility in Maryland every two weeks -- until now,
WorldNetDaily has learned.

In a move that concerns career White House computer operators,
officials recently put an end to the practice, leaving potential
evidence under subpoena vulnerable to mass destruction.

A federal judge seeking White House e-mails from 3,400 back-up tapes
recently expressed his own concerns about their safety.

"The public has a right to be concerned about the integrity of the
tapes," said U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is hearing the
$90 million class-action Filegate lawsuit against the White House.

The Office of Administration, the custodian of all White House
records, has been storing the e-mail back-up tapes off-site to guard
them against a White House disaster such as a fire or a bomb. Even air
conditioning problems -- something the White House reportedly had to
deal with recently, during a patch of very humid weather -- can harm
magnetic computer media.

Gaithersburg, Md.-based First Federal Corp. is the contractor the
White House hired to store the tapes. The computer-media storage
company maintains facilities in Gaithersburg and Rockville, Md., says
First Federal Vice President Sandy Guidera, who declined to comment on
the White House contract.

White House computer operators say that until recently, the back-up
tapes had been taken to the Gaithersburg site, located on West Watkins
Mill Road.

Northrop Grumman contractor Bill Berky has been handling the rotation
of tapes from the White House side. Those not previously stored at the
Maryland site are stored in the New Executive Office Building across
Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.

"Currently there are no tapes being sent off-site. None," a senior
White House computer operator told WorldNetDaily. "It's potentially
dangerous. It leaves us without any way of restoring any system that's
lost."

Added the career White House employee, who wished to go unnamed:
"Federal law requires us to have a way to recover data from a
catastrophic event."

The White House, which has maintained there's no off-site storage
facility, did not return calls for comment.

The previous rotational cycle was set up to ensure that at least the
latest year's worth of tapes were always stored off-site.

"If I take Friday's tapes out there (to the Maryland storage site),
then what I'd bring back with me would be this week's a year ago,"
said a White House computer worker familiar with the operation. "So
you're bringing back a year-old set of tapes."

An estimated million-plus e-mails generated by President Clinton and
Vice President Al Gore and their staff have not been properly archived
and thus never searched for compliance with subpoenas from the court,
Congress and the independent counsel.

Still, the e-mails are stored on more than 3,400 back-up tapes, which
are kept in the sub-basement of the New Executive Office Building and
in the custody of White House Security Officer Charles Easley.

White House Counsel Beth Nolan has promised authorities that the White
House will restore the e-mail from the back-up tapes and search it for
relevant information before the election. But the project has fallen
far behind schedule, thanks in large part to the inexperience of the
contractors the White House hired to do the $8 million-plus job.

Meantime, the entire batch of back-up tapes sits in Room SB-234 in the
NEOB. The room is climate-controlled and secured with Defense
Department-spec cipher locks.

But the tapes are not stored in a vault or any type of fireproof
chamber. In fact, they're kept inside "printer-paper boxes," a source
who has seen them told WorldNetDaily.

"They'd all be wiped out if there were a serious fire in that
building," said a White House computer worker.

Asked for comment, a spokesman for Judicial Watch, the public-interest
law firm litigating the Filegate case, says the storage conditions
only heighten his suspicions the tapes are not being properly
safeguarded.

"This information increases our concern that the tapes will be harmed
from some kind of 'technical glitch,'" said Judicial Watch President
Tom Fitton.

AC on the blink

Fitton says that his investigators recently learned that the air
conditioning went out in the New Executive Office Building, which he
fears may have affected the integrity of the tapes.

"They had an AC problem a few weeks back," he said. "I understand that
the basement of that building is a swamp when it's humid out. It's not
the best for storing media that has a short shelf life."

The White House did not return calls attempting to confirm the air
conditioning problem.

Magnetic media such as the 8-millimeter and 4-millimeter back-up tapes
the White House uses, which look like camcorder cassette tapes, don't
keep an image very long -- even in cool environments with low magnetic
fields and low static, experts say. Hot and humid conditions would
only speed the degradation process.

That's because the tapes are basically nothing more than strips of
plastic with rust on them. (Technically, it's metal oxide.)

Judicial Watch has petitioned Judge Lamberth to turn the White House's
e-mail tape reconstruction project over to a special master.

The watchdog group has recommended data-retrieval specialist Ontrack
Data International Inc., which has demonstrated to the court that it
can copy the back-up tapes 25 times faster than the White House's
contractors.

Before the e-mail back-up tapes can be restored to a searchable
format, they must first be copied.

Once they are copied, the originals could be put back into off-site
rotation for their protection. And the sooner they are copied, the
better, say White House computer operators.

But Easley has assured the court that the tapes are safely stored in
"an environmentally controlled space designed to protect the integrity
of the data."

What's more, only he and unnamed "deputized" staffers have access to
the room. White House officials claim the tapes have never left
Easley's sight when contractors have checked them out of the secured
room, nor even when they've worked with them. (Actually, the White
House recently removed some of the original tapes from Easley's
custody. The FBI has them.)

Who is Charles 'Chuck' Easley?

An Army veteran and one-time used-car salesman, Easley replaced Craig
Livingstone as security chief in 1996 when the former bar bouncer,
Democratic operative and Friend of Hillary got in hot water for
stockpiling confidential FBI background files on former Republican
White House officials.

As it happens, it was Easley who issued Livingstone a top security
clearance in 1995. Easley, a 14-year White House vet, was in charge of
giving such clearances at the time.

But Easley, in a 1996 House deposition, admitted failing to review
Livingstone's own FBI background file before giving him clearance to
top-secret data. He said he took White House lawyers' word that "there
were no problems" in Livingstone's file.

In fact, Livingstone's file contains references to occasional drug
use, FBI agents have testified.

"It was a mistake," Easley confessed in the deposition.

Easley, 60, is not very computer literate, White House insiders say.
One computer operator said he "has a hard time turning on his
computer."

Easley referred a call for comment to the White House press office.

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