Good post on the missing White House emails from EMC/Kazeon:
The Washington Post article announced that two advocacy groups, The National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), reached a settlement with The White House in a long-running lawsuit over more than 22 Million “lost” emails during the Bush-era administration. Initially, the Bush White House denied that any emails were missing. However, ninety-four days of emails were restored by contractors from backup tapes. Since Presidential correspondence (including emails) must be preserved by law, the initial misleading statements coupled with court documents outlining how The White House never implemented plans to solve the chronic email archiving problem created a scandal for the White House and spawned numerous conspiracy theories. Interestingly enough, the Bill Clinton White House was also plagued with similar email and email archival issues during his tenure. Due to National Security concerns, it is unclear how many of the restored Bush-era emails will be made public; however, all restored emails will be added to the Bush collection in the National Archives and Records Administration.
Scandal, Suspicion and Conspiracy Theories aside, The White House experienced email and email archival issues that are all to common in today’s corporate environment. From the Washington Post article, once the IT professionals noticed the email and email archival issue and brought it to the attention of ”policy makers”, they deemed it too expensive to restore the emails, even though it put The White House in clear and explicit violation of the law (sound familiar to anyone?).
