Bush Data Threatens to Overload Archives

Source: The New York Times

By ROBERT PEAR and SCOTT SHANE
Published: December 27, 2008

WASHINGTON — The National Archives has put into effect an emergency plan to handle electronic records from the Bush White House amid growing doubts about whether its new $144 million computer system can cope with the vast quantities of digital data it will receive when President Bush leaves office on Jan. 20.

The technical challenge was an inevitable result of the explosion in cybercommunications, which will make the electronic record of the Bush years about 50 times as large as that left by the Clinton White House in 2001, archives officials estimate. The collection will include top-secret e-mail tracing plans for the Iraq war as well as scenes from the likes of Barney Cam 2008, a White House video featuring the first pet.

Under federal law, the government has “complete ownership, possession and control” of presidential and vice-presidential records. The moment Mr. Bush leaves office, the National Archives becomes legally responsible for “the custody, control and preservation” of the records.

Archives officials who disclosed the emergency plan said it would mean that the agency would initially take over parts of the White House storage system, freezing the contents on Jan. 20. Only later, after further study, will archivists try to move the records into the futuristic computer system they have devised as a repository for digital data.

Questions about the archives’ capacity have added a new element to the uneasiness felt by open-government advocates and historians, who already fear that departing White House officials, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, may not turn over everything. Mr. Cheney asserted this month in a court case that he had absolute discretion to decide which of his records are official and which are personal, and thus do not have to be transferred to the archives,

The National Archives has already begun trucking boxes of paper records from the White House to a warehouse it is leasing in Lewisville, Tex., not a great distance from where Mr. Bush’s presidential library is to be built, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The archives invoked its emergency plan to deal with problems in transferring two types of electronic files: a huge collection of digital photographs and the “records management system,” which provides an index to most of the textual records generated by Mr. Bush and his staff members in the last eight years.

Archivists said it could be weeks or months before these files could be indexed and searched.

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Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/washington/27archives.html?_r=3&ref=us

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Imagine how much more there would be if King George actually turned over all those missing e-mails !

:shrug:

I think an old Apple II with 56K memory could handle all the e-mails this bunch of crooks will somehow "find"..

Presidential Records Act.

flood the zone

wonder there is anything left to store.

Most. Corrupt. Administration. Ever.

They have more capacity than the Pentagon.

I read where WalMart has enough space (terra-bytes?) to store the entire written material in the Library of Congress, four times over, and not even notice it.

Storage is cheap.

From the Times? Gloating over the massive amount of electronic data from the BUSHCO Administration? CMON Melvin, they dont have WH emails at all, for 8 effin years