Wednesday, March 05, 2008

White House email follies

The White House email controversy: hearings spotlight disturbing IT practices
Some of that technical detail, though, confirmed my worst fears: IT operations at the White House are terrible. The archiving system currently in use is a bad joke. In a big PR problem for IBM Lotus, Congress is also badly miscategorizing Lotus Notes as an obsolete technology, providing a misleading justification for an unfounded migration during a time of war. The cost to manage data recovery is being misrepresented by at least an order of magnitude. And Congress behaves like an old married couple, constantly bickering. That last, at least, is no surprise to anyone.

Like Gilligan's ill-fated three hour tour, this three hour hearing ended badly, with no real resolution. A good hour of the hearing was wasted on a debate between the members about whether an "Interrogatory" of one Steven McDevitt was acceptable to the members.

McDevitt, it turns out, is one of us. He was the IT guy in the White House Office of the Chief Information Officer who was responsible for setting up the new archiving system -- and he was pissed. Apparently, all of his best practices recommendations were ignored.


If the White House PR plan is to stone wall this and hope everyone loses interest, then they are going about it the right way. But I don't think this will work. I think that we are going to be hearing much more about this.

Via Pensieri di un lunatico minore.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Anybody that thinks the "disappearance" of stretches of time of the White house email system is just a coincidence...well I have a bridge I want to sell you.

This is a deliberate conspired means of depriving the U.S. Government and it owners, the U.S. Citizens of their rights to those materials after President Bush is out of office.

The Bush/Cheney legacy will be a combination of the Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover legacies and I don't mean that as a compliment.

Just as Nixon the Bush/Cheney White house not only thinks but IS above the Law as nobody has the guts to take them to task.
Just as Hoover the Bush/Cheney White House collects data and approves the collection of data on U.S. Citizens without the least bit of thought to the legal methods of doing so.

This Administration's legacy will be that of ruin of the constitution, our image in the world, the lack of respect for our military, and finally for all the stupid one-sided backwoods decisions he made.

But Congress can say "I helped too".