Expert: White House Email System ‘Primitive’
The White House continues to underscore the need for an email archiving system. According to the USA Today, a computer expert who worked at the White House called the email system “a ’primitive’ setup that created a high risk that data would be lost.”
In written statements placed on record by Steven McDevitt at a congressional hearing, a study by White House technical staff in October 2005 turned up an estimated 1,000 days on which email was missing.
According to McDevitt’s statements, the White House’s email system had the following issues:
•The White House had no complete inventory of email files.
•Until mid-2005 the email system had serious security flaws, in which “everyone” on the White House computer network had access to email. McDevitt wrote that the “potential impact” of the security flaw was that there was no way to verify that retained data had not been modified.
•There was no automatic system to ensure that emails were archived and preserved.
Regardless of the political inferences and innuendo asserting email may have conveniently disappeared, McDevitt’s statements highlight the flaws and vulnerabilities in the White House’s archiving capability, which is mandated by federal law.
