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The Outlook On White House Traffic?
by Alex Mendelsohn
By definition, technical editors read a lot. Press releases, white papers, engineering datasheets, book reviews, technical publications, and application notes are a few of the periodicals and papers editors pore over on a continual basis.
For the past few weeks, in my spare time (ha!), I've been enjoying Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. If you've ever read a Russian novel you know it's not lightweight reading, but Tolstoy artfully breaks his story into seven parts, with delightfully compact chapters throughout.
In the midst of all this reading, a press release from Zatz Publishing crossed my desk. Rather than the usual headline extolling the virtues of some smaller, lighter, and/or faster breakthrough electronic device, the release's headline asked: "Is Osama bin Laden reading private White House e-mail?"
According to David Gewirtz, the author of the book Where Have All The E-mails Gone?, Osama the Elusive One may know President Bush's confidential travel itinerary before Bush's own staff does, and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be able to read American war plans ahead of time, and good ol' former KGB top cat Vlad Putin may very well know about America's supposedly secret foreign policy decisions before they're revealed to the public.
As an e-mail expert, Gewirtz shows how a seemingly benign White House e-mail system can have national security consequences. Gewirtz contends that errant e-mails in a crippled e-mail system may already have led to strategic mistakes in Iraq. The Hatch Act may have been used as an excuse to bypass government servers, giving a reasonable-sounding excuse to circumvent the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act.
Worse, the IT guys down at the White House may have set up a poorly-managed system as a pretense of cluelessness, to divert questions of disclosure.
Is this farfetched? Well, consider this: The White House e-mail system initially ran on Lotus Notes, then Microsoft Outlook. No big thing, right? I agree, until you realize the switchover occurred smack dab in the middle of the run-up to the war in Iraq.
According to Gewirtz, the e-mail migration interrupted e-mail flow at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, leading to the April 13th 2007 statement by then-White House Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino that no fewer than 5,000,000 e-mails were likely missing.
What's really nasty about all of this is that the White House apparently has no secure way of controlling the flow of e-mail or backing it up (as required by law). Gewirtz points to five key concerns.
First, e-mail is, and has always been, a problem for presidents since its inception. Second, the outdated Hatch Act is actually encouraging poor e-mail security, routing e-mail through the open Internet where anyone can intercept it. Third, there's no acceptable and legal archiving technology in use in Washington. The aforementioned poorly timed e-mail migration is the fourth problem. Fifth, the IT folks in Washington can't keep track of Blackberrys and similar PDAs.
If you find some time to read, check out Where Have All The E-mails Gone? (ISBN 978-0-945266-20-4), and by all means set aside some time for Tolstoy's Anna as well. The former is a quick and intriguing read, and as significant as the classic Russian novel.
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