Computer technology is creating more than just new businesses. It is also creating new opportunities for political investigators, consultants, and press officials. Exhibit A: the charge by House Republicans that the White House hid e-mails from investigators' subpoenas for two years. Exhibit B: the response by White House officials that e-mail technology is so complex that the e-mails were lost accidentally and it will take six months and up to $3 million to recover them.
This latest controversy began when Judicial Watch, a public-interest law firm, revealed the existence of White House e-mails stored on backup tapes. Contract workers familiar with the White House's e-mail system have said the contents include e-mail related to the Paula Jones lawsuit, fund-raising investigations, and other controversies. Because of White House technology-management errors, several categories of e-mail now stored on roughly 4,000 backup tapes were never reviewed during investigations. The missing e-mails may number 246,000, although some may have been shared among computers that have already been searched.
A contract worker copied some of those backup e-mails onto a Zip disk, which has a large storage capacity. When asked if he could explain why some e-mails on the Zip disk could be read but others were inaccessible, White House Deputy Press Secretary Jake Siewert took refuge in ignorance: "No, and probably if I studied it for weeks, I wouldn't know. I'm not that technically literate." Similarly, Vice President Al Gore, who has repeatedly shown off his familiarity with e-mail, denied involvement with the issue, telling the Associated Press, "I don't ... I don't ... I don't handle the e-mail things." In a hearing before the House Government Reform Committee on March 30, White House counsel Beth Nolan said the e-mails were missed because senior White House officials did not understand the technology.
Experts in computer technology are skeptical of the White House's explanations. "I'd compare it to copying a VCR tape," said Tully Moye, president of thebest.net, an Internet service provider in St. Simons Island, Ga. "It's changing a tire," said Jeff Williams, president of Binomial International in Ogdensburg, N.Y., a company that helps companies recover e-mail lost in disasters. As for Zip disks? "I haven't had any problems," and there are usually ways to quickly pry loose any trapped data, said Timothy Shinkle, chief technology officer at Provenance Systems, an Arlington, Va., firm. "It sounds to me like they're making excuses," said Bob Janusaitis, president of Business911 International, another disaster-recovery firm, in Houston.
Asked how long it should take to recover the e-mail messages and to search and find keywords, these experts said a few days or weeks. The keyword searches are similar to those used by visitors to Yahoo! or standard Web sites. The critical factor is the speed at which the data on the tapes can be copied onto a new computer that can quickly conduct keyword searches, said Jeff Weisberg, chief technical officer at Netreach, an Internet service provider in Ambler, Pa. Of course, the process will be slowed by the White House lawyers' desire to read each relevant message before it is sent off to Capitol Hill or other investigators. But the first such e-mail could be sent to investigators in a few weeks, the industry executives said.
According to Beth Nolan, the missed traffic consists of e-mail sent over a period of 27 months from outside the White House to the 526 officials who used the e-mail computer known as Mail2; e-mail sent over six months to officials whose first names begin with D; and e-mail sent to and from people employed before 1997 by the Office of the Vice President, which includes Gore. The Mail2 problem was discovered in January 1998 and fixed that November by a typing change: MAIL2 to Mail2. The letter D problem was picked up in April 1999 and fixed that May. The problem at the Office of the Vice President was recognized in early 1997 and was partly fixed shortly thereafter.
The Zip disk was used by a contract worker in the summer of 1998 to copy e-mail related to Monica Lewinsky's testimony in the Paula Jones lawsuit. On March 29, 2000, Charles C. Easley, the associate director of security in the White House's Office of Management and Administration, tried to print out the Zip disk's files. However, the disk failed to work, and Easley and a White House security official got copies of the same disk from the contract worker's employer, Northrop Grumman Corp., according to Easley's April 3 affidavit.
Republicans believe the scandal lies in the failure by White House officials over the past two years to quickly fix the computer problem or to search the backup tapes for subpoenaed evidence. Republicans also say that White House officials are delaying review of the tapes until after the November elections.
According to White House spokesman James Kennedy, "Our effort is focused on reconstructing the backup tapes, [and] the best estimate we have seen is that the project will take six months to complete." Contractors who claim they can do the job faster don't know the real circumstances, he said, although he granted that "we will certainly talk to them." A contract has already been awarded to two Virginia firms, he said, and they will move their equipment to White House facilities within 70 days. Northrop Grumman, which has maintained the e-mail system since 1997, has not been asked to recover the missing e-mail.
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