Bush Data Threatens to Overload Archives
By ROBERT PEAR and SCOTT SHANE
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.
In their plan, archives officials wrote, the transition poses "unique
challenges" because of the huge volume of electronic records, some of
them in "formats not previously dealt with." Even though archivists have
been working with the White House to survey the documents, "there is
always a possibility that some electronic records may be overlooked,"
the officials wrote.
If the electronic records of the Bush White House total 100 terabytes of
information, as archives officials estimate, that would be about 50
times the volume of electronic records left behind by the Clinton White
House in 2001 and some five times the contents of all 20 million
catalogued books in the Library of Congress.
"It's a monstrous volume of material, and some people wonder if the
system can absorb it," said Lee White, executive director of the
National Coalition for History, a collection of 60 archival and
historical groups.
Sam Watkins, a transition liaison officer at the archives, said his
agency was expecting to receive 20 to 24 terabytes of e-mail alone from
the Bush White House. By contrast, Mr. Watkins said, the volume of
e-mail from the Clinton White House was less than one terabyte.
While some routine messages may be of little interest to historians, the
law does not generally permit White House officials to pick which
messages to preserve. And for an administration not documented by the
tapes that captured the inside story of the Johnson and Nixon White
Houses, e-mail may provide a substitute, historians say.
The archives said it had "a high level of confidence" that it could
bring the e-mail into its electronic record-keeping system and retrieve
messages in response to requests from Congress and the courts.
But Thomas S. Blanton, director of the nonprofit National Security
Archive, a plaintiff in several lawsuits seeking Bush administration
records, said the National Archives' track record did not justify such a
claim.
"Their confidence is inexplicable," Mr. Blanton said.
Archives officials said they might have been better prepared for the
transition if the White House had cooperated earlier.
Millions of White House e-mail messages created from 2003 to 2005 appear
to be missing and may not be recoverable. And in September 2007, the top
lawyer at the National Archives wrote in a memorandum that he had "made
almost zero progress" planning the transition because the White House
had ignored repeated requests for information about the volume and
formats of electronic records.
In May of this year, the Government Accountability Office, an
investigative arm of Congress, found that "the administration has not
yet provided specific information on the volume and types of data to be
transferred" to the archives. Linda D. Koontz of the accountability
office warned in May and again in September that the National Archives
might not be ready for the torrent of electronic records on Jan. 20.
Questions remain about how quickly the archives will be able to make the
records accessible to Congress, the courts and researchers, said Paul
Brachfeld, the archives' inspector general.
"The electronic records archives system may be able to take in a
tremendous amount of e-mail and other records," Mr. Brachfeld said. "But
just because you ingest the data does not mean that people can locate,
identify, recover and use the records they need."
The contingency plan, quietly approved by the National Archives on Nov.
7, emphasizes the difficulties posed by large numbers of White House
records created with proprietary commercial software.
Proprietary products can create problems because they quickly become
obsolete, as anyone who has weathered the transition from VHS tape to
DVDs can attest. The National Archives seeks to preserve electronic
records in a form that can be used for decades to come.
Even if the technology were perfect, some historians, librarians and
watchdog groups say they do not fully trust the administration to
preserve its records.
Their worries were heightened by a filing by Mr. Cheney's lawyers this
month in a lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and other interest groups. The
filing said neither the National Archives nor the court "may supervise
the vice president or his office" for compliance with the Presidential
Records Act.
"There's some anxiety, particularly given the attitude of the office of
the vice president toward records preservation and disclosure," said
Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists, who is
editor of the online publication Secrecy News.
A Cheney spokesman, Megan M. Mitchell, said that his office had been
handing over records to the archives "for some time now" and that
concerns about the vice president's intentions were misplaced.
"We will do everything we can under the law to preserve records," Ms.
Mitchell said.
But J. William Leonard, who stepped down in January as the top archives
official overseeing classified records, said there was ample reason for
skepticism.
Mr. Leonard, who clashed while in government with the vice president's
office, noted a remark that Mr. Cheney made in September 2007, at the
presidential library of Gerald R. Ford, for whom Mr. Cheney once worked
as White House chief of staff.
"I'm told researchers like to come and dig through my files, to see if
anything interesting turns up," Mr. Cheney said. "I want to wish them
luck, but the files are pretty thin. I learned early on that if you
don't want your memos to get you in trouble some day, just don't write any."
Fonte:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/washington/27archives.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
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