Computergate: Who's running the show?

"Computergate." Until someone else comes up with a name that catches on, that's my nomenclature and I'm stickin' to it. (Hey, check out the latest results on that Kos poll!)

Today's L.A. Times (subscription required) emphasizes that Rove, upon assuming his duties, was officially cautioned not to misplace any emails, which is sort of like cautioning Charles Ng not to kill people. So where did the missing missives go? How do the White House email systems (official and non-official) actually work?

In response to the latest document dump, a Democratic Underground poster with the euphonious nick "Tandalayo_Scheisskopf," who seems to have a technical background, offered a reaction deserving of repetition here:

1. The documents offered up do not have full email headers included. For those who understand such things, email headers are a rich source of information. I do not think that a lack of full email headers in these documents is a mistake.

2. From their format, as supplied, especially as regards how file attachments are shown on them, I would expect that their email server infrastructure is based upon Microsoft Exchange (version unknown). Now, this possibility, taken with the recent CREW information that 5 million emails are missing, tells me something:

5 million emails are missing, out of how many emails? That is hard to divine, but I can say this: this is a very high volume email infrastructure, one that surely has a ton of security. In an Exchange environment like that, you are going to have Exchange bridgehead servers, connectors, routing servers, active directory servers, firewalls, clustering, a number of email stores, IIS servers, service-dedicated servers, ISA servers, SAN storage and a lot more. Plus Blackberry servers. And, most importantly, a dedicated sub-infrastructure of servers for just backups and archiving.

For all these emails to be scrubbed completely is No Small Taters. Either this was the single worst configured and administered Exchange infrastructure in the history of mankind, or one or more people with a very detailed knowledge of Exchange came in, mapped the topology and proceeded to sanitize the system.

There is a third possibility: That the White House and the RNC have decided to stonewall and ignore subpoenas.

Any way you slice and dice it, this is big and it points to organized criminal effort. I also cannot think of any geek who would willingly sign onto duty like this and place themselves in a position of such jeopardy. Especially one with the high level of technical expertise needed to do all of this.

Which leads to a fourth possibility: Could this system have been intentionally set to wipe out, lose, obfuscate and obscure. That is not unlikely.

Were I advising Leahy or Waxman, I would find out where those servers are and put seals on them post haste.

The RNC servers are in Chattanooga. But where are the official .gov servers?

Now that is an intriguing question.

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

According to an interesting letter published in an earlier post, official governmental communications are supposed to be the purview of CSS (Central Security Service), the little-known sister agency to the NSA. The NSA breaks codes; CSS makes them. However, the small amount of information about CSS available online suggests that their mission is military; the White House goes unmentioned here, for example.

The official NSA/CSS "faq" page says:

Specifically, NSA/CSS provides intelligence products and services to the White House, Executive Agencies (such as the CIA and State Department), Chairman and Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), military Commanders-in-Chief (CINCs) and component commands, military departments, multinational forces, and U.S. allies. In addition, NSA/CSS provides information assurance products and services to government customers and government contractors, as required.

This statement is deliberately non-specific. (Can anyone tell me what is an "information assurance product"? Do they sell 'em at Frys?)

(By the way, the spiffy new NSA site is, as my ladyfriend might say, "totally gothed up." All they need is that cool dripping blood font...)

If CSS stores the .gov emails, then the data rests securely in Big Brother's hands in Maryland. But what if the gig went elsewhere? What if "Little Brother" -- that is, Little Republican Brother -- handles those missives?

Nothing in the Presidential Records Act (it's here and the 2001 update is here) prevents Bush from giving that job to anyone he likes. The PRA requires that the whole kit-n-caboodle should end up at the National Archives; nothing in the Act stipulates how emails are handled during a president's tenure.

If Bush outsourced the task of archiving emails to a non-governmental firm, nobody at NSA/CSS would have raised a public stink. "Public stinks" are not what they do. Alas, I doubt whether anyone at Never Say Anything or Can't Say Shit will answer my questions about who runs the White House email system -- although they might well provide help to the beleaguered congressfolk looking into these matters.

As we revealed a short while ago, the firm GovTech, run by a Bush family friend, got the gig to do a still-mysterious internet project for the White House. If GovTech is handling the official email -- the stuff which is supposed to be archived, pursuant to the Presidential Records Act -- where does that stuff get stored before (presumed) delivery to the Archives?

We have seen (scroll down to previous posts on the topic, and check out both the links and the reader commentary) that GovTech uses the services of SmarTech, also in securely Bush-friendly hands. SmarTech handles all the RNC stuff. They're in Chatanooga.

Which means that -- who knows? -- the official emails and the non-official emails may be in the same hands, in the land of Davy Crockett's nativity.

It also means that the Bushies intended to install a "legacy" system in the White House, which might well have kept WH communications in Republican control, even if there had been a turnover in 2004. Plenty of room for mischief there.

If the Dem wins in 2008, someone at the new White House had better make it his job to learn who runs what when it comes to information technology.

Finally: Many have bandied about the question of whether the emails can be recovered. The common presumption (see here) is that they remain somewhere in cyberspace. But this presumption does not take into account the possibility of a "friendly" service provider creating a system designed to make the evidence go bye-bye.

For a real eye-opener, read the L.A Times piece here. (Subscription required.) A sample:

Many companies now make it a policy to get rid of all deleted e-mails after 30 or 90 days.

For consumers wondering how long their correspondence lives on, the Internet service providers that control the routes through which e-mail travels may expunge sent and deleted messages in less than a week.

Network Solutions purges deleted e-mails after just a few hours, said Pete Fox, senior vice president of engineering. Then it's really, really gone.

"We do it very consciously, because we didn't want to get in a situation where government entities come asking for people's deleted e-mails," Fox said.

When an AOL user hits the delete key, the message is sent to a file called "Recently Deleted E-Mail."

It sits there for three days, then vanishes, AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein said.