-Caveat Lector-
http://venus.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/CUDS5/cud547.txt
excerpt
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 93 03:37:40 -0400
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED](Jack McNeeley)
Subject: File 6--Virus Hits White House
((MODERATORS' NOTE: The following was excerpted from a longer
article from The Washington Post)).
The following article moved on the Washington Post news wire
March 13. I confess that I expected some other CuD reader to go to
the trouble of passing the thing along, with enough comment and
criticism to pass muster with the fair-use copyright gods, so I
neglected to toss the thing your way.
Since no one else has done so, and since the on-line shriek
community has inexplicably let George Bush's vandalism of the White
House computers pass virtually unnoticed, I must submit the following
for your perusal. Readers who want the complete article will have to
visit their local (paper) library, armed with a dime to plug into the
photocopying machine, so that the Post's copyright may be properly
violated. Those of you with a social conscience will send some spare
change to Katy Graham to buy a legal copy of the newspaper.
11th-Hour Covenant: Lost Memory Computers to Gain for Bush
By George Lardner Jr.
(c) 1993, The Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- When President Clinton's top aides moved
into the White House in January, many of them had trouble
getting their computers to work.
That's because during the night of Jan. 19 and into the
next morning -- President Bush's last hours in office --
officials wiped out the computerized memory of the White House
machines.
The hurried operation was made possible only by an
agreement signed close to midnight by the archivist of the
United States, Don W. Wilson. The ensuing controversy has
added to allegations that the archives, beset for years by
political pressures and slim resources, is prone to
mismanagement and ineptitude in its mission of preserving for
the public the nation's documentary history.
It also has raised strong doubts about the efficacy of a
15-year-old law that says a former president's records belong
to the people.
Just what information was purged remains unknown, but it
probably ranged from reports on the situation in
Bosnia-Herzegovina to details about Bush's Iran-Contra pardons
to evidence concerning the pre-election search of Clinton's
passport files. In the warrens of the secretive National
Security Council, only a month's worth of foreign cable
traffic was retained to help enlighten the incoming
administration.
[At this point we must pause for fair-use commentary: It's
obvious from merely the first five paragraphs of this article that a
crime of historic proportions has been committed. If some
cyber-rambling teenager had wiped the hard disks of the White House
computers, you can bet that legions of doomed SS agents would spare no
expense to run the scoundrel to ground. The article continues:]
Bush and his lawyers had wanted to leave no trace of the
electronic files, arguing they were part of an internal
communications system, not a records system. But court orders
issued a few days earlier required that the information be
preserved if removed from the White House.
So backup tapes were made of the data on mainframe
computers and carted off to the National Archives by a special
task force. Hard disk drives were plucked out of personal
computers and loosely stacked into boxes for the trip. Despite
such measures, there are indications some material may have
been lost.
[Indications? Tell me more, tell me more! As in "General
Failure Reading Drive C: (A)bort (R)etry (I)gnore"? Oh, I get it:
Somebody must have accidentally entered "wipefile *.*".
[The article continues:]
The transfer had been authorized by Wilson, who at 11:30
p.m. on Jan. 19 put his signature on what would prove to be a
highly controversial "memorandum of agreement.' It gave Bush
"exclusive legal control' over the computerized records of his
presidency as well as "all derivative information.'
Critics have denounced Wilson's agreement with Bush as a
clear violation of a post-Watergate law that made presidential
records public property. And they fear that the authority
granted Bush is far broader than officials so far have
acknowledged.
For their part, archives officials say they did the best
they could under difficult circumstances and contend they
deserve some credit for getting physical custody of the
electronic material. Chided days later about the broad scope
of the agreement in a meeting with outside historians, Wilson
protested that they just did not appreciate "the political
environment in which I was
