3/3/08

George Bush on Email: "I don't want you reading my personal stuff."

March 3's article, "Computer experts point to White House failures in e-mail controversy" by the AP's Pete Yost outlines what Mark Epstein calls "negligence." Epstein is director of technical services for Cataphora Inc., a California company that specializes in retrieval and analysis of electronic information.

Even with Federal laws requiring proper archiving, the White House is not being subjected to the standards that have enforced in the private sector, according to James K. Wagner Jr., a lawyer and co-founder of DiscoverReady LLC, a firm that assists companies in gathering and reviewing electronic documents.
The penalties for regulated companies that have failed to implement effective e-mail archive solutions have been quite severe, penalties often imposed by branches of the federal government.

And, of course, this analysis comes on the heels of a report that the RNC isn't even going to try and retrieve messages sent on its servers by White House staff.