Hacker 2/HACKER2.mdf/cud/cud547f.txt

Text File | 1995-01-03 | 12KB | 238 lines

Date: Thu, 24 Jun 93 03:37:40 -0400
From: [e-mail](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 operating.'

         On Feb. 12, Wilson compounded his difficulties by
     announcing he was taking a $129,000-a-year job as executive
     director of the George Bush Center for Presidential Studies at
     Texas A&M University. The Justice Department has said it is
     considering a criminal investigation of a possible conflict of
     interest by Wilson.

     [Now, that is rich.  Not even in Texas could you get this kind of
nonsense past a grand jury.

     [The article goes on to say that the archivist agreed with Bush's
claim that the electronic materials were not records but were internal
communications.  However, the article says, a federal judge had
already rejected that claim.

     [Specifically, the article says, U.S. District Judge Charles
Richey had ruled on Jan. 6, in a case brought at the end of the Reagan
administration, that information in the White House computer systems
not only "fit into an everyday understanding' of what a record is,
but also met the statutory definition in the Federal Records Act.  The
article continues:]

         Richey said he was worried that the [Bush] administration
     was about to destroy information "of tremendous historical
     value.' He also said that making paper copies of the
     electronic data would not be sufficient, because the paper
     copies would not necessarily show who had received the
     information and when.

         "The question of what government officials knew and when
     they knew it has been a key question in not only the
     Iran-Contra investigations, but also in the Watergate matter,"
     Richey observed.

         The judge ordered the defendants, including Wilson and the
     Bush White House, not to delete or alter any of the electronic
     records systems until archivists could preserve the material
     protected by the Federal Records Act.

         Richey's Jan. 6 order obliged the archives to make sure
     that the "federal' or "agency' records on White House
     computers were preserved, even though they might be commingled
     with "presidential records.' Figuring out the difference is a
     chore affecting primarily NSC computer files.

     [At this point the article explains that a memo written by the
national security director to the president would be a presidential
record, and not disclosable, but that if the president signs it and
sends it to the Pentagon for implementation, then it is a federal
record and is disclosable.
     [The article then says:]

         According to records churned up by the lawsuit, Richey's
     Jan.  6 order precipitated numerous meetings of archives
     officials, often with Justice Department and White House
     representatives.  Government lawyers, meanwhile, went to
     Richey to ask if they could make backups and purge the
     computers before Clinton moved in.

         Richey, uneasy about past foul-ups and what he called
     "inconsistencies' in the backup taping plan, turned them down
     on Jan. 14. But the Bush administration promptly appealed. The
     next day, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington said backups
     would be acceptable "so long as the information is preserved
     in identical form' until the appeal could be decided on its
     merits.

         But the inventories given to the archives task force
     were not complete. "Many dates are missing,' an after-action
     archives memo said of the backup tapes, and more than 100
     had no dates.  It was impossible to tell how many erasures
     might have been made after Richey's ruling. And according to
     a certificate from the White House Communications Agency,
     six tapes packed with NSC messages and memos were
     "overwritten due to operator error.'

     [Holy Ned!  Does this sound familiar?  Where is Rose Marie Woods
and her six-and-one-half-minute gap when we need her?  The amount of
information we're talking about here is staggering. Six nine-track
tapes overwritten "due to operator error"?  C'mon.]

         In all, more than 5,000 tapes and hard disk drives were
     delivered to the archives. Most had to be preserved because of
     the lawsuit, but a number of hard drives were added at the
     last minute because of a grand-jury subpoena related to the
     pre-election search of Clinton's passport files. Once that
     investigation is over, the grand-jury materials, under the
     Bush-Wilson agreement, will become "the personal records of
     George Bush.'

     [How conveeenient!

     [The next section of the story details Wilson's background as a
Reagan appointee and former director of the Gerald Ford Presidential
Library (beg your pardon?).  It says that Wilson (shocking though it
may seem) declined to comment for this article.  It then says,
however, that in a March 2 deposition, Wilson testified that he didn't
see the Bush agreement until the night of Jan. 19, was unfamiliar with
its terms, and signed it only "upon advice of counsel,' namely, one
Gary Brooks, the archives general counsel.  That's some general
counsel, that Gary Brooks!

     [The article continues:]

         The Bush-Wilson agreement went far beyond the presidential
     records law. It gave the ex-president exclusive legal control
     of all "presidential information, and all derivative
     information in whatever form' that was in the computers. And
     it gave Bush the veto power in retirement to review all the
     backup tapes and hard drives at the archives and make sure
     that all the information he considers "presidential' is kept
     secret. He can even order the archivist to destroy it.

         "It's history repeating itself almost 20 years later,' one
     official close to the case said, alluding to the September
     1974 agreement that gave former President Nixon, who had just
     been pardoned, ownership and control of his White House tape
     recordings and papers and allowed him to destroy the tapes
     over a five-year period.  Congress quickly canceled that
     agreement in a law that applies only to Nixon, but to this day
     most of the 4,000 hours of Nixon's tapes remain tied up by the
     maneuvering of Nixon and his lawyers.

     [The article goes on at considerable length here, and it just
gets worse and worse.  All I can say is, where is the attorney
general?  Where is the FBI?  Where is the freaking Secret Service and
their computer-crime goons?  Conspicuously missing, that's where.

     [The last paragraph of the story is worth reading:]

         Skeptics are still wondering what's in the [Bush computer]
     tapes.  "There must be something important in them,'
     [historian Page] Miller said. "You don't have agreements late
     at night, just like that.'

Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253