The IT department at the White House has come under fire
after aCongressional
reportdetailed how it lost thousands of
e-mails that were supposed to be archived under federal
law.
The White House's automated archiving solution hit problems in
2002 when the Bush administration changed its e-mail software from
Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook.
Incompatibility issues with the new system meant that archiving
was left in the hands of staff rather than an automated solution,
and thousands of e-mails were overlooked.
Juergen Obermann, CEO of archiving specialist GFT Inboxx, said,
"It seems a little archaic to leave the archiving of potentially
sensitive and highly classified information in the hands of the
end-user, particularly for an organisation so firmly in the public
spotlight.
"More worrying is that by failing to archive all correspondence,
the very body supposed to be upholding the law is clearly in
violation of it."
The Bush administration has technically broken federal law by
not fully archiving its records.
The
Presidential Records Act came into force in 1978, in the
aftermath of the Watergate scandal. The act lays down that
presidential records are owned by the people of the US, and not the
president.
The
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