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NARA Destroys Federal Electronic Records



With Regard to the lose of electronic mail records at the National Archives
and Records Administration (NARA), for those who missed the story it's
posted at the end of my comments.

Let me first discuss the lose of NARA records and then deal with the
problems which I believe they illustrate and the sad state of the National
Archives in dealing with electronic Federal records.

1)  The explanation of what wiped out their server and deleted all those
e-mail messages just stretches the imagination.  Assistant Archivist L.
Reynolds Cahoon told George Lardner of the Washington Post that the
"...messages could have been accidentally erased by someone trying to
delete a single user's messages and hitting the wrong key."  It's a Rose
Mary Woods explanation.  Its just not possible to delete all those messages
in the server by hitting the wrong key.  Who ever did it, knew exactly what
they were doing.  The ease of which the leadership of NARA accepted this
ridiculous explanation betrays something quite remarkable.  After all, no
other agency has spent more time and money in studies to try to figure out
how to preserve e-mails.  Or is it just the opposite, as I will now argue.
 The National Archives is not about preserving federal e-mail, but instead
trying to rid itself of it.

2)  So it's not surprising that NARA comes away from this incident with the
wrong lesson.  Rather then develop a fool proof way of managing electronic
mail.  One which saves each Federal e-mail at the time of creation in an
off line tamper proof records management system suitable for Archival
retention,   NARA instead points to the incident to justify its "you see
how unreliable e-mail systems are?" As further justification for their
"print out Federal e-mail Records."

Problem is that NARA had no internal rule as to when to print and file the
Official Records.  In fact the first NARA internal directive to do that was
just issued at the close of 1999.

So its all a big charade.  The business of the government is humming along
on thousands of government computer servers.  But the when - of when -
these records are printed out and entered into the official file - all
depends.  There is no requirement as to when this is to happen.
Question???  If a federal e-mail is not printed out and entered into the
central record keeping file, is it a Federal Record?

In the past these files were called work files, or convenience files and
defined as non-record.  Non-record because they had not been printed out
and entered into the official centralized record keeping system.

Of cause all this was declared illegal in the PROFS Case.  Though NARA had
argued that the e-mail traffic of the National Security Council (NSC),
 used by the investigative committees to  reconstruct the Iran Contra
events, were all non records because they had not been printed out and
entered into the NSC's official files.  The court disagreed and e-mails to
be Federal Records and the system that created them to be a record creation
system.

Now NARA is trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.  They now call
all the original e-mail in federal e-mail systems "electronic copies" (see
 Disposition of electronic copies; suspension of NARA Bulletin 99-04
 December 27, 1999 NARA Bulletin 2000-02   TO: Heads of Federal agencies
 http://www.nara.gov/records/policy/b2000-02.html)

All the federal e-mail in the server are copies because the paper records,
if they were made at all, are the original records, even though they really
aren't the original.  But its easier to destroy copies so that's why they
call them copies,  even though they are the original records.

Now you might ask.  What's wrong with paper records.  Nothing.  But I want
to at least preserve the federal electronic records of the top echelon of
each federal agency.  Because it's far easier to go through millions of
documents electronically rather then by hand.  And I just don't think that
all the federal records on the server, are being printed out and preserved.

So as we begin the new millennium, NARA continue with the charade that
federal records are being printed out and placed into a filing system.  Yet
they present no proof, they cannot point to any study, in fact they do not
monitor federal agencies compliance to the "print and file e-mail records."
 So in the twilight of the Clinton administration, and John W. Carlin
tenure as Archivist of the United States all one can truly say, is that a
great deal of money and effort have gone into studying the problem, yet
there is not one single federal electronic e-mail record from any Federal
Agency, that has been accessioned into the National Archives, and no clear
answer as to when that might happen.  Our nation has never before seen such
a massive destruction of Federal Records in its history.
Eddie Becker,  Washington, DC  ebecker@cni.org
(Disclosure: Eddie Becker is one of the Plaintiffs in the Profs Notes Case.
------------------------------------------------------------
Archives Loses 43,000 E-Mails
By George Lardner Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 6, 2000; Page A17
Officials at the National Archives, who are in charge of telling the rest
of the government how to save and safeguard e-mail, are red-faced about a
mishap in the computers of their own high command.
They say they "lost" at least 43,000 electronic messages last summer, wiped
out without a useful trace. They were supposed to have a backup system that
could have replaced the missing information, but they said it was not
working properly.
"All efforts to restore these messages failed," Deputy Archivist Lewis J.
Bellardo said recently in response to an inquiry from author-researcher
Scott Armstrong, a longtime critic of the agency's electronic
record-keeping policies.
The e-mails, which included the internal messages of 125 users in the
offices of Archivist John W. Carlin, Bellardo, the headquarters of the
regional archives and five staff units, were erased sometime over the June
18-21 weekend. Officials could not say just how many messages, accumulated
over a four-month period, were deleted, but "based on a conservative
estimate of 300 messages for each account," Bellardo said, "we calculate
that at least 43,000 messages were lost."
Officials say they still do not know just what caused the deletions. They
say the audit log features that might have provided a clue had been turned
off because they would have hampered the system's performance.
Making things worse, according to Assistant Archivist L. Reynolds Cahoon,
was the fact that adequate backup procedures were not in place. "It's
really distressing to us," Cahoon said. He said "it was our understanding
that backups were being made," both on a daily basis and a periodic
systemwide basis, but the agency's contractor, Signal Corp. of Fairfax, had
been doing neither as the Archives had specified.
Cahoon said he did not want to blame Signal because "we should have been
more vigilant about what our contractor was doing," but, in any case, he
said Signal has replaced the project manager and the supervisor who was
responsible for the backups.
Armstrong and another longtime critic of the Archives's e-mail policies,
researcher Eddie Becker, were skeptical of the official explanations,
especially Bellardo's assertion that "the deletion was unintentional rather
than willful or malicious."
"Did someone hit the wrong button? Spill coffee? Did the system get hit by
lightning?" Becker asked. "It sounds like they don't know what happened.
Most likely it was some disgruntled person. The Archives can be like the
Post Office. And for them to be managing other people's records when their
own records are such a disaster is ludicrous."
"This was definitely not a bolt of lightning or a power surge," Cahoon
said. He said the messages could have been accidentally erased by someone
trying to delete a single user's messages and hitting the wrong key. He
believes this is what happened. He said backup systems have been beefed up
to guard against another mishap, but he said the safest way to save
important messages is to print them out.
"We don't have a lot of trust in our systems at this point," Cahoon said.
"We're using software that's used all over the world, but it's not
foolproof yet. It's subject to human error."
Agency spokeswoman Susan Cooper said Carlin prints out all his important or
"record" messages every day, as do other top officials. "We take this very
seriously," she said of the erasures, "but at the end of the day, we don't
think many 'record' messages were lost."
                               End of Washington Post Story.

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