I know that not a lot of folks read LJ on the weekends, but I needed to put this out there.
The White House is saying that 5 MILLION emails may have been lost due to a “screw-up.”
If this story gets any traction at all (which I’m still not sure will happen, given our toothless media), expect that is going to be the repeated narrative: The White House “screw-up”, and the “lost” data. It’s sexy, after all — it plays to the incompetence of the Bushies, which everybody is familiar with by now. “Can you believe these chuckleheads? What morons. Hyuck-hyuck-hyuck…”
It is, however, the narrative that the White House wants to have out there. The media is going to help, as well.
The problem, y’see, is that in the 21st century, “lost” doesn’t happen. Email passes between multiple servers, and unless drives are scrubbed to purposeful, high-security levels, copies of any email sent can be recovered from pretty much anywhere.
Most of the country, though, hears “lost data”, pictures the time that they forgot to save a Word document, or accidentally deleted an email, and they say “Oh, that’s happened to me.” Except that it didn’t, not really. That Word document, that email, could still be called up from their hard drive today, by a sufficiently skilled investigator with access to the right tools.
Five million emails don’t get “lost.” Someone makes them go away. For the White House to be claiming that they were “lost” in a “screw-up”, would mean that they’re confident that the data is unrecoverable.
For the data to be unrecoverable, somebody had to make it unrecoverable.
Which means that somebody, somewhere, had to give the order.
If our media has any balls left (which, again, I doubt), that is the question that they should be asking, over and over again. Fuck talking about “who screwed up” — start talking, around the clock, constantly enough so that Ma & Pa Kettle start to get the message:
“Who gave the order?”