-Caveat Lector- http://venus.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/CUDS5/cud547.txt excerpt Date: Thu, 24 Jun 93 03:37:40 -0400 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED](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.' ------------------------------ End of Computer Underground Digest #5.47 <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
