Drives Destroyed as Governor Exits

Computerworld - Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a potential candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, ordered the destruction of hard drives from nearly 90 computers before leaving office last month — a controversial move in which his office was assisted by the state’s IT department.

Drives that had been used in 83 PCs and four servers were destroyed, according to Claire Bailey, director of the Arkansas Department of Information Systems. In an interview, she said that the DIS backed up data from the servers but not from the PCs and then gave the backup tapes to Huckabee’s former chief of staff.

Bailey said a DIS staffer worked with representatives from Huckabee’s office “to determine the mechanism for [his] transition out of office” from an IT perspective. She added that she believes Huckabee’s representatives were provided with options for handling sensitive data stored on the state’s systems as part of that process.

The governor’s office chose a combination of writing over the data and destroying the hard drives, Bailey said. That approach, she noted, follows DIS guidelines, which recommend that in cases involving the deletion of sensitive data, state agencies should write over the information “one to three times” and then destroy the drives containing the data.

Bailey said, though, that her office doesn’t weigh in on whether doing so is appropriate. “Our customers make the decision,” she said. “DIS does not make the decision about whether data is sensitive or not. We back up information for our customers, but we do not go in and analyze the data.”

Drives were removed from systems in the state capitol building, the governor’s mansion, a state office in Washington, and an office and airport hangar used by the Arkansas State Police, Bailey said. The state spent $13,000 from its emergency fund to destroy the drives, she noted.

Huckabee filed papers on Jan. 29 saying that he was forming an exploratory committee in advance of a possible run for the GOP’s 2008 presidential nomination.

Gabe Holmstrom, a spokesman for the Arkansas attorney general’s office, said the attorney general is reviewing the destruction of the disk drives to determine whether any state laws were broken.

Meanwhile, Jim Parsons, a resident of Bella Vista, Ark., confirmed that he had filed a complaint against Huckabee with the Arkansas Ethics Commission for allegedly destroying state property.

Parsons also tried to file a criminal complaint with Larry Jegley, the prosecuting attorney of Pulaski County in Arkansas. But Jegley’s office declined to accept the complaint because it didn’t consider Parsons to be a victim of a crime, said First Deputy Prosecutor John Johnson. He added that if the destruction of the drives was in fact a crime, the real victims would be the state agencies that owned the affected computers.