Opinion: White House e-mails lost? What a joke!

Computerworld - Q: Steve, did you see that the White House has now "lost" e-mail records? -- J.M. Acton, Mass.

A: I did.  They didn't.  They are hiding them -- there is a big difference.

A Washington Post story states that the issue surrounding the mess is one of inappropriate protocol -- i.e., folks using e-mail accounts they weren't supposed to -- but that is just a smoke screen. White House spokesman Scott Stanzel stated that the White House staff hadn't been properly taught how to save "politically oriented e-mail," but that it has since developed new guidelines for more than 20 staffers who have official or politically oriented e-mail addresses.

"The White House has not at this point done a good enough job at overseeing the practices of staff with political e-mail accounts," Stanzel says. "Some officials' e-mails have potentially been lost, and that is a mistake that the White House is aggressively working to fix."

First of all, I don't believe the e-mails are lost. I don't believe they can't be found by a 25-year-old Microsoft administrator in an hour, let alone in a building that has access to folks who can read the tip you left on your credit card bill at dinner last night from outer space. This is the White House we're talking about, no?

So, let's just play along for a bit. The White House lost data. E-mail records, required by law to be produced as evidence, are no longer able to be produced. Electronic discovery is not possible. If this were a business, or a civil trial, the fines would be huge and the possibilities of other penalties would loom large.

So, staying consistent with the fantasy, this does expose the core of the issue -- that if an electronic record is worth creating, it is worth keeping. Furthermore, if it is worth keeping at all, it is worth keeping forever -- or at least until it is formally nuked.

So, the lawmakers of the world should formally legislate the obvious:

1. Any business or legal record created shall be kept in immutable form (meaning it doesn't change, and any change to it creates a new version with new metadata time stamps and authoring information) in accordance with stated, published policy regarding the expiration of that data. In other words, you create it, you keep it until you nuke it, and you make sure that you treat all similar data the exact same way.

If you work for the U.S. government, no matter what e-mail system you use, those records should be kept for 50 years -- just like if you work in a Wall Street firm. If your policy is to then destroy the records, then you make sure you destroy all of them the same exact way.