According to a report from the US, all White House e-mail containing staffers personal business passes through an unencrypted ISP based offsite- which has resulted in about five million White House e-mails sent between 2003 and 2005 going missing.
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According to Gewirtz, There are days the vice presidential office shows no e-mails in its Inbox. Days where there are no messages at all raise questions. We don’t know if they’ve been backed up. The White House says the computers the messages are on have been destroyed, but they dont keep track of which ones stay at the White House. So, if they dont know which computer is which, how do they know which ones have been destroyed? And what happens to these hard drives? “
Furthermore says Gewirtz, “One of the things that came out was that the White House has no mechanism for keeping track of portable media. Also no mechanism for keeping track of computers. They dont track where laptops are, for example. In the White House, there is no tracking for any of this portable media. On a 2GB thumb drive, you can fit 890 copies of the King James Bible. You are talking about a 1110-page book. How many American secrets could you stick on a 2GB thumb drive?”
According to Gewirtz, “The White House needs to be managed by a dedicated IT team that lives across administrations. It would have a procedural base similar to the Secret Service detail. Put it under the auspices of the Secret Service because they already have most of those structures in place”.
