Vice President

NARA invokes emergency plan to deal with deluge of White House data

Submitted by jajacobs on Sat, 2008-12-27 15:39.

The New York Times reports today on the problems the National Archives faces in acquiring, organizing, managing, preserving and making available the records of the Bush White House.

The National Archives has put into effect an emergency plan to handle electronic records from the Bush White House amid growing doubts about whether its new $144 million computer system can cope with the vast quantities of digital data it will receive when President Bush leaves office on Jan. 20.

Among the problems NARA faces? Volume: NARA anticipates getting 100 terabytes of data 50 times the what they got from the Clinton White House. This is the equivalent of five times the contents of all 20 million catalogued books in the Library of Congress.

Cooperation: "Millions of White House e-mail messages created from 2003 to 2005 appear to be missing and may not be recoverable. And in September 2007, the top lawyer at the National Archives wrote in a memorandum that he had 'made almost zero progress' planning the transition because the White House had ignored repeated requests for information about the volume and formats of electronic records." In addition, Vice-President Cheney's lawyers claimed in a court filing that neither NARA nor the court "may supervise the vice president or his office" for compliance with the Presidential Records Act.

Formats: NARA says that there are a large numbers of White House records created with proprietary commercial software.

Access: Paul Brachfeld, the archives' inspector general, said "The electronic records archives system may be able to take in a tremendous amount of e-mail and other records.... But just because you ingest the data does not mean that people can locate, identify, recover and use the records they need."

Bush E-Mails May Be Secret a Bit Longer, Cheney asserts sole right of review of his records

Submitted by jajacobs on Mon, 2008-12-22 17:09.

Bush E-Mails May Be Secret a Bit Longer, by R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post, December 21, 2008; A01.

Legal Battles, Technical Difficulties Delay Required Transfer to Archives...

The required transfer in four weeks of all of the Bush White House's electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits and lagging computer forensic work, according to government officials, historians and lawyers.

...The risks that the transfer may be incomplete are also pointed up by a continuing legal battle between a coalition of historians and nonprofit groups over access to Vice President Cheney's records. The coalition is contesting the administration's assertion in federal court this month that he "alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records" and "how his records will be created, maintained, managed, and disposed," without outside challenge or judicial review.

...The National Archives and Records Administration is supposed to help monitor the completeness of the historical record but has no enforcement powers over White House records management practices.

Plum Book becomes political

Submitted by jrjacobs on Sat, 2008-11-15 19:30.

We've posted previously about the Plum Book and how this simple US govt phonebook has been surreptitiously changed to further a political agenda. Now Think Progress has picked up the story. They point out that both the 2004 and 2008 editions offer a startling — and erroneous — assertion: The office of the Vice President is not in the executive branch. Both versions put the description of the VP’s office last under “Appendices,” rather than in the Executive Branch section:

The Vice Presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch, but is attached by the Constitution to the latter. The Vice Presidency performs functions in both the legislative branch (see article I, section 3 of the Constitution) and in the executive branch (see article II, and amendments XII and XXV, of the Constitution, and section 106 of title 3 of the United States Code).

The 1996 and 2000 versions unambiguously include the Office of the Vice President in the executive branch.

Blogging the debates

Submitted by jrjacobs on Tue, 2008-09-23 10:11.

You can tell we're coming down the home stretch of the 2008 presidential election as we're being bombarded with ads, and more information than we can read even if we'd aced the Evelyn Wood Speed reading course! Luckily, there are more and more sites popping up to help us sift through those info-mountains. A couple of weeks ago, we posted about some mapping tools based on publicly available polling data.

now, VoterWatch has released the 2008 Presidential Debates Project. On September 26, the night of the first Presidential debate, Dick Morris, Cynthia McKinney and many others will provide commentary and perspective surrounding the debates. Best of all, they'll use the VoterWatch media player, to comment and blog within footage of the U.S. presidential debates. So, feel free to get your analysis from the paid presidential supporters in spin alley (which John Stewart aptly renamed "deception lane!"), OR check out the analysis from across the political spectrum from the likes of Brett Winterble of Covert Radio, Green Party Presidential Candidate, Cynthia McKinney, Political Author and Commentator, Dick Morris, Political Strategist, Sophia Nelson, Public Agenda, Reason Magazine, The Bob Barr for President Team, The Heritage Foundation, and VoteGopher.

Cheney: OVP neither executive nor legislative branch

Submitted by jrjacobs on Mon, 2007-02-12 22:06.

The Office of the Vice President (OVP) is refusing to cooperate with a government directory known as the "Plum Book," which lists government employees. Federal agencies have to comply by listing staffers in the directory, but Dick Cheney's office claimed an exemption for itself, arguing that the Vice Presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch. But it's not just the phone book with which the OVP refuses to cooperate. Evidently, the OVP is not part of the executive branch and so need not comply with ANY disclosures. An important legal ruling is pending over Vice President Cheney's refusal to disclose statistics on document classification and declassification activity. The Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), which is responsible for the policy and oversight of the government's security classification system and declassification, has asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to direct Cheney's office to disclose these statistics. According to Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News, "for the last three years, OVP has refused to divulge its classification statistics to ISOO, despite a seemingly explicit requirement that it do so. Prior to 2002, such information had routinely been transmitted and reported in ISOO's annual reports to the President." Hmmm, the OVP doesn't want the public to know who's working there or how many documents they're classifying. What's going on there?

Syndicate content Syndicate content