Thursday, May 21, 2009
Officials at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) are feeling some serious heat from Congress after they admitted that a computer hard drive containing huge amounts of data from the Clinton White House has gone missing. The drive reportedly contained Social Security numbers for Clinton administration staff and visitors to the White house, including one belonging to a daughter of former Vice President Al Gore, as well as addresses and Secret Service and White House operating procedures.
Archive officials don’t know whether the hardware was stolen or has just been misplaced. They said it disappeared sometime between October 2008 and March 2009, when archive workers were in the process of reviewing the drive’s two terabyte’s worth of data. As many as 100 employees had access to the area where the hard drive was stored, and the FBI has been called in to investigate. NARA is offering a reward of $50,000 for information that leads to the equipment’s recovery.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), senior Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has called the archives’ acting director, Adrienne Thomas, to appear before the committee on Thursday to explain the mishap. “This egregious breach raises significant questions regarding the effectiveness of the security protocols that are in place at the National Archives and Records Administration,” he told the Associated Press.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Investigation Into Huge Loss of Computerized Clinton Data (by David Johnston, New York Times)
Sensitive Data Missing from National Archives (by Larry Margasak, Associated Press)
Missing Clinton Administration Hard Drive (National Archives and Records Administration) (PDF)
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