Bush Data Threatens to Overload Archives: Via NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — 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.

The technical challenge was an inevitable result of the explosion in cybercommunications, which will make the electronic record of the Bush years about 50 times as large as that left by the Clinton White House in 2001, archives officials estimate. The collection will include top-secret e-mail tracing plans for the Iraq war as well as scenes from the likes of Barney Cam 2008, a White House video featuring the first pet.

Under federal law, the government has “complete ownership, possession and control” of presidential and vice-presidential records. The moment Mr. Bush leaves office, the National Archives becomes legally responsible for “the custody, control and preservation” of the records.

Archives officials who disclosed the emergency plan said it would mean that the agency would initially take over parts of the White House storage system, freezing the contents on Jan. 20. Only later, after further study, will archivists try to move the records into the futuristic computer system they have devised as a repository for digital data.

Questions about the archives’ capacity have added a new element to the uneasiness felt by open-government advocates and historians, who already Editor (Emphasis added): fear that departing White House officials, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, may not turn over everything. Mr. Cheney asserted this month in a court case that he had absolute discretion to decide which of his records are official and which are personal, and thus do not have to be transferred to the archives,

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While some routine messages may be of little interest to historians, the law does not generally permit White House officials to pick which messages to preserve. And for an administration not documented by the tapes that captured the inside story of the Johnson and Nixon White Houses, e-mail may provide a substitute, historians say.

The archives said it had “a high level of confidence” that it could bring the e-mail into its electronic record-keeping system and retrieve messages in response to requests from Congress and the courts.

But Thomas S. Blanton, director of the nonprofit National Security Archive, a plaintiff in several lawsuits seeking Bush administration records, said the National Archives’ track record did not justify such a claim.

“Their confidence is inexplicable,” Mr. Blanton said.

Archives officials said they might have been better prepared for the transition if the White House had cooperated earlier.

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 May of this year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, found that “the administration has not yet provided specific information on the volume and types of data to be transferred” to the archives. Linda D. Koontz of the accountability office warned in May and again in September that the National Archives might not be ready for the torrent of electronic records on Jan. 20.

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Even if the technology were perfect, some historians, librarians and watchdog groups say they do not fully trust the administration to preserve its records.

Their worries were heightened by a filing by Mr. Cheney’s lawyers this month in a lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and other interest groups. The filing said neither the National Archives nor the court “may supervise the vice president or his office” for compliance with the Presidential Records Act.

“There’s some anxiety, particularly given the attitude of the office of the vice president toward records preservation and disclosure,” said Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists, who is editor of the online publication Secrecy News.

A Cheney spokesman, Megan M. Mitchell, said that his office had been handing over records to the archives “for some time now” and that concerns about the vice president’s intentions were misplaced.

“We will do everything we can under the law to preserve records,” Ms. Mitchell said.

But J. William Leonard, who stepped down in January as the top archives official overseeing classified records, said there was ample reason for skepticism.

Mr. Leonard, who clashed while in government with the vice president’s office, noted a remark that Mr. Cheney made in September 2007, at the presidential library of Gerald R. Ford, for whom Mr. Cheney once worked as White House chief of staff.

Editor (Emphasis added): “I’m told researchers like to come and dig through my files, to see if anything interesting turns up,” Mr. Cheney said. “I want to wish them luck, but the files are pretty thin. I learned early on that if you don’t want your memos to get you in trouble some day, just don’t write any.”

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