Nixon got crucified for erasing 18 minutes of a tape recording. This violation of the Federal Records Act led to the Presidential Records Act, which a 1993 court decision held applied to emails. The Clinton administration set up and archive for their Lotus Notes based email system to comply.

The Bush administration in 2001 tossed Lotus Notes in favor of a Microsoft Outlook/Exchange email system. This did not work with the existing archive system, and it is now 2008 and a new archive system has still not been implemented. Legal requests for information related to Executive branch activities are met with “We can’t find those emails” or by getting emails from local users’ Outlook folders, which are not in any way shape or form tamper-proof.

Further, it appears that many Bush administration officials, including Karl Rove, routinely used Republican Party email addresses for official government business in order to escape the legal requirements for email retention. The Republican Party has only a 30 day email retention policy.

All this from an administration that believes it has the right to monitor anyone’s telephone or internet activities at any time without a warrant, just in case you might be a terrorist.

You would think that given a years-long pattern of flouting the law, I would have heard this on TV news or read about it in the newspaper, right? No, I read about it in an IT newsletter on SQL databases linking to a post on the ars technica web site.