NorthSeas Lives On !

It's taken a while but it is now official. NorthSeas lives on

Jatheon Technologies Inc. of Toronto, Canada will announce today that it has taken over worldwide operations and support of NorthSeas customers, resellers and distributors. In addition to providing technical support, Jatheon will also offer an attractive trade-out program for NorthSeas appliances.

As part of this arrangement, I am delighted to be joining Jatheon's Board of Advisors.

Jatheon is the designer, developer and marketer of Plug n Comply™, a family of network appliances that simplify archiving, indexing, retrieval and dynamic monitoring of corporate email and messaging data. With headquarters in Toronto, Ontario, and Novi, Michigan, Jatheon serves North America and Europe through its network of global business partners. Check them out at http://www.jatheon.com/

The Difference Between a Backup and an Archive Rears its Head at the White House

14 Million E-mail Messages Found. So what?

The Washington Post today reported that a Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge yesterday that the Bush administration ordered to transfer White House e-mail messages missing from four years ago, will meet its legal requirement and transfer the e-mails to the National Archives.

It's been a long legal battle between the Bush Administration, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and the National Security Archive. For a year and a half, the Bush office argued strenuously that the e-mails were gone forever. Even after being ordered just last week to recover the e-mails from back-up tape, they continued their appeals.

Now, just six days before the moving vans pull in, they report that they have found 14 million messages and will transfer them to the Archives. Hmmm?

Forget the gamesmanship in this whole thing, what is it that they have actually found? What is it they will be transferring to the National Archives, back-up tapes of the mail-server for the dates in question? If so, then yes these tapes would certainly contain the so-called "missing emails", but definately not in any searchable format.

If this is the case, and I am only speculating here, then the Bush Administration has in fact met its legal obligations, but all the National Archives gets is a bunch of unsearchable computer tapes.

If you know more about this, please comment.

And You Thought You had a Full Inbox

Federal Judge Says the Bush Records Must be Given to Obama Administration

According to the Associated Press, a federal judge yesterday declared that Barack Obama's incoming administration must be given copies of documents the Bush White House had been withholding from Congress pertaining to the firings of nine U.S. attorneys.

Although the ruling may not have specifically addressed e-mail records, in a previous court ruling in favor of the National Security Archive, the Bush Administration was told it must retrieve 225 days of missing e-mail from back-up tapes.

How they're progressing with that little project, who knows?