About Those Emails? The Contractor Did It

I guess if you make sure your contractors can’t reveal what they’ve done in your name, it becomes harder for others to discover what it is that you, personally, have done. But not impossible. The IT companies for the White House are denying that their the company that missed 5 million missing emails in their daily audits.

When Congress asked about 5 million executive branch e-mails that wentmissing, a White House lawyer pointed the finger at an outside ITcontractor.

The only problem? No such IT contractor exists, according tosources close to the investigation of a possible violation of theFederal Records and Presidential Records acts.

[snip]

Contrary to Roberts’ statement to the Oversight Committee, severalsources, including an IT company currently doing contractual work forthe Executive Office of the President, have told ChannelWeb that nooutside company had a managed services contract to audit the Executive Office of the President’s e-mail archiving system daily during the period when the e-mails went missing.

"There are many contractors working for the [Information Assurance]Directorate and no single one provided audit and archive functions,"said a spokesperson for Unisys, an IT security and hardware firm whichhas provided the Executive Office of the President "with a variety ofIT services that support the Office of Administration."

"We don’t believe that Unisys is the Information AssuranceDirectorate contractor to which Deputy Attorney General Keith Robertsreferred when he briefed Rep. Waxman’s committee in May," said LisaMeyer, director of public relations for the Blue Bell, Penn.-basedcompany.

For the record, we might want to distrust Unisys on this point. After all, they’re the company supposedly in charge of monitoring Homeland Security’s computer system. And they seemed to have missed basic things–like installing security devices on Homeland Security’s networks.