Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
“Anybody seen Sandy Berger lately?”
My EXACT very first thought!
“Is that a hard drive in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”
Great minds, and all that! We suffer similarly with our cynicism.
Well, the Clintons are either sweating bullets or drinking a nice bourbon right now. Wonder if anyone has started to blame the Rethuglicans yet?
Sandy Berger’s drawers could not be reached for comment…
Me thinks they should go for a name change over there at the National Archives. “Free Library of America” seems to work!!
BT: Jimmy T sends.
Must be a lending library.
Fortunately, all of the information is backed up on secure servers.
Isn’t it?
You all have missed it. It was the “missing” FBI files on members of congress that Bill n’ Hill used to great effectiveness. Can anyone say Craig Livingstone?
Not to worry, this is just practice for when our medical records (which include such things as identification numbers, parents names, their medical history, our insurance information, etc…) are all made both secure and available via the government.
They seem to have the available part down.
This is to keep health care costs down. Because goodness knows the biggest rise in health care costs has been faxing of charts from my previous doctor.
Somebody walks out with the only records and years later they’re found in the now-SecState’s office. Whoops? Where did those come from? Must have been behind the sofa cushons!
Berger walks out of the national archives with archives stuffed down his pants…
I’m supposed to trust these people with my medical data?
There are companies that do this for a living. TRW, FDR, might as well throw in Chase and Wells Fargo and Citibank and Sears.
Wonder how many times they allow hard drives with classified data out of the building?
– Max
VA was one-step ahead last summer with missing laptops loaded with personal info (SSN’s and the like).
- SJS
I left active duty last year and every scrap of my physical was entered into the online data base. A year before that the Navy mailed me my hard copy medical record since it was “obsolete.” Yeah, both are slathered with my SSN and every other bit of personal identity. I have the warmest fuzzy feeling about the future. I just know that some second deputy under assistant to the principal undersecretary of paper affairs will have 3.2 million medical records on the laptop or thumb drive stolen from his/her/its car. What a surprise that will be.
Curtis/Max:
The massive loss of data you fear is already a seemingly weekly event in the UK. Seems like not a week goes by that either the NHS, MI 5 or the RAF, Army, etc., sees some joker leave his lap-top in the tube, etc., with 60,000 names here, a couple of mil there–it seems to be a constant drip, drip drip these days over there–I just can’t wait for the current proposed “improvements” over here to come to full fruition.
This is why I keep a hard copy “backup” of my medical records in my desk drawer at home.
I’m just wondering which concrete foundation in the DC area now is the keeper of the info….Yeah, Sandy was my first thought. Kinda coincidental how significant Clinton data disappears…like letters from ROTC files, for those who can recall that far back.
Worried about a legacy, someone is…
As one who has spent much time in the Archives and benefitted immensely from the helpfulness of the staff, I would not immediately conclude that malice is involved. Records get stolen, but it’s much easier to misplace a record than it is to find it again.
Consider the Archives as a giant, physical database. Data elements (records) can be stored efficiently (i.e., wherever there is room) because their locations are recorded in a table.
Suppose you need Records A001 and A002. You fill in a call slip describing them and an archivist checks the inventory list and adds their locations—Record A001 is on, say, Floor 5 West, Shelf C12 and Record A002 is on Shelf H47. A clerk then goes to those locations to pull the records.
If Record A001 was misfiled, it won’t be on Shelf C12 when the clerk gets there—in effect, the database pointer has slipped. Once that happens, finding Record A001 again is either hugely labor intensive or a matter of luck.
The clerk will likely look for Record A001 in nearby physical locations, but that isn’t always much help. If you’re lucky, the record that was supposed to be on Shelf C12 was misfiled to an adjacent shelf—say, C11 or C13, or B12 or D12. If you’re unlucky, a hurried reading of the filing label caused the record to end up twelve stacks over on Shelf O12 instead. Or it was duly filed on Shelf C12, in a different area or on a different floor.
In the late 1980s, I was digging through the reading room copy of a finding aid. I found an entry (under “Subject File HF—Fires and Explosions”) that was precisely the record I needed. Unfortunately, when the archivists consulted their working copy of the finding aid, we discovered a penciled note: “Cannot be located. Nov ’63.” When I checked in 2000, it was still missing.
Time to update the system, bar code everything files, media, locations, link it all to a central database scan the codes at every turn. Think package delivery tracking. Of course the challenge is getting the money and time to touch each document to apply that bar code label.