Where Have All the [Whitehouse] Emails Gone?
Reviewed by Robert Pritchett
Author: David
Gewirtz
http://www.zatz.com/
http://www.emailsgone.com
Released: November 2, 2007
Pages: 236
$20 USD
ISBN-10: 0945266200
ISBN-13: 978-0945266204
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Strengths: Discusses “White House” Email systems. Offers 6 recommendations.
Weaknesses: Misses
the “Scary Thriller” Whodunit conclusion. Contains swearing. Doesn’t answer
the question.
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Introduction
“The
White House claimed 5,000,000 emails may be missing. After unprecedented
research, email expert David Gewirtz discovered the problem is about so much
more than missing emails. Unchecked, some really, really bad things could
happen…Learn about technical and
security concerns that blast through political rhetoric and even party
affiliation.”
About the book…
“Freaky National Security Consequences” is what I was
wanting to read about and David Gewirtz does a great job painting some possible
scenarios, but Tom Clancy really doesn’t have a thing to worry about because
David attempts to look a the technology behind the obfuscation and supposed
incompetence behind the scenes over the last few decades since Email was
released as a public tool of communication.
Sorry David, but I expected more than a puff piece promoting
the ZATZ Strategic Analysis Service and repeated print mantras on the book as
not being a Hatchet Job of the Current Administration™ or nearly every chapter
ending with “Tips from the ZATZ Magazines” and subscribe to any of 5 online
magazines.
Heck, if this is how books are made today, I could do that
with macCompanion magazine.
I expected this book to go deeper and explain perhaps the IT
organization inside the White House and even perhaps name names and finger who
the incompetent Email administrators and system upgrade technicians were that
“dumped” Emails off machines. But then again, the US Government does seem to
use “low bid” to get the job done, no matter how dumb the solution may be. I
speak from personal experience working under the jurisdiction of the Dept of
Energy when we were running the largest OS/2 site in the US and servers and
systems were replaced with Microsoft technologies.
And then again, perhaps the underlying strategy continues to
be “job security” for someone. I found “in the interest of National Security”
tagging was mostly done to cover up costly, stupid mistakes and to protect
ca-rears (pun intended).
David does mention every once in a while about the National
Security Council, but I think if anyone really wanted an Email from 5 or 10
years ago, all one needs to really do is ask the NSA and get it from their
super computers. That was not one of the 6 recommendations by David. Nor was
switching platforms and moving to Macs, which is what I personally would have
done for enterprise-level instead of moving from IBM’s business-grade secure
and backed-up Lotus system to the wimpy not-ready-for-real-business Microsoft
Outlook Email system, which is what was done in the White House.
Somebody has a lot of “splainin’ to do”, but sadly, David
was not able to find them and get to the bottom of this issue. Granted, he was
able to find a person known as “Deep Mail”, but I think David spent way too
much time chasing the rabbit in the Alice in Wonderland and Karl Rove’s missing
Blackberrys, SMARTech and GWB43.com.
I suspect that if David had been able to publish the missing
pieces and tied up the loose threads in this book, that perhaps he would be
found in a ditch somewhere.
A Disservice
Frankly, I found the book to have too much white space in
it, both literally and figuratively. Perhaps there was some Intelligence
Service editing that occurred. David double-spaced, large-typed the book and
bloated it from pamphlet size to book size. And yes, it does look like a first
attempt at hard-copy print by screen-scraping online info. And yes, this is his
first book.
I also think he did a disservice to this case by constantly and
repeatedly ad-nauseum referring to his own online magazines covering Domino,
WebSphere, Outlook and his other magazine publications.
Each chapter repeatedly ends with “Go to emailgone.com” for
the resource list.
The Web is the Book
Okay, I have promoted and lauded books that had lots of
links in them tied to a dedicated website that was value-added to the printed
version. I think David balanced the beam too far to the site. In this case, the
printed version is nothing more than as a tool to push us to the website,
because the site is where the missing images, graphics, and original
documentation not printed in the book are located as an archive, so when the
next Administration takes office, the documents will still be available to the
public. I would have published those in an Addendum in the book.
Instead, David publishes 4 Appendices with “Letters from
Deep Mail” a promo piece for InBoxer with an interview with Roger Matus as a
solution for Email archiving and retrieval (and for the Windows environment
there are quite a few other “solutions” as well), lessons learned for companies
so they don’t make the same mistakes as the White House and another interview,
this time with Marie Patterson with her solution from ASX-One for records
management and compliance.
Conclusion
David wrote;
“One final thought. Many books
offer "companion sites" that are accessible only to purchasers of the
book they accompany. I decided to make our companion online resources available
to everyone. This subject is so important that I felt I should put the
supporting research out for public review rather than hide it away just for
those who bought the book. Even so, it will make much more sense if you do read the book.”
Yes, that may be true. My suggestion is that you read the
book in front of your computer to get the gist. This is a snapshot in time and
may well be totally irrelevant in about 5 more years, but then again, if any of
the worst-case scenarios kick in, then David will be lauded for common-sense
sleuthing and he can say; “ I told you so”.
I hope that David’s formal recommendations are accepted,
which boil down to one IT team being responsible for Email administration and
chasing down “lost” communications devices and amending the Hatch Act to
include secured communications with Email included, political or not. By the
way, where is the Secret Service in all of this anyway?
And perhaps David Gewirtz can do some investigative
journalism and get his long list of unanswered questions truthfully answered.
How fitting that he printed the laundry list of those questions in “Chapter
13”.
Recommendation
I didn’t care for the cussing, the repeated self-promotion,
the book format (bloated white space) and lack of resolutions to serious
problems. David’s Windows-based centricity shows, because that is his meat and
potatoes. Hey, if Macs are good enough for the Marines and Army, why are they
not good enough solutions for the White House?
The last I checked, the NSA answered to the President of the
US and if anybody should be handling the ebb and flow of information from the
White House, they should be handling it with their experts instead of the Email
admin being handled through off-site 3rd-party services. That is
just an accident waiting to happen. Oh wait…
