The acting director of the National Archives and Records Administration will not appear tomorrow before a House subcommittee to explain the possible theft of a hard drive with one terabyte's worth of sensitive data from the Clinton administration, according to congressional staffers. Lawmakers instead will receive regular updates from the NARA inspector general's office as they continue their investigation.
Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee learned yesterday that the hard drive went missing from the National Archives facility in College Park, Md. sometime between last October and March of this year.
NARA says that no original records have been lost. NARA has the original tapes and a backup copy of the hard drive.
NARA is still unsure what exactly was on the drive, but in a statement Issa said it contains national security information, more than 100,000 social security numbers, contact information for various Clinton administration officials, Secret Service and White House operating procedures, event logs, social gathering logs and political records. Whatever the information, there's plenty of it, since one terabyte of data is the equivalent of millions of books.
The hard drive was moved from a “secure” storage area to a workspace while NARA staff worked to convert the information for archival purposes, according to Issa's statement. At least 100 staffers and janitors, visitors and interns had access to the area, located near bathrooms.
You can read more at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2009/05/clinton-era_data_missing.html?hpid=moreheadlines.
