–Destroyed Hard Drives a Catch-22
(2 February 2007)
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has been hit with an ethics complaint for destruction of state property; Huckabee had computer hard drives from four servers and 83 PCs destroyed before he left office.
Huckabee spokesperson Alice Stewart says the governor was acting on
"recommendations from the Department of Information Systems (DIS) to destroy the hard drives." Huckabee stated in an email to Computerworld,
"This is not about destroying state property, this is about honoring our obligation to protect the privacy of the thousands of people who had personal data on those hard drives." Arkansas DIS director Claire
Bailey said they "backed up information from the servers but not the
PCs, and gave the backup tapes to Huckabee's former chief-of-staff."
Tampering with public records is a Class D felony in Arkansas. The
Arkansas's attorney general's office "is reviewing the situation to determine whether any laws were broken."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=government&articleId=9010162&taxonomyId=13&intsrc=kc_top
[Editor's Note (Schultz): I am confident that issues such as this one are likely to become increasingly prominent over the next few years.
Destroying sensitive data that could fall into unauthorized hands seems like a "no-brainer," yet legal statutes often require the retention of such information.]
(((Maybe this guy will become President, and we'll see this absurd noncrime crime hashed out in fantastic Whitewater detail, from both sides, for eight years.)))
