White House Email Research Resources

Notes from the author

Throughout Where Have All The Emails Gone?, I provided Web links to the original documentation and source material used in the investigation.

Creating the book presented an interesting challenge. Images that can be huge online have to fit onto a printed page. You can’t scroll or click a page in a book. In that sense, print is a pretty primitive medium.

00002290-c-i-smI solved that by providing the full, original images and source materials on this companion site. In fact, I was able to go further, and provide links to full video feeds, complete transcripts and other helpful information.

To make things a bit easier for you, all of the links in the book are available in this resource section. That way, you won’t have to type in any long URLs from the pages of the book.

Web links are notoriously subject to something called “link rot”. We’ve all experienced it. Click a link and instead of going to the page you want, you get an error message. This often happens with links on government sites, especially when administrations change. Information that’s available now on WhiteHouse.gov will likely be unreachable once the next President takes office.

To make sure all of our source material remains available, I’ve made electronic copies of all the relevant federal Web pages and linked to them from this resources page. While all federal records are in the public domain, the content of Web pages operated by private individuals and companies is not. I’ve avoided capturing full copies of some of the privately owned Web pages for just this reason. We’ll just have to hope those pages stay online.

I’ve also captured extensive screen shots of search results and my forensics process and those extended screen images are also available on this page. Please note that when you click an image, you’ll be taken to a page containing just that image. When you’re done examining the image, just click your browser’s Back button.

Finally, I’ve also preserved the video feed for each of the White House Press Briefings referenced in the book. You can watch the actual press briefings in a variety of formats, provided by the Moving Images library of the Internet Archive.

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.

These are fascinating and disturbing artifacts. Please take your time exploring them.

– David

Post Bush Administration Update: My expectation of “link rot” certainly turned out to be true. Once the Obama administration came into office, virtually nothing of the Bush Administration’sWhiteHouse.gov site remained, including items that could have been important forensic resources. That’s why I made copies (see below). I’ve left the original URLs in the resource section below, even though most of them report “page not found”. It’s important to know where these documents resided before they were removed by the changing administration, and those “rotted” links are some of our only remaining clues.

Update – Bush Whitehouse.gov archives: The Bush administration whitehouse.gov site has been archived. While we haven’t had a chance to go through the archive site to verify completeness, we applaud the archivists who put this together. Visit http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/.

Where Have All The Emails Gone? research resources

From the At-a-Glance section:

From the Table of Contents:

From Chapter 2, A historical perspective:

From Chapter 3, Can email messages just disappear?

From Chapter 4, Follow the domains:

From Chapter 5, Who runs GWB43.com?

From Chapter 6, A detour into mob journalism:

  • Click to see Figure 6-1. Whois TRESPASSERS-W.net?
  • Click to see Figure 6-2. Karl’s porking up at Porker’s.
  • Click to see Figure 6-3. Mr. Rove is apparently holding a Coptix report.
  • Click to see Figure 6-4. There be Sleestaks here.
  • Click to see Figure 6-5. There’s no shadow on the report.
  • Read the Corrente rant.
  • Read Wonkette’s take on the story.
  • Read the Coptix explanation in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

From Chapter 7, The nightmare scenario:

From Chapter 8, An archiving plan only FEMA could love:

From Chapter 9, Migrating from Notes to Outlook:

From Chapter 10, Why did Karl Rove keep losing his BlackBerry?

From Chapter 11, Understanding the root causes:

  • Watch the YouTube video demonstrating a 60-second voting machine hack.
  • Since YouTube videos have a tendency to disappear, you can also find voting machine hacks by simply typing “voting machine hack” into the YouTube search field.

From Chapter 12, My formal recommendations:

From Appendix A, Letters from “Deep Mail”:

From Appendix B, An interview with Roger Matus on email archiving and retrieval:

From Appendix C, What your company can learn from the White House
email problem:

  • There were no links or resources listed in this appendix.

From Appendix D, An interview with Marie Patterson on email storage and retrieval:

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