"Is IT management at the White House as incomprehensibly unprofessional as it seems -- or is a pretense of cluelessness being used to divert questions of disclosure?"

We started this investigation asking the same question Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Henry Waxman asked: where have all the emails gone? They were, of course, referring to emails that might incriminate the Bush Administration in the Democrats' investigation into the firing of eight United States Attorneys.

However, after five months of very in-depth research, we've come to the conclusion that the missing email messages are the least of our concerns. After completion of our in-depth multi-issue analysis, we determined that White House email use can be summed up with five key concerns:

• Email has always been an issue with presidents since email existed
• The Hatch Act is encouraging poor email security, routing mail through the open Internet, and creating potential national security risks
• There is no acceptable archiving methodology in use
• An unnecessary email system migration occurred at the worst possible time
• There appears to be poor management of portable technology (people are losing their toys)

Email priorities
Despite Congress' desire to have something with which to beat up the White House, when it comes to email use in the White House, we've determined that operational priorities should be in this order:

• National security is more important than archiving
• Archiving is more important than disclosure
• Disclosure is important for an informed populace
• An informed populace can sometimes be counter to national security

Let's look at each of these in turn.

National security is more important than archiving
As we've seen through some of our scenarios, some really bad things can happen as a result of poor email security and continuity. Even though the intent is that taxpayer money not fund political activity -- and that incumbents don't have the benefit of government services in running their campaigns -- it's very clear that even the most benign-seeming email message, falling into enemy hands, could cause severe damage.