They've finally caught on that e-mail is recorded in perpetuity...
...but the Republican party has been caught using off the record communications to plan things for the past couple of years, and that makes the keepers of the archives sit up and take notice. Spokespeople for the White House have stated that thousands of e-mails were lost and cannot be retrieved because they didn't go through the proper channels but instead used unauthorized, unsecured laptop computers and e-mail servers that did not archive messages sent or received, in violation of federal law. Now that Congress is probing the firings of eight federal attorneys and looking for relevant communications, they aren't finding any; in fact, Karl Rove sent about 95% of his e-mail through the unauthorized network, or that's what investigators are saying. So far, forensics efforts haven't produced anything, or if they have they aren't talking. The accusations are very real: The Presidential Records Act of 1978 (44 USC, ß2201-2207) states that communications and documents pertaining to actions of and by the President and Vice-President of the United States of America must be archived and eventually disclosed to the public; it also states that those records are technically the property of the citizens of the United States of America. Communications going up as far as the President and the Vice-President are included in this off-the-records scheme, which is funny because George W. Bush always claimed that he never used e-mail, and even had admins funnel all messages sent to president@whitehouse.gov into the bit bucket.
I have to hand it to them, they used a good strategy for keeping things private - they used third party systems, and ensured that logs were either never kept or destroyed as permanantly as they could manage. There's just one thing with leaving an informational vacuum - when investigators don't find anything at all, they get very suspicious. The hell of it is, the party didn't even try to hide who ran gwb43.com, the domain through which they ran all of their e-mail services. Check out the domain registration information.