Cafferty: White House Illegally Deleted Over TEN MILLION e-mails

Cafferty: A government watchdog group now says more than 10 million White House emails are missing. Citizens for the Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) described this massive hole in White House email records last April. At that time they thought the number was 5 million - Now they say it is more than 10 million emails. In one of the great understatements of this here Christmas season, the group says that this revised estimate - quote - highlights that this is a very serious and systematic problem at the White House - unquote. Both CREW and another private group called the National Security archive are suing the Bush administration to try to get information about all these missing emails. The White House email problems first came to light during special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity.

It’s worth noting what a critical time period these missing emails represent. Why it’s from March of 2003 to October 2005. That would include the start of the Iraq War right up through the aftermath of Katrina. As the director of one of these groups put it: It doesn’t get more historically valuable than that. Given the way the White House handled both the war and Katrina, it’s also quite convenient that suddenly this mountain of stuff is missing. By the way it’s against the law that these emails be destroyed or lost. They are supposed to be saved. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 mandates White House communications be preserved. Another law broken — Another example of nobody doing a damn thing about it.

{via crooksandliars}

IE7 phishing bug nets concern

Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 7.0 that might lend itself towards the creation of more convincing phishing attacks.

The cross-site scripting (XSS) bug creates a means to replace local page displaying a "Navigation to the webpage was canceled" message with a "Refresh the page" link. "This might be useful in a phishing attack, but it does sound rather complex and requires the user to jump through the hoops," the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Centre notes

The flaw is perhaps more noteworthy for been among the first to affect IE 7 rather than the immediate threat it poses. Microsoft is investigating reports of the bug.

Meanwhile SANS has added the flaw to its list of unpatched Microsoft security vulnerabilities, as a secondary concern. The most pressing flaw remains a Word vulnerability that permits remote code execution, discovered in February.