Can you imagine not being able to locate OR destroy classified and sensitive documents? Leaving emails and files tucked away in nooks and crannies of an enormous industrial complex spread over the world with a million employees is no way to do business, much less organize a war. Vital pieces of information can get lost or fall into the wrong hands. Legacy data can be kept...forever. E-mail is never captured and left up to end-users to keep as records (as they see fit). Retention policies are not enforced by any tool, but are trusted to end-users.
This system basically lends itself to failure at the hands of each soldier. How can anyone see this as being logical to our national security? Well apparently the Navy does.
This is why we need H.R. 1387 - the Electronic Message Preservation Act - which would force government bodies to take their information governance into the 21st century. It is now up to a vote in the Senate, and I'm telling you to walk...no, run to your senator's office. It's our nation, our information, let's protect it.
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Also check out Stephen A. Arnold's post in his Beyond Search blog which explores a recent TREC study on enterprise-wide search. They key take-away here is that companies (and the government!) cannot solely depend on custodian-based search when litigation or investigation arises.
When investigations in the military can take years, like the heart-breaking case of Pat Tillman which has taken over 2 years, it is vital to be able to keep your electronic ducks in a row. Yet, the government and many corporations do not find a need to do so.
Basically, to do a thorough investigation someone might have to look through an entire corpse of enterprise data (or at least very large and relevant sets). Is that really a surprise?
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