A possible theft of a White House computer hard drive from the time of the Bill Clinton Presidency has proved that it’s not only viruses that get the blame for the current lack of digital security.

Light fingered thieves still have a role to play when it comes to computer data theft, although U.S. Government officials are not 100% certain that it’s a theft, saying that it might have been misplaced instead.

Nonetheless, the FBI fear the worse and suspect that the hard drive, which contains a terabyte of data, was stolen from a National Archives record centre.

The hard drive includes thousands, if not millions of individual pieces of data computerised at the time of the Clinton administration. This, say the authorities, includes members of the then Vice President Al Gore’s family, security information and personal information on White House workers and visitors.

Red-faced officials from The National Archives and Records Administration said that they took the loss very seriously indeed, but stressed that they were not certain how much information had been stolen, or how revealing it was. They said that all the effected parties, including the Clintons and the Homeland Security Department, had been notified of the loss.

The officials were perplexed as to how such a thing could have happened at the highly secure archive in Maryland, although they admitted that the hard drive had been signed out of the storage area and that it had been taken to a work space where it was accessible by a number of staff and archivists.

For once, viruses are not to blame.

Guest Article by Neil Camp

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