COMPUTER TAPES DETAIL BUSH TERM

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 17, 1993                   TAG: 9301170076
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium
COMPUTER TAPES DETAIL BUSH TERM
Imagine being able to search the minds of the White House staff during the most momentous events of the past eight years.
About 4,000 computer tapes from the Reagan and Bush years might give scholars, curious citizens and even prosecutors a handy way to tap into the innermost workings of government, if the tapes survive the transition of power.
The Challenger explosion, the Iran-Contra scandal, the Panama invasion and Desert Storm, not to mention a couple of presidential elections and budget crises galore - those were some of the many events that marched before the nation's eyes since the White House staff started doing business by computer in 1985.
Staffers used computers to draft documents and spreadsheets, send memos and notes to each other, and schedule meetings in the White House and outside.
It's all on the tapes, which were used daily to make backup copies of information in the White House computers.
"The only way to get at the old stuff is saving it in electronic form," said Michael Tarkington, attorney for Public Citizen, an advocacy group that's gone to court to preserve the tapes.
The amount of information saved on the tapes could easily exceed the equivalent of 400 million pages, double-spaced, in formats used by the more modern computer systems. That's something like 100 billion words.
Human beings don't live long enough to deal with that much information easily. One person reading a page a minute would take more than 7,000 years to wade through all those words.
Bush officials say they want a free hand to erase records from the computer system, and deny they need to keep the backup tapes once they've printed the information. They say they want to give the new administration a clean slate.
Public Citizen and a private group that preserves government documents, the National Security Archives, are challenging the Bush administration's right to destroy the data before President-elect Bill Clinton takes office.
A federal judge on Friday told the White House it could erase some information, as long as the data had been saved on tape.
If the information remains available on tape, then computers can be used to search for it.
For example, during the investigation into former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, the Justice Department used computers to search Reagan-era files.
"They wrote a program that looked for files of particular people, looked for files individually, looked for 51 keywords, and spit out a note if there was a match," Tarkington said. "They couldn't possibly have done it if they had just the paper copies."
The tapes also show to whom messages went, whether they were received, and when they were sent. That information is produced by the computer, eliminating human error or deliberate tampering.
Prosecutors are starting to wrestle with the advantages and problems of computerized evidence.
"Let's say I have a warrant to search for evidence of wire transfers from Miami to Panama," said Kenneth F. Noto, deputy chief of narcotics section of the U.S. attorneys office in Miami. "If I can get the electronic data, I may be able to search and find those transactions faster by scanning it."
But when investigators analyze the information, they run into the problem of proving they haven't changed the data.
"If I start altering the original data, I risk tampering with the evidence," Noto said. "If I take the same data and duplicate it on a floppy [computer disk], you would have pretty good defense objections that it wasn't the original evidence."
Even so, some lawyers believe the convenience of computerized evidence far outweighs problems.
"There's an immense advantage in terms of speed," said Judah Best, a Washington attorney.
The Bush-Reagan tapes present particular problems because of the way the system worked. All of the files, old and new, were saved on tape daily, so a single document could appear on many tapes covering weeks and even years, Public Citizen's Tarkington said.
"It's going to take a lot of effort," Tarkington said.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB