[quoting Phil Reeves, 20 Sep 95] The comment that the U.S. government now requires that ALL e-mail must be archived is amazing. Does anyone have the source of this directive?
I heard a discussion of this topic on a National Public Radio news program a couple of weeks ago. It may have been "All Things Considered." The way I understand it is that different Departments of the U.S. Federal Government (e.g., Agriculture, Energy, Defense, etc.) are still grappling with how to archive the immense amount of e-mail being generated within these bureaucracies. I also understand that the government as a whole now considers e-mail written by or to Under-Secretaries and above as official communications, and therefore it must be archived for historical purposes. Of course, this business of archiving e-mail sounds much simpler than it is. Many issues remain to be resolved, e.g.,
1. Will historians of the future even be able to "read" the electronic symbol systems used to store this archival data? (I remember flying over the Nazca Lines in Peru, gigantic drawings and lines etched into the desert by an ancient Andean culture. The interpretation of these symbols is still a mystery. Will our ASCII standards be just such a mystery to people of the distant future?)
2. How long will today's optical storage media (e.g., CD-ROMs) physically last?
3. Considering all the encryption methods in use throughout the government, will messages coded today be accessible to the decoding systems of tomorrow?
4. How will e-mail supposedly written by a person in the government be authenticated?
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