The following is part 2 a series of X (formally Twitter) articles from Don Lueders
https://twitter.com/DonLueders/status/1985350748536729905
No one at NASA is managing any electronic information in compliance with the law. But don’t take my word for it. Take a listen to what the agency’s records management staff have to say.
With the passage of the
Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014
, the definition of a Federal record was changed to include “
”. This meant that every item of digitally recorded information created or received by an agency must be managed through its entire lifecycle in compliance with the Federal Records Act (FRA), and no electronic information can be destroyed outside of a National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)-approved retention period.
In my five-plus years supporting electronic records management at NASA, I have worked with billions and billions of pieces of digitally recorded information in a staggering range of unique formats. During that entire time, I never saw one item of recorded electronic information managed in compliance with the FRA. Not one single item.
NASA’s electronic records management program isn’t dysfunctional. Nor is it broken. It simply doesn’t exist.
This is something I am capable of proving and I’m willing to testify to under oath. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Instead, let’s hear what some leading members of NASA’s records management program have to say.
The following is a sampling of audio clips taken from recorded Teams meetings in which several senior NASA records management officials candidly admit that the agency has no functioning electronic records management system.
As you listen to this first clip, notice this NASA Center Records Manager says that not only is his Center not managing the lifecycle of their records – they don’t even know where their records are. This is true of records managers across the entire agency.
This NASA records manager says the agency has a process for managing paper records, but nothing for managing electronic records.
This NASA records manager admits that none of her agency’s electronic information is being managed through a National Archives-approved records retention schedule.
This records manager speaks about her past managers encouraging her to destroy agency information indiscriminately, in clear violation of the law.
This NASA Center Records Manager admits that her agency has no real electronic records management program or even a strategy to create one.
Finally, this is a clip from a NASA records management program all-hands meeting from earlier this year. Both of these women have leadership roles on the records management team. Listen as the woman on the left suggests the records management team is like the “cobbler’s children have no shoes”. What she is admitting is that even the NASA records management program does not manage their own electronic records.
Then, when she jokingly says, “It’s not that bad…”, the woman on the right, who is her boss, says “It is that bad. It is.” Then they both have a good laugh.
Every year, NARA requires each government agency to complete an annual self-assessment of their records management program. Every year, NASA gives itself high scores. They are lies. (I will post about this in more detail later in this series.)
NASA does not comply with any Federal records management laws – they only pretend to. The damage this has caused cannot be overstated. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been lost. NASA’s most critically important classified information has been stolen. Information chaos causes unimaginable inefficiencies.
And when the next Space Shuttle-like tragedy occurs (and it will occur – this is space travel, after all), no one will be able to understand why it happened, who was responsible, or how to prevent it from happening again because there will be no reliable records to refer to.
Coming up in Part 3 of this series, I will explain how NASA’s contractors are fully aware of the agency’s records management crimes, how they have actively participated in it, and the shocking lengths they will go to prevent an employee from bringing these crimes to the public’s attention.
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Wow…just WOW.
I’ve seen/had issues with digital world for sometime now. Platforms treat people as individual avatars…two peopke look up the same thing and each get different definitions or one person looks up same thing a year later and the content has changed. The beauty of a paper book or encyclopedia is everyone gets the same info forever…changes come with new editions but old one still exists. Lookout if/when 100% cashless society, high EV penetration and no central bank arrives – you could easily be tracked and locked out of nearly every aspect of freedom.
What do you mean «changed»? We were always at war with Oceania.
It was be design feature if the real records no longer exist you can replace them with new synthetic data that much better fits your narrative 🙂
This is very alarming. Not that they don’t have a records management system, that’s merely alarming.
What’s very alarming is a senior manager informing subordinate that she’s putting something together, didn’t want to force her into something that wouldn’t work for her org, and she’ll send it over in a day or two. This could only come from someone who knows nothing about building a records management system. You don’t put something together like this “in a day or two”. You need qualified consultants who understand both the legal requirements, the technology in use, and the general workflows just to start. Building a system like this from scratch for an org the size of NASA is probably a one to two year effort to just define requirements, let alone evaluate technology options, implement them, and train people to use them. If they’d started in 2014 they could have evolved the system over time, but they didn’t. Two really important points:
It has been my experience that when an organization doesn’t have a records management system, they actually still have all the data. When someone says they don’t even know where the data is stored, that’s a dead give away that they don’t even know that there is a backup system that makes a copy of data “as is” every single day and perhaps more than once a day. First principle of disaster recovery is that you must be able to restore data to its state at any given point in time. A cyber attack that took two years to mature for example requires that you reverse all the changes made by the attacker and that requires having daily backup of all the data. People lose files, by lose I mean delete them and then forget that they deleted them, 5 years later something that wasn’t important turns out to be important and a panic call to IT results in questions like “can you remember the name of the file?” “how long ago roughly?” “what would have been some of the important key words in it?” and presto, a coupe of hours later IT has restored the file. They had it on backup and I’m betting that NASA has all their backups going back decades, they’re probably on tape cartridges stacked up in a closet and no one recalls what those things even are, and probably complete sets at Iron Mountain who has been sending a bill for storing them every month for decades and accounts payable has no idea what its for but they’ve been paying it for 20 years so they just approve it again.
Second, I pray that there will not be another shuttle disaster, but if there is, I’m betting that root cause will be harder to find due to politics than data availability. When the shuttle disaster happened, NASA tried to blame the engineers at Morton-Thiakol. Fortunate for them, the engineers had kept their own personal copies of all electronic communication. They were able to prove that not only were their o-rings designed to spec, they desperately were trying to get the launch cancelled because they knew the rings would fail at the launch temperatures that morning. NASA ignored them, then tried to blame them. This turned into a lesson to engineers all over the world, keep all your records even if your employer doesn’t and even if they do. Those engineers went on a speaking tour to engineering colleges all over the US and Canada (and perhaps other countries too, I don’t know) explaining their experience and how important it is to keep copies of your own communications. I don’t know that the lesson has been passed on since then, but if not then let this be a lesson to every engineer reading this. Keep every email, every text message, every chat message, its the only way you can defend yourself when someone like NASA tries to make you the scapegoat for their own screw ups. Last note, I’m not familiar with the specifics of American data retention laws, but in general, when there is no records management system, the backup systems have records of everything within their retention policy. Orgs too sloppy to implement proper records management usually are too sloppy to have a data retention policy either. In fact I would encourage the author to inquire as to what the data retention policy is. Not having a data retention policy means you have to retain everything forever. Any mass delete of data without a policy leaves behind tracks. No IT manager in their right mind deletes anything without a specific direction to do so from management, otherwise their job could be at risk. Were I a betting man, I’d give odds that NASA has all their data stored on some sort of media somewhere.
MODERATOR – I tried to break this up into sections to make it more readable, there’s some auto-format features that would probably be quite helpful if I knew them by heart, but as an occasional commenter I’m never going to learn the specifics and they keep changing what I’m trying to do. If you shut them off completely most of us are quite capable of breaking up paragraphs and numbering them ourselves.
My experience with root cause analysis is that it is a blame game. If something can be blamed on a single cause, the book can be shut and everyone can now move on. Take, for instance, the O-ring on the space shuttle. That was the failure point, not the root cause. Bureaucratic and administrative incompetence were the root cause, but no one would have been allowed to go there. Without Richard Feynman it all would have just gone away.
We are brothers in this area.
No. It wasn’t a short in the cable that was the root cause. It was power system design that could not tolerate a short that brought the whole system down.
Trigger and root cause are not the same. Patching symptoms is not solving the problem.
Cheers.
Spot on.
I would be amazed if NASA as it is today could push anything new on his scale far enough that a launch disaster would be possible. Their specialization now seems to be copy-pasting and junkets:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160215020246/www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/2/11/celebrating-women-in-science
https://web.archive.org/web/20180923210629/mars.nasa.gov/resources/7705/women-in-science/
(for true appreciation of NASA data, open these links in tabs and compare)
I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff. Are these people being directed to save or destroy trivial stuff the same as say secret stuff? Are the things they are being directed to do reasonable at all levels? Is there a reason there isn’t an established protocol to do the things they aren’t doing?
There is a reason.
It has to be a highly criminal institution to be so extremely effective in avoiding accountability and control.
In 2003 there was a documentary on how the Space Shuttles were serviced between flights. It was shown only one time, on Discovery or History Channel, a month or two before the loss of Columbia.
It showed a lot of the antiquated systems the Shuttle depended on. Records kept in old wooden library card catalogs. Replacement tiles hand carved using manual 3D tracing pantographs from physical templates of every tile on every Shuttle. The ceramic coatings on the tiles were hand dipped like a chocolate covered ice cream cone.
Instead of having laptops with access to an electronic procedure manual, they used huge binders full of paper to tell the workers how to do everything. One part of the documentary showed a crew *failing* to get either of the two special wheel nut torque wrenches to work correctly. They didn’t keep at it until they fixed it. End of shift they stuck a note in the procedure manual for the next shift.
How many times were such notes lost? Putting all that in a computer system would have made it easy for anyone to find notes and alerts from earlier shifts. The people who couldn’t get the nuts torqued could put an action item in then when the next shift logged in, that item could pop up as an alert that it had to be addressed.
How much time every shift was lost flipping through the big binders looking for notes and everything else?
How much time was spent on all the hand work making tiles when they should have all been digitized for CNC carving and a robot made to dip them in the ceramic coatings?
I have been searching for this documentary for 22 years. I didn’t get to see the whole thing. It got “memory holed” after the single showing instead of repeated multiple times like most shows on Discovery and History channels.
Or, you know, a simple journal with problem reports and fix reports. With signatures. One could expect such a thing to be done more often by the parties responsible for work on which someone’s life and limb is staked.
It would also be vastly more useful than half-remembered anecdotal evidence, if anyone wanted to improve the procedures and tried to look for problems in the workflow.
This ain’t brain science, and does not require Microsoft PowerClunk 2000™, either.
The greatest concern I have with digital data records is how easy it is for those wanting to maintain a narrative to falsify its content. The selective use of data immediately to hand in search facilities ensures the actual information and factual information can be side lined as the narrative provider simply presents those records they wish to project their storyline. I use the word storyline for a purpose.
Yesterday here in the UK a story broke regarding the BBC manipulating and splicing parts of a Trump speech at the time of the Jan 6th events which clearly presented what looked like provocative encouragement to march on the Capitol building. It was all false projection, it was digitally spliced. Tump was portrayed as an agent provocateur when he was the exact opposite. He was, a calming feature as evidenced in the original video. The BBC presented a complete digital hatchet piece on the President of the USA and the people at the BBC Panorama production team are still employed by the BBC. The BBC standards committee raised the issue of bias and dangerous false influence at the time, but the program still went out and it went out in Oct last year just prior to the Presidential election! It was a clear attempt to influence the voters in the US in favour of Kamala Harris.
That is how bad it is now in left wing totalitarian controlled media. This story only exists because of a whistle blower at the BBC. See the Daily Telegraph for details.
Digital data is wonderful up until those with malicious intentions control it. This is as serios as it gets but it is getting worse.
Sounds like the makings of a production called “The Forthright Saga”?
“NASA’s most critically important classified information has been stolen.”
Is this the basis for the Chinese space program? Hmmm.
Wow.
I used to admire NASA.
The the climate liars took over.
Now this.
Very sad.
Actually NASA’s Earth Sciences Division conclusions about the earths Climate align with all the other climate research entities in the world. Apparently Deniers don’t like it. Too bad.
climate research, there in lies the problem.
Only those who support he narrative get to call themselves climate research, much like no paper that doesn’t support the climate narrative will ever be published because those who control the narrative won’t permit it.
Utterly worthless claim you make as science runs on reproducible research not popularity or consensus bromides which is the province of politicians.
That’s what happens when you have «leadership roles» and all that rot, instead of the kind of command structure somebody sane (if naive) would expect in an agency like this, or even management of a modest-scale business (as opposed to cancerous cartels, like Disney etc).