In a blistering emergency court order, U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola–who has clearly lost all patience with the current administration–directed the Executive Office of the President to preserve every workstation and mobile device, every hard drive, memory stick, CD and DVD “that may contain emails sent or received” between March 2003 and October 2005–irrespective of the intent with which it was created.

In Facciola’s eyes, not only has the administration failed in its obligation to safeguard all electronic messages, it has willfully ignored a court’s instructions to search a full range of locations for all electronic messages that may be missing. “The records at issue are not paper records that can be stored, but electronically stored information that can be deleted with a keystroke,” Facciola wrote. “Additionally, I have no way of knowing what happens to computers and to hard drives in them when one administration replaces another.”

“I have always begun with the premise that…the e-mails that are said to be missing are the very heart of this lawsuit and there is a profound societal interest in their preservation,” Facciola continued. “They are, after all, the most fundamental and useful contemporary records of the recent history of the President’s office. If Napoleon was right when he said that he did not care who wrote France’s laws if he could write its history, then the importance of preserving the e-mails cannot be exaggerated.”

Indeed.

Groups seeking to preserve the emails at issue here applauded the court order. “There is nothing like a deadline to clarify the issues,” said National Security Archive Director Tom Blanton. “In six days the Bush Executive Office of the President will be gone and without this order, their records may disappear with them. The White House will complain about the last-minute challenge, but this is a records crisis of the White House’s own making.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Happy to Comply With the “Freedom From Releasing Information Act,” Though
• You Know, That Domestic Wiretapping Operation Might Come in Handy Here

And as for the “those-who-would-sacrifice-liberty-for-security- deserve-neither” crowd? Well, perhaps they can find some solace in this comment from Senator Christopher S. Bond, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: “There’s nothing to fear in this bill, unless you have Al Qaeda on your speed dial.”

All depends on who you ask, I guess, because the Electronic Frontier Foundation says there’s actually quite a bit to fear no matter who you have on speed dial.

“It is an immeasurable tragedy that just after its return from the Fourth of July holiday, the Senate has chosen to pass a bill that betrays the spirit of 1776 by radically expanding the president’s spying powers and granting immunity to the companies that colluded in his illegal surveillance program,” said Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “This so-called compromise bill represents a shameful capitulation to the overreaching demands of an imperial president. As Senator Leahy put it in yesterday’s debate, the retroactive immunity provision of the bill upends the scales of justice and makes Congress and the courts handmaidens to the White House’s coverup of its illegal surveillance program.”