Today the National Security Archives at George Washington University (not to be confused with my friends at the NSA) announced that they have filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court requiring the Executive Office of the President to recover and restore some five million mysteriously missing e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005.

Again, hoping to steer this blog and its readers' comments away from political commentary, I'd like to take this moment to ask what would YOU do if you were the I.T. administrator asked to recover these missing messages? Certainly there is a vacuum of information: as outsiders we don't know if the messages were caught on backup tapes and then later deleted or if they were never archived in the first place. But let's not let the lack of facts ruin a perfectly good round of "what if"!

Removing it from the public sector, imagine you worked at MortgageCorp and that several thousand e-mail messages were deleted from the server under your control. Now that the sub-prime lending market is in a tailspin, consumers start to fling class action lawsuits at MortgageCorp. How do you deal with the recovery of messages that, if recovered, would certainly do considerable harm to your employer and that--precisely because of this--the person who performed the deletion was probably quite crafty in covering their tracks. Would you immediately call in forensics experts? or duck the issue and tell the boss "they vanished--I can't get them back. Now it's general counsel's problem."