The Connell story still interests me. And I wonder exactly what he did, there. Because in 2004, I was contracting at a DHHS agency. Then-Director Tommy Thompson demanded that I cancel my vacation plans in order to fake his having placed all agencies under a single domain as he had promised. The promise had been made months earlier, but then he did nothing about it. It was a big joke around the office then, and today I’m embarrassed to say I complied.
So, what did Connell really do? Seeing what I saw, I wouldn’t even bet it was a real domain hosting any actual email servers. Was there a back-up stashed somewhere? Most likely. That’s the standard practice - although, where I was, they were still using giant tapes and not sending it off-site for extended periods, as they claimed. FOIA requests made later went to exactly 1 lower-level staffer who laboriously ran the required searches. But it wasn’t necessary to actually have that separate domain available because the whole thing was a programmatic fake-out in the first place…hmmmm.
