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Huckabee's junk heap of secrets Sunday, Jul 22, 2007 By John Brummett Attorney General Dustin McDaniel has found that former Gov. Mike Huckabee didn't violate state law on his way out of office by having his staff's computer hard drives crushed. Of course. There never was any law on that one way or the other. This was not significantly different from shredding paper. It's just more expensive for the taxpayers and a more irritating noise, a metallic crunch in place of a grind or drone or hum. It's a widespread government practice to get sensitive information off computers when you vacate an office. Huckabee, always more paranoid than most, merely wanted to make absolutely, irrevocably sure. Citizens had best hope that state government can protect the information on its computers. Your taxes, your income, your driving record, your Social Security number - they're all there. All Huckabee did was go one more surefire physical step beyond the multistep, military-designed technical erasure that is in wide government use - by Mike Beebe, for example, when he departed the attorney general's office. This always sounded more dramatic or irregular than it was. It turns out that, since Beebe became governor, the state Information Systems Department - state government's central computer services agency - has obliged agency requests to crush hard drives from the state Board of Landscape Architects, the Pharmacy Board, the Public Accountancy Board and the Workforce Education Department. The protocol has been that the Information Systems agency does what agencies want. And if the landscape architects are worried about protecting some supposed trade secret - the textbook ratio of boxwood to monkey grass, perhaps - then they get the same service as the outgoing governor. Information Systems is in the process of trying to make this protocol more formalized and transparent. It's not easy. There are different rules for different kinds of data. The Internal Revenue Service is uncommonly serious, as it well should be, about protecting its information which is also in the custody of states. I asked Claire Bailey, who ran Information Systems for Huckabee and does the same for Beebe, if all that hand-wringing in January about Huckabee's crushing had been overdone. She responded by saying she had liked the comment that morning on the subject in the Little Rock paper by Larry Jegley, the prosecuting attorney in Pulaski County. What Jegley had been quoted as saying was that McDaniel reached the right conclusion that no law was broken. But Jegley also said that Huckabee had handled the matter stupidly in a way inviting suspicion, without accounting or explanation. That is an old story. Huckabee's problem almost always was not corruption, but an ethical blind spot enhanced by tackiness, huffiness, hypersensitivity, combativeness, hyperbole, arrogance, a chip on his shoulder. When told of McDaniel's finding clearing him, Huckabee crowed that he'd only done what he was directed to do and that he expected the same volume level clearing his name as besmirching it earlier. Alas, McDaniel said, Huckabee was "overstating." Huckabee? Really? Finding no violation of law is not the same as a positive endorsement. McDaniel said the former governor couldn't claim he was only doing as directed, when he, in fact, had been the actual governor, thus the one responsible for doing the directing. What happened was that a high-ranking official in Information Systems, via Huckabee's placement, was Gary Underwood. He had formerly worked as a media guru for Huckabee's gubernatorial office, and, before that, with Huckabee in Texarkana to produce Huckabee's preacher's TV show. Underwood is the one who, in concert with Brenda Turner, another Texarkana pal of Huckabee and the gubernatorial chief of staff, recommended the crushing. Huckabee can't very well paint a passive picture of his role. But, in the end, it's yesterday's stale news. Huckabee's secrets are safely in the same junk heap with those of the landscape architects. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
