What Poindexter didn't realize was that a number of White House career civil service employees were onto this game. One such civil servant, Patrick M. McGovern, a Lieutenant Colonel, told his staff to set aside copies of the backup tapes. FBI agents soon commissioned data dumps for the backup tapes, the email messages were made public during the Tower Commission hearings, and some very juicy White House email was being read by Americans in the mid-1980s.

On April 7, 1990, John Marlan Poindexter was convicted on multiple felony counts on for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury, defrauding the government, and the alteration and destruction of evidence pertaining to the Iran-Contra Affair.

Poindexter never did serve any jail time because the convictions were later overturned on a technicality.

Strangely enough, in 2003 Poindexter wound up back in government service for the Bush II administration as Director of the DARPA IAO (Defense Advanced Projects Agency Information Awareness Office), an agency funded to develop "total information awareness" technologies that could lead to mass-surveillance systems.

So the guy who was convicted on multiple felony counts for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury, defrauding the government, and the alteration and destruction of evidence pertaining to the Iran-Contra Affair (and wrote a PC BBS program) was now in charge of "total information awareness".

Yep, the guy who did his best to avoid being watched in his actions with Iran-Contra was now developing the mother of all surveillance systems for the Bush II administration. Go figure.

Keeping Reagan's email records
By the end of the Reagan administration in 1989, most of the Executive Office of the President was online with email and more than seven million email messages resided in White House systems. But the fun doesn't stop with the end of the Reagan administration. In fact, it's the end of the Reagan administration that opens up our next chapter of White House email fun.

See, back then, the White House didn't consider email to be "records" and so, as the Reagan staffers were leaving their offices for the last time, they were getting ready to wholesale destroy all of the email from the eight years of the Reagan White House.

It's always the geeks who get in the way.

A guy named Eddie Becker worked for the National Security Archive of George Washington University. He'd been following the Iran-Contra Affair for his bosses and was curious about what was going to happen to the Reagan-era email records. After doing a little digging, he was shocked to find out that the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) didn't consider email "records".

NARA wasn't going to do nary a thing and, except for those email messages set aside for legal cases, all the rest were scheduled for "disposal" the night before Bush I was to be inaugurated.

Now, here's where it gets particularly juicy. Eddie's bosses decided to make a Freedom of Information Act request for all of the Reagan-era email and sued the government to prevent destruction. Amazingly, this all happened almost immediately. At 5:15pm on January 19, 1989 in U.S. District Court, in front of the honorable (late) Barrington D. Parker, Civil Action No. 89-142 was about to be adjudicated.