Let's make sure you noticed the "oh boy" part of her statement:

...nor does it have any process in place for tracking or monitoring the use of such media

Bottom line: Portable data storage devices, available in sizes up to a terabyte, are completely unaccounted for at the White House. Moreover, they have no process in place for managing what happens to all that portable data.

A few minutes of paranoid thought will help you see the terrifying implications of thousands of White House employees -- any of whom might have portable hard drives or thumb drives -- and no tracking or management of these devices at all.

Not scared yet? OK, try this. You can buy a very typical 2GB thumb drive (about the size of a car key) for about $10 from Newegg.com (one of my favorite vendors). That USB Flash Drive can hold 73,142 copies of this article. And this is a long article.

Still can't picture just how bad this is? The King James Bible is about 1,120 pages, or about 2.5MB. You could fit 819 King James Bibles on a thumb drive that you carry in your pocket.

The White House doesn't have any process in place for tracking or monitoring the use of such media. How many important American secrets could a White House employee carry in something that costs ten bucks and can store 819 King James Bibles?

And, in case I haven't freaked you out enough on this topic, consider that a 16GB USB Flash drive costs about $100 and is still the size of a car key. Now our troublesome EOP employee can carry 6,552 King James Bibles (or the equivalent in American secrets) in his or her pocket.

Recommendation: Put a process in place today.

Active data copied over
It was challenging, as I read the White House declaration, to get a true understanding of what was implied in certain statements. For example, Payton states:

As part of a refresh, OCIO will make a copy of the current user's active data on the current computer hard drive to move to the new computer hard drive. This may include the data contained in a profiles folder. In addition, if a user saved .PST files in their profile, those .PST files should be copied over

So here, we're forced to ask what she means by "active data"? Does that mean only documents used in the last month, six months, a year? I know that my personal My Documents folder has stuff going back probably 15 years. I've got the text of books I've written, old contracts, designs, and so forth. I'd be quite upset if that data was destroyed. Since CIO Payton didn't define what constitutes "active data", we really can't determine what was saved from old hard drives to new ones.

Also, Payton specifically defines profile in a footnote:

A Microsoft Windows user "profile" describes the Windows configuration for a specific user, including the user's environment and preference settings. The user profile contains those settings and configuration options specific to the user, such as installed applications, desktop icons, and color options.