Really it come down to the fact that 90% of people are completely ignorant when it comes to technology. All and I mean ALL the excuses for lost data is complete bs. Redundancy is one of the primary reasons for the cloud.
Give any patriotic SA or DBA the ball, and I guarantee in 80+% of the cases theyd have the files, and for the rest theyd give you the name of the perpetrators who deleted anything. (In a few hoursnot days or weeks either!)
The difference is in control. Transferring files to a CIA site means eliminates NSA control. It doesnt matter if its cloud or on premise. The authority is now the CIA. When the CIA lies to Congress; its a mutual agreement. Neither one wants the truth; they just want some good tv, or they may want you to get very, very bored. State and CIA are acting against the President and countrys interest and have been since Ive been alive. Many in Congress share the same world view and run cover for all of them. Anyone who thinks you can tell the players by (R) or (D) is seriously naive.
Whats interesting from my perspective is that what people worry about is administrative control. Thats where everyone agrees who in charge and how things are done procedurally. With the CIA, the means they all agree to the same story.
What such control doesn’t address is technical control. That is where the skeletons are buried. That is where the real information lies, but no one every walks down the hall to see what is happpening in those cold hallways filled with whirring fans and flashing lights. Those flashing liights that indicate another backup, another mirror, another file sever or storage array just received the last batch of encrypted, serialized data that is destined to be archived in accordance with the contract.
Right...on...the...money.
Is it possible the disparity between the two databases has something more to do with the “unmasking” and less to do with auditing?