Federal Government employment records are all in paper records stored in a former limestone mine that looks like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The Limestone mine vital records storage was built in the 1950s and the manual procedures have not been updated for about 70 years.
The Iron Mountain’s underground facility, located 220 feet below ground in a former limestone mine, is used to store various types of vital records, including federal government employment records. This facility offers unmatched security and optimal preservation conditions for these critical documents. The storage of federal government employment records at the Iron Mountain underground facility includes:
Controlled environment: The facility maintains carefully regulated temperature and humidity conditions to ensure the longevity of paper records.
Advanced security: The underground location provides natural protection against disasters, and the facility employs state-of-the-art security measures, including 24/7 monitoring.
Organized storage: Records are likely stored in boxes or on shelves, with metadata and tracking systems to manage the vast amount of information
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) processes federal employee retirement paperwork in an underground facility in Pennsylvania. This facility, which is indeed a former limestone mine, handles the retirement claims manually. The process is labor-intensive and time-consuming, which naturally limits the number of retirements that can be processed each month
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The good news? Paper records are hard to delete. Bureaucrats can’t just hit a button to wipe out thousands of files that documented their misdeeds.
The bad news? Good luck finding something in all those files…
How are they are hard to delete ? Shred them, bury them, burn them.
Destroying physical evidence is in general, more time consuming and leaves more traces than just erasing records. It is quite funny that you quote shredding, burying and burning as we managed to recover important data from the gestapo archive in berlin (that was shredded), Pompeii scrolls (that were carbonized) and the deadsea scrolls that were buried (although in this last case it was not an attempt to destroy dem but to protect them so it does not count). Obviously we lost tons of documents through shredding, burying, and burning, but it is not 100% reliable.
A single 18TB drive with 2MB per page images would hold 18 million pages of scans (single sided). If they were packed hugely efficiently like a fresh ream of A4 paper (500 pages at 0.127mm per page approx 63.5mm) that would be 36,000 reams of paper or a stack that is 22.9 meters that would weigh 81.7 tonnes. That is just a single 18TB drive. 2 lorries of paper or a small drive.
The only reason all the paper exists is the lack of a cost effective scanning and indexing method (removing humans) which will occur within the next 10 years with all the various robots and AI…at the moment it looks cool in an old way. It will change.
Yes, but you need the technology to recover that information. That’s the problem. Our technology is the problem, because it’s utterly, unrobust. It doesn’t “translate” effectively across technologies that exist in my lifetime. Want to say something that lasts? Carve it in stone. Worked for thousands of years. Some person in the future who finds that stone you wrote on may have no clue WHAT you’re saying, but know what? They will know your saying SOMETHING. Sometimes that’s the best any of us can do.
Not to influence, but just be noticed. To let someone know, “I’m here”, and also appreciate the fact your here too. Perhaps thousands of years after I turned to dust. Yup, carving stuff on stone, sticks around.
Come on, digital data conversion is so, so, basic. Even the very first RLE encoding of images is still known and easy to code even if you don’t have anything off the shelf. Asside from that, what do you think AI agents are going to be busy at in the comming decades.
I have tapes from 1980 that I could still decode.
Moving between technologies, hang on a second while I type copy source://* destination://
Sure, but in terms of long-term storage, there is a tradeoff between data density and data survival, if your data are collected in multiple galleries underground, even a partial collapse of the mine will destroy only a small portion of them while if everything is on a hard drive that gets lost/misplaced/damaged, you lose everything.
Furthermore, we, as hairless monkeys, perceive some inherent value from the size of things (this is why we make monuments… monumental): an archive in a big building (or a big collection of books) will be kept in higher regard by people through the centuries compared to a drawer full of SD cards, even if the amount of data in the sd cards is more.
Iron Mountain is a commercial archiving site and used widely for paper as well as ‘offline data’. Lots of corporations are still required to archive paper copies by regulations or for historically non-digitized records. That said, of course the govt should digitize its processes. But that’s a 20 year effort probably – best case.
I am just shocked by the ways modern bureaucrats find ways to justify their work and try to keep it the way it is. From communist bureaucratic ideology attacking Musk, twisting truth to their end. How they tend to dominate the comments on some forums,…
Not to mention communist tricks – importing economic migrants to Europe. Why? Migrants are mostly non Christian, they will vote for the left. Indoctrination with homosexual propaganda will weaken concept of family, Christianity and left spectrum gets more votes.
But their indoctrination is crumbling, that is why they are so loud. Even if the left has control of majority of media, attack the right all the time, they still lost. People still voted for Trump.
We must know, that in communist- extreme left regimes there are lots of state employees. The working class and private sector work to support gov employees. Lots of them have good jobs, easy ones on the back of private sector. So it is in their interest to keep it as it is and stop any reform in a way they can. Write comments of forums to smear Musk,….
And the so called “activists” are the people paid by communistic left wing, paid by to promote their communistic ideology so they may keep control of population and good paying jobs. They are just modern propagandists. So communist leaning governments channel money into ” non-governmental organisations”. They pay them and in return for money they spread left, communist propaganda, indoctrinate people. The left has benefits, because they indoctrinate people to elect them and keep power, the NGOs “activists” have benefits, because they are paid nicely.
I already replied once, but my original comment got lost.
I don’t know if your comment is just trolling, but I think you have some deeply rooted misconceptions.
In every aspect of our world, there are competitive and noncompetitive people, from the guy who is happy to work office/workshop/factory hours at WorldMostCompetitiveCompany Inc. to the guy who wants to become the general director of the Federal Bureau of Bureaucracy. Sooner or later, competitive people will step on each other’s toes as they try to climb the career ladder and use the tools at their disposal to move forward.
Those who claim that there are conspiracies (flat earth, anti-vax, a communist cabal, does not make a real difference) do so because they tend to have a poor understanding of the process they have conspiracy theories about. They think that NASA, NIH, academia, political parties, and government agencies act as monolithic objects without internal competition.
If you are in a room and nine people say A (for example, that the earth is round), but you know that it is B (like the earth is really flat) and you can prove it by demonstrating that it solves a particular problem (for example saving money on airplanes routes) you got yourself ahead of your competition for the next round of promotions.
The truth is that despite all the bull…t, the government is not particularly more inefficient (or efficient) than any corporation because the population makeup of competitive and non-competitive people is more or less the same.
Even Tesla, that here on NBF is praised as the company of eternal growth and perpetual innovation, has inherent and unavoidable inefficiencies: even if you continue to do R&D at a certain point of your product cycle, you stop innovating that product because it would require retooling the factory and you prefer to wait and introduce the changes in the next model. You are being efficient in production but inherently inefficient in managing your competitive advantage in R&D at that specific moment. The more you wait to introduce the changes, the more efficient you will be in production, but you are leaving time for competition to catch up (so your R&D work becomes less efficient).
People believe in conspiracy theories because they are ignorant (either in general or on a specific subject), so they despise the experts who tell them they are wrong (because the experts are the most qualified people to tell them they are wrong), and since all the experts tell them the same thing (that they are wrong) all the experts must be part of some sort of conspiracy and act as one mind. The truth is that most of the experts compete, and most processes (like in science) are self-correcting because your esteemed colleagues are the most qualified to take over your job once they prove you wrong.
Regards
“We have TOP MEN working on it….top men”…..indeed.
I mean in the age of SSDs stop doing that nonsense. Few rooms with different locations with SSDs to have spare data, backups and have good security on them. Digitalize and optimize the process no need for 700 people doing that. You can get USB to work with Windows 95, so 30 years back. Its just data.
i am really shocked with what ways, excuses they will come out to smear Musk or resist change.
Humans will remain (biologically speaking) for hundreds of thousands of years in the future. Therefore, any analogic format will still be readable until it completely crumbles. We already lost data to change in a proprietary format (see one of my comments to someone below on this page), the requirement for proprietary hardware that is discontinued, not maintained, and not produced anymore. You either pay people to physically maintain the paper in the mountain or to restore the hardware physically and periodically convert it to a new format every few decades.
Agree with everything you’ve said. That said another option is laser engraved sapphire discs that can be read like microfilm with any common microscope. No power needed for data preservation, discs can last millions of years, no realistic risk of the technology to read the discs becoming obsolete.
Yes, and indeed, archivists which are the experts on storage matters, tend to promote research and development in the storage and archviation fields. Obviously, if you shut down everything, you lose the archives, you lose the archivists, and the push for archviation developement.
We already lost stored paper with fires, degradation over time.
So instead of finding needles in haystick to justify 700 people working with paper in giant mountain you store data in more modern way and save tons of money and help the society to progress.
You know humans in thousands of years in the future will most likely not be more primitive than now to need mountains of paper stored to preserve data. They will be able to read data or if necessary to design how to read it from old data storage ways.
And whole Wikipedia has about 22 GB of compressed data. If you need fail saves you can safe it in more different ways, but not in paper.
Sure, and indeed, parchment is better than paper for storage, as it burns a bit less.
Again, it is not about finding a needle in the haystack, is about having the haystack and, maybe, use it to retrieve the DNA of an extinct kind of hay that might help you in the future because it is the most valuable item for an alien civilization visiting us… Jokes apart, no electronic format has been tested for storage for more than what? like 70 years, we do not know how they decay or how their content reacts to rare solar events (or cosmic rays….). We know (because we have empirical evidence) that paper survives for centuries (if not millennia). Everything digitized has format deprecation, support deterioration and obsolescence issues, everything cloud-based also has data stability issues as databases can be hacked and without offline physical (and stable) copies, if enough time has elapsed, it might very difficult to revert to an original digital version (after all if we are cutting costs, why should we bother to maintaining multiple redundant digital records, is such a waste of taxpayer money)
We were still sending ‘life of plant’ records to iron mountain when I was working at Pennsylvania Power and Light in the early 00s. Occasionally, I pull documents off of fiche at my current employer.
” (in a controlled environment) grants that the documents will remain accessible for hundreds of years: we can still retrieve information from charred Pompeii scrolls and Egyptian papyrus, and we managed to reconstruct the Gestapo shredded archives in Berlin. Digitalization allows easy access to COPIES, but digital standards change, and maintaining retro-compatibility is not always possible”
Do you really think employment records need to be accessible for hundreds of years?
Maintaining retro compatibility is really lousy argument. If they would really need it, society with current or advanced tech will figure something out or use spare old ones.
Data are not helpful until you find a way to use them, and not all collections of data are used for their original purpose: church records are used to rebuild family trees, and accurate family trees help build family histories of those who migrated to US. The interest in family history promoted the development of companies that sold genetic profiling kits, and widespread genetic profiling now helps criminal investigations, all because popes were interested in souls records. I am not saying this is always the case, but it can be. Keeping the record is not the difficult or expensive part, building the infrastructure that makes that record useful is the expensive stuff, and throwing the record away does not reduce the cost of the infrastructure you already built. You just lose the information you already paid to generate and track.
I do not know if employment records need to be tracked for hundreds of years, but by trade I have a Ph.D: in molecular biology with a specialization in cancer and ageing: there are human syndromes that have what is called “anticipation” which means that in the first generation expressing the symptoms, those symptoms manifest at a certain age, et’s say 60 years of age, in the following generation they appear at 40, in the next one (usually the last because they appear before reproductive age) at 20 years of age. If your grandfather got exposed to some chemicals that mutated his DNA and your grandkids could die of pulmonary fibrosis 120 years later, I guess you would like to have all the available data on the matter.
To me the bottom line is you do not necessarily know what you are going to do with the data, but if you lose them, you lose all their possible uses.
Second, do not assume that retro compatibility of non-analogic devices is so easy to maintain, we as society have already lost data due to changes in proprietary standards, some example are:
-A huge BBC archive saved on a proprietary laserdisc format
-Some us census data that were saved on modern magnetic tapes in the 60s that required specific proprietary hardware
-I am ond enough to remember Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, which was discontinued in 2009 and most of its DRM-potected content is lost.
-Not necessarily super relevant as “data” but all the proprietary web services and online video games that get discontinued and cause permanent loss of the user data.
Regards.
If you need to find needles in a haystick to justify 700 people in giant mountain working in legacy way you will find them. But that wont help society to progress a lot and keep expenses down, so money will be spent otherwise.
Compressed Wikipedia is about 24 GB.
And concerning you rationalizations. If data is digitalized so basically it will be way easier to work with. Easier to understand family trees, genetics and make tons of good use of data, which would not be possible if using paper or it would take too long.
So about finding needles in haystack to justify danger of data being lost and keep using paper:
We know many ways to store data, not just SSD,… There can be many ways to store it, make copies and if one fails, we have others, which will work nicely. So no need for 700 working the old legacy way and having tons of paper inside a mountain.
Even if we transfer data each 10 years to new media it is still more rational, cheaper, modern way to do, than continuing using 700 people inside a giant mountain to push paper.
I do not need to justify anything.
Archivists make a living managing archives in the same way as firefighters make a living in preventing fires, both groups advocate for funding and more manpower, both have a “vested interest” in doing their job correctly and, probably, are the best people to ask what are the issues in their jobs, what are the solutions, the long term plans and investments required and so on.
You do not build a multi-decade infrastructure like the archive mentioned in the post without making your case in hundreds of funding committees.
While I advocate for the digitalization of every document for everyday use, I see the enormous limits of permanent digital records (impermanence, standard deprecation, support degradation, lack of retro compatibility, therefore, stratification of standards, instability of digital data due to hacking, radiation and so on, energy and computation requirements…) , AND I AM NOT AN ARCHIVIST, I do not know the guidelines, the laws or the requirements in place, I do not know, why those guidelines got developed, but being human I know human nature: we develop safety protocols only after accidents, and we develop guidelines only after something went wrong. Losing the Great Grandma census file might not be a big issue, but losing documents that secured a criminal’s conviction or, much worse, data on which land was owned in the 1800s by that arsenic mine and was used as a dumpster might be more problematic.
Furthermore, as I tried (poorly) to explain before, data archiviation is ALWAYS the least expensive step in the process.
-First you need to spend money to develop an understanding of the data you need. For example, many empires existed throughout history, but the Romans, the Persians, and the Chinese were the few who developed a sophisticated bureaucracy that allowed them to understand the usefulness of standardized collection of census information.
-Once you spend money to develop local bureaucracy centers (like city halls) you spend more money to collect the information,
-then you spend more money to study the data you collected (like employing an educated workforce to count the tables in a census to calculate taxation for a Roman province)
-Then you spend more money to use the information, finally providing the direct value that information was collected for in the first place (you send around tax officers to collect taxes, others that promote tax exemptions, and so on…)
-At this point, the information you collected has exhausted its intended value; you can throw it away or save it for later use (for example, if a new tax is introduced if you need to calculate military service quota or the amount of investment for a new road system).
People who do not understand the process might think this is inefficient since the information has exhausted its intended purpose, and there is no point in keeping it! We as societies discovered pretty early that it is cheaper to store stuff for later, even if we do not know when we will reuse that information and for what, rather than rebuild the record every time because it seems smarter and more efficient in the short term.
I agree, but there is one argument for paper. Nobody can hack paper records and alter them afterwards. Is there a non zero risk that that would happen in the next few hundred years?
You just need a streak of 3-4 Obamas in a row and they could decide to erase any trace of some ”indefensible” practise/moral/wording.
This article is probably meant to be an example of how outdated and wasteful the government is, but is missing the point: this is how the ORIGINAL documents are stored for safekeeping. Analogi storage of paper documents (in a controlled environment) grants that the documents will remain accessible for hundreds of years: we can still retrieve information from charred Pompeii scrolls and Egyptian papyrus, and we managed to reconstruct the Gestapo shredded archives in Berlin. Digitalization allows easy access to COPIES, but digital standards change, and maintaining retro-compatibility is not always possible (for example, if it was a commercial closed standard with encryption and then the company goes bankrupt or discontinues the product as it is no longer safe.
I think it is interesting to discuss HOW things are done, but it is also important to discuss WHY they are done in a certain way. Assuming that everyone is stupid/wasteful/outdated is not always the correct position.
I agree with the idea that paper records were the safest and most effective way for actually storing retrievable records for the past 70 years as one software company with a proprietary software product in the past would make all the records unusable in the event of a bankruptcy.
But today, computer technology has finally matured beyond the level of issues that software obsolescence is a major headache. Three example of computer software and hardware immaturity as well as personnel issues for anyone who remembers:
In the 1980’s, there was the 16-bit to 32-bit software conversion. The problems many faced in the PC world and the Digital Equipment Corporation world are legendary. Those problems were much more manageable in the conversion from 32-bit to 64-bit computing later.
In the early 1970’s, many mid-sized companies waited on automating their accounting software. Sometimes they did so because computer hardware was so expensive. The cost of automating accounting records was not worth the benefit (better decisions) for them at that time. Now there is QuickBooks.
In the 1960’s there was the comedy movie “How to success at business, without really trying” and others. The dozens of clerical staff in that movie who worked at the rows upon rows of desks are now 90% handled with phone voice mail.
Computer software maturity to maintain retro-compatibility is now manageable. It’s not perfect, but it is now very manageable when looking at the massive cost of paper.
With OCR and AI, today’s software is also ten billion times faster and cheaper than paper. Banks today can perform absolute magic to decipher my chicken scratch to determine the amount of money on my very few hand-written paper checks. Today, OCR and AI can certainly be taught to translate smudged, small-font, type-written pages, so let’s begin the process.
P.S. I”m so old I remember the 1960’s.
I’m so old, I remember Moses, though I never met him personally. Of course, you make some very good points, I just disagree with some of your conclusions. Yes paper is expensive, and not very robust, but the need to store data (actually information) in some permanent unalterable form, is IMO, very important. Our technology is rabidly changing. We must not base our information society on what is volatile, fragile, and hackable.
My point is simple. Our information must not be dependent on our technology, not working, or having a “hiccup” at anyone moment. We must assume our technology WILL have that problem, at some point, and deal with it. It will. So, we design technologies to embed information in ways that are both robust, but require no technology to access them. Like writing on stone?