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Boston City Government Discovers Email Retention
An anonymous reader writes "The Boston Globe, covering a battle to unseat the 16-year incumbent mayor, has found out that the city has no email retention policy. A city official who receives hundreds of emails a day was found to have only 18 emails in his mailbox. The city has enabled journaling on its Exchange server in response. The Globe also notes that they had to curtail requests for emails under the Open Records law because for each mailbox, 'City officials estimated they would charge $5,000 for six months worth of email.'"
Yes, I know where I am, but if you'd RTFA:
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
In the recent debate he claimed there was no evidence he was corrupt. I guess this show's it's 'cause he deletes most of it...
When confronted with the fact that he sold city property to two of his friends for really cheap, he said that it was "only two out of hundreds of deals". I guess it's OK to break the law if you only do it a couple percent of the time?
Best part? He's going to win again.
Seems to me that the bigger the city, the more stupid the voters are...
Actually, it was probably a bunch of PianoCat videos, 9/11 tribute chain letters and Obama-llama hate mail.
[End Of Line]
The real problem is is that law makers (and enforcement) often think themselves above the law. They made/enforced it, so can change/ignore it. Worse, the punishments for such violations is almost always minor. "Whaddyou gonna doo 'bout it?"
A simple answer is to charge felony "obstruction of justice", and have the felony provisions remove from office. This is highly unlikely to happen for reasons of "good buddy" through to not causing excessive fear in the bureaucracy.
Massachusetts has a remarkably good record of producing top-notch crooks in our political ecosystem. It is not surprising that they evolved far enough to realize that email is not their friend in court.
/dev/null; export $EMAIL_STORAGE
setenv $EMAIL_STORAGE =
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Its not just politicians. Where I used to work, a disgruntled IT person forwarded emails between an "escort" and a company director to all 6000 company employees. jpg attachments and all.
Everyone raise their equivalent electronic hands who thinks the City of Boston is going to increase manning for the IT staff to accommodate this increase in workload, scope, and new technology implementation?
No hands. Sucks to be an IT admin for the City of Boston about now.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
In the county government (not in Massachusetts) where I work, there is no standard policy. A draft policy was circulated not long ago that would mandate a standard retention policy of 90 days. Some agencies have different policies by law (child support must hold onto e-mail for I think five years, and the district attorney and public defender's offices must keep case-related e-mail in perpetuity), but the 90-day cap was allegedly intended to balance discovery and e-mail storage requirements. Part of the policy suggested that PSTs, forwarding to other e-mail accounts, and saving messages locally should be disabled; the response from one agency was that they should prepare to start spending more on printers, because a lot of material was going to end up in hard copy, especially for those of us working on projects that can take as much as three years to complete. AFAICT, no IT staff were consulted before the draft was written.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Working in archives as a historian in the past five years, I can tell you that email retention is just the tip of the iceburg. Many, many times I spoke with officials who told me that all of the "old" files I needed were "on the website." I was looking for files and forms produced in the 1990s and 2000s. Very frequently, the files were not "on the website" where they should have been. They were overwritten, or lost in a website redesign, or they were never online to begin with. Sometimes, I could find the file I wanted by using the Internet Archive, but more often, the files were simply lost.
I think the period between 1995 and 2015 will be remembered as a dark age for recordkeeping of all kinds.
Since 1930, every mayor of Boston has been a Democrat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_Boston
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
That is the weirdest mix of sh and csh syntax I've ever seen.
You know, if it were just prostitution and extramarital affairs, I wouldn't care if their emails were deleted. Those types of personal vices are rather inconsequential to being a good civil servant. I know that the Republicans saw it as a huge victory when Clinton was impeached basically for having an extramarital affair (and don't tell me that it was for perjury; it was his personal life that was on trial), but, in the grand scheme of things, personal infidelity is probably not the biggest "crime" a public official can commit. I'd choose a president who respects civil liberties & human rights and acts in the interest of the public, but happens to be a philander, over a president who is completely devoted to his wife, but is willing to step on civil liberties, support torture, or sell out the American public to corporate interests. Likewise, I'm much less concerned about a president who lies about his private life than one who lies about justifications for war.
So, no, I'm not particularly concerned about politicians hiding emails to their girlfriends/boyfriends. We should be so lucky if that's all they were hiding. It's more the potential bribes, nepotism/cronyism, and backroom deals that I'm worried about. Those are the type of things that actually conflict with good governance—in other words, government corruption.
It's more than that, corrupt politicians in the US have pretty much always gotten more done than ones doing things legally. Never has the US government been so responsive to the citizenry than during the period where the boss system was in force. It was beyond a doubt incredibly corrupt, but at least they got you a job if you didn't have one, sent a doctor if you weren't well and actually considered the people's well being, you just had to show up on election day, hell they'd even drive you there and provide free drinks.
Obviously, it's horribly corrupt and has serious issues, but they did get a lot done, and try getting the government to give a damn about you now. Not going to happen as long as the Republicans are trying their hardest to stop living wages and health care and the Democrats are so horribly incompetent.
You know, if it were just prostitution and extramarital affairs, I wouldn't care if their emails were deleted. Those types of personal vices are rather inconsequential to being a good civil servant.
It is a question of trust. If they will not keep their word to a person they have pledged their life to, and who is (or should be) the closest to them in the world, then they may be lying to me too...
That said, I don't really trust a damn one of them...
Seems to me that the bigger the city, the more stupid the voters are...
You obviously don't understand how machine politics works. Voters are not dumb:
1. individuals allied with the incumbent receive substantial benefit and thus vote for the incumbent
2. those who are not allied are systematically disenfranchised
It's not a matter of dumb/smart, it's a matter of organized/unorganized. Those who are organized (the incumbent) wield significant power to ensure that those without power have difficulty organizing (and thus threatening their power).
I fail to see why it's relevant that an individual end user had only 18 emails when he receives hundreds daily. I would love to have this individual in my organization, less chance of corrupt Outlook .pst files and less to backup from the workstation. Retention policies should have nothing whatsoever to do with what recipients retain in their local mail stores. Retention, compliance, and backup policies are enforced at the server.
Oh, so that's what my scripts won't run.
Yeah, I was feeling a little nostalgic for csh, which is ironic, considering I hardly ever used it and couldn't remember much syntax. I and wasn't about to refresh my memory for the sake of making a funny, so I fudged it.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
it's not about IT staff it's about what the business and lawyers need.. sorry. At my company we had a 90 day retention for email inboxes and after that it had to be filed in "retention" folders with the purpose marked or in the case of sales, they probably printed the materials out and put it in a physical file folder for contract purposes.
The 90 day camp is cute and common because people think by deleting everything they're spared discovery/FIOA requests.. but that's very not true. If a project takes 3 years then the entire correspondence must be kept for the 3 years, plus the historical period after the project is done. Electronic cleanup doesn't exempt you from discovery or FIOA requests for information you are obligated to keep. Filing stuff in paper means that a clever lawyer can compel the court to shut you down while they dig through your file cabinets for information..and it automatically puts you in contempt-of-court should a judge order 91 day old emails produced (like what's going with Apple vs. Pystar)
That is the weirdest mix of English and Englicsh syntax I've ever seen.
That's where Bush and Cheney won in spades because they kept their dealings as "executive rights" so nobody could get them in court to answer for things like Gitmo...they simply refused the summons and fired any DoJ officers that pushed them. They also used "executive privilege" to get out of several other related cases for them and their buddies. It was hilarious when a Republican President had to deal with Democrat controlled Congress "after Clinton" and the Democrats went out of their way to prove they weren't nasty, even when they had the President dead to rights for ACTUAL impeachment obstructing justice in the spying case and gitmo. BushCo benefited from the "but Clinton" defense in spades the last 2 years.
Obama really needs to issue an executive order to lock them (and their families, aids, hairdressers, etc) up until we get answers to some of those questions... after all the President has that right now and there's empty space in Gitmo soon for new political prisoners!
No one ever said that a firefighter had to be smart. All that is required is that he is ballsy, understands how fires work, how to control fires, and is able and willing to obey orders.
I speak as a graduate of the U.S. Navy's finest fire fighting training. ;^)
With all due respect, Navy firefighters have it easy. All you need to put out the fire is a corkscrew long enough to bore through the hull.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Yeah... haven't you heard? Laws are for the "little people", not for the all-knowing, all-caring Government.
Since when has any politician actually pledge themselves to you or the people.
It's a matter of importance. If they can't keep a pledge, then why do you expect them to remain truthful to you or the people or the office in which they hold? We have already seen people like Clinton violate the Constitution and the war powers act with the Balkan occupation.
You do not need proof to understand that less of a thread binds them to a job compared to a spouse they gave vows to.