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Labor Department To Destroy H-1B Records
Presto Vivace writes H-1B records that are critical to research and take up a small amount of storage are set for deletion. "In a notice posted last week, the U.S. Department of Labor said that records used for labor certification, whether in paper or electronic, 'are temporary records and subject to destruction' after five years, under a new policy. There was no explanation for the change, and it is perplexing to researchers. The records under threat are called Labor Condition Applications (LCA), which identify the H-1B employer, worksite, the prevailing wage, and the wage paid to the worker. The cost of storage can't be an issue for the government's $80 billion IT budget: A full year's worth of LCA data is less than 1GB."
Once H1-Bs get used to working for peanuts to fulfill their "American dream", the next step is give them US citizenship so government can say "see, US workers are willing to work for less," then use the lowest common denminator to set wages.
This is because the H1B visa problem is rife with abuse, ranging from fraud, most common, to basic slavery. If you don't believe the slavery port realize that a lot of people working on H1B visa's in the US have signed very abusive contracts with brokers in their home countries. If they quit and leave they'll be in a heap of legal and financial trouble when they get back.
The tech companies know this, the Labor department knows this, Destroying records s a way to hopefully prevent any future legal action on the part of H1B applicants in the future. Similar thing happened with Migrant workers from Mexico, taxes and fees were taken out, then records were destroyed to make it impossible for workers to sue later or collect benefits promised.
Simple
1: Just encrypt it thoroughly,
2: name it "Archive of leaked celeb pics" or something.
3: upload to pirate bay
4:????
5: free indefinite storage, fast retrieval
That's more than some small countries national budgets..
How is that even even possible?
You could buy 80 million $1000 computers for that amount!
Sorry for not being completely OT, but that's insane..
... everything. The cover ups are wall to wall.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Not the H-1Bennetts! How will we solve our problems without them?!
The answer to this is easy: plausible deniability. If the records are only temporary, and get expunged after 5 years, then the US government suddenly have an out for bad press over a long history of abuses of that H1B program that have gone unchecked. Instead of changing policy, fixing the program, and investigating historical abuses by various (mostly tech) companies, it is easier to rewrite histrory.
The answer will now be: 'Oh... we can't possibly investigate company X for H1B visa abuses. The records were temporary and no longer exist. Since the records no longer exist, we cannot possibly comment. To the best of our knowledge, the H1B program works.'
I'll spring the $100 for a rasberry pi and 8gb stick of memory to store it in.
The $100 solution could host the files and store a couple decades worth of data too.
The article doesn't seem to point out the obvious explanation, ie that H1B applications contain personal data (of the type Slashdotters are usually passionate about protecting), and that it is good practice not to keep such information hanging around once it has served its primary purpose. There are presumably solutions to the research concerns, such as aggregating the data before it is deleted or collecting the specific data necessary before the records are deleted.
Virtually serving coffee
Never mind. We can just ask Slashdot to make a DUPLICATE copy
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/10/29/1244255/skilled-foreign-workers-treated-as-indentured-servants
How many times will you be running this story, this week?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
You may think 5 years is too short, but you do need some expiration date for non-critical data. Without an expiration date, whoever manages the data has to go into CYA mode and keep it forever. That gets expensive - it's not the cost of raw storage, it's the cost of ensuring that everything is kept as systems change.
Back in my day, that was called the backspace key.
Is the data public information? if so, why not just make it publicly available, and whoever cares can download it. If the data is valuable, it will be mirrored and survive. if not, it won't.
...except of course the private data of people they intercepted illegaly.
The Department of Defense Pork
The Department of Homeland Pork
The Department of Corporate Lawlessness
The Department of Corporate Welfare
Why is Snark Required?
some group like Anon should acquire and distribute the entire archive of h1b record data.....no more secrets about importing slave labor
Can't these be requested under the Freedom of Information Act? If the government does not want to store them, I am sure there are many private organizations that will.
er, i mean lawyers! Sue this basTURDs to the wall. And remove them from any government post, for all time!
Every single government form and department has a record retention policy of some kind. This is a labor certification record held by the department of labor. This doesn't tell you anything except that the person had the H1B and was OK to work at their original hire date, its a work verification not a visa data repository. The actual visa application and so-on would be with US CIS or US CBP. I'm honestly surprised they held it for even 5 years, since most forms of this nature have a retention of only 2-4 years.
Deleting those records is admitting you had them in the first place.
It's sad when the obvious reasons aren't even addressed, and laymen have to fill in the rest of the article with common sense. What has slashdot become, FOX-dot?
The goal of an effective document retention policy is to identify documents that can be destroyed and destroy them as soon as it is permissible to do so. Old documents are a court case with a broad discovery order away from becoming a big cost. It's very cheap to say "the retention policy says these documents are only kept five years and we physically destroy them shortly after this date".
I know of a county government in New York that kept their backups tapes from their mail server as a method of retention. There was some political trouble with a mayor (who used the county's email system) and a contractor - suspicion of giving no-bid contracts or something like that. A request came to the county's doorstep for all of the email correspondence between the two for the four years the mayor was in office. The county had to buy a spare server and restore each monthly tape to it and manually pick out the email messages. It cost them $190,000. It would have been better for them to either have an effective archiving plan, or to have deleted them. Keeping stuff "just in case" is a horrible idea.
Of course, if these documents are being singled out for aggressive purging and other documents are not, then there may be some funny business going on.
Normally I laud government attempts to limit the amount of information they collect on individuals. But I would imagine that the reason for this change is far less about protecting the rights of individuals and far more about protecting corporations.
I am a citizen of the United States of America. I realize what is going on
But how many of my fellow Americans know?
And more importantly, how many of them give a damn?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... the most transparent administration in history.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streissand_effect
I'm *sure* the NSA, FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security have backups of every single "deleted" record.
Why don't they use law enforcement meta-data deletion policy, the five year timer doesn't start until after a citizen files a FOIA request.
If the the government isn't doing anything wrong, what do they have to hide?
All those poor companies that profited from this H1B effort and the US government that helped for various reasons to make it more profitable for those poor companies, could be at risk.
Especially once you consider they were on the backside they going after unions and organizers as politicians with a position.
Think of the Children and the kittens that would be at risk if we keep this 1G of data. We need that disk space for my 7G landmark EQ beta install!
These are public records (according to TFA). Some research organization (university) can make periodic requests for the data, put it on line and store it indefinitely. They (or some third parties) could even create a few reports, to give the public an idea of which companies are making H-1B visa requests.
Have gnu, will travel.
presumably these are public records, because it's government and all. What's to stop anybody who is crying about "deletion of evidence" from submitting a FOIA request for all of the records that are set to be deleted, and then maintaining their own database?
How can the Americans allow their government to turn so rogue, so fast ?
We voted an incompetent, populist demagogue to be President. Then a sycophantic press covered for his failures & malfeasance for his entire first term, and called anyone who dared criticize the president 'racist.'
The republic can survive Obama. He is just one man. The republic cannot long survive a citizenry that would vote for Obama. He set his sights out to fundamentally change the United States, and he's doing that- but it's change for the worse. Hopefully our fellow citizens can learn from the experience.
\Cue angry responses from an unrepentant Obama voters and 'flame-bait' downmods.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Keeping 1G of records on disk virtually free. Checking each and every record periodically for the 5 year limit costs money. It is all about deniability.
We are basking in the glory of a transparent government. Thanks, Obama!
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Why bother deleting anything when you can just tell congress the hard drives crashed?
Privacy?
According to the government, we shouldn't be afraid of them snooping on us, because only criminals try to cover their tracks.
Critical to what type of research? What H-1B records are critical to what type of research?
Do you know how much the NSA spends on developing zero day attacks so they can keep America safe? Getting backdoors installed in every application or piece of computer hardware sold in the US is expensive.
To support those computers you need:
-- Network Infrastructure
-- Storage
-- Boundary Management
-- Circuit costs
-- Support Personnel
-- Software
-- Maintenance (Smartnet, Software Assurance, etc.)
-- etc. etc. etc.
Yeah 80 billion sounds plausible.
Title says it all
What fundamental change? Extending the Bush tax rates? Passing Heritage Care? More International Interventionism? I know the rhetoric of 'omg socialist' sounds good but we've had socialism in this country since FDR.
Once H1-Bs get used to working for peanuts to fulfill their "American dream".
Not all H-1Bs work for peanuts... There are also H-1Bs from Canada and various wealthy countries in Europe. I'm one of those.
:)
Either way, after looking at my LCA (I just dug it up) I can tell you that only interesting thing specified there is the salary range. Which can be very inaccurate, I currently make well above the salary range specified in my LCA.
Note, as someone who have submitted everything from bank statements, criminal records, occupation and addresses of family, and an amazing load of other private documents to the US in order to get a visa; I'm very happy that the US doesn't plan to store this information indefinitely.
(Not that any of my documents are remotely interesting, but in general privacy needs to be respected)
Keep in mind that this so called "evidence" is also sensitive and private documents from hardworking residents and former residents (now citizens, green card holders or foreign residents). It's not something you can just hand over to researchers. Besides considering the level of institutional incompetence perpetuated in most American companies and agencies it's probably all stored on paper
Sue the government and put a litigation hold on the documents. They are clearly trying to hide something.
You know your government is overreaching when they collect and keep your telephone records forever, but have to destroy lists of H1-B visas after five years "to save storage space".
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
. . . those of us who aren't arithmetically-challenged have noticed that this official fourth jobless recovery (although really the fifth or sixth, and we are now told that all the jobs lost have been created again, at least in numerical quantity), that with each and every one of those four downturns, meltdowns, etc., that exactly one-fifth of the US workforce was laid off --- now, to have precisely the same portion of the workforce laid off each and every effing time is just a little bit too mind boggling to be taken as accidental --- throw into the equation all those jobs now being offshored, or created offshore, and more and more foreign visa scab workers imported by the corporations (remember, please, that the NYC Times Square attempted car bomber had been sponsored to this country from Pakistan, by a hedge fund based in Connecticut).
Can't be. This is the most transparent administration ever! The news said so!
I agree with others that industry lobbyists, unhappy with some research that uses H-1B records, may be behind the deletion of records. For example, last June I posted a subset of the Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) online at http://econdataus.com/lcainfo.... . The first large table there shows some of the most questionable data in applications from 2001 to 2013. The green values are values from applications that were certified that appear to be incorrect. As you can see, this data occurred from 2006 through 2008 and included records with company names like "Large Company" and addresses like "address123". But as stated at http://www.foreignlaborcert.do... , "The OFLC will no longer respond to inquiries to confirm priority dates, search for records in response to FOIA requests, or provide information for requests for duplicate certifications for permanent labor certification applications with a final determination issued in 2008 or earlier, in keeping with the OFLC records schedule". Hence, the source record for these years are no longer available, even via FOIA requests. Coincidence?
In any case, it seems that most of the processing of LCAs is automated and that some of the applicants take advantage of this. As you can see from the link above, all requests for over 1000 positions were denied but there were many requests for just under 1000 positions that were certified. That suggests that there is a known cutoff at 1000. Then, there were a number of certified applications that did not appear to contain enough information to determine the workplace location, a critical piece of information for evaluating the requests. Then, I noticed that nearly every application that proposed to pay a salary significantly below the prevailing wage was denied. However, many that proposed to pay a salary many multiples the prevailing wage, suggesting bad salary data, were certified. For example, a request to pay a product consultant $11.4 million a year and a staff dentist $15.5 million a year were certified! That's despite the fact that they listed the prevailing wages as $84,344 and $136,864, respectively. It appears that someone is just applying a set of filters to the data and "rubber-stamping" everything else.
....would be proud.
Just email them to any random american and the NSA will store it for you.