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British Government Instituted 3-Month Deletion Policy, Apparently To Evade FOIA
An anonymous reader writes: In late 2004, weeks before Tony Blair's Freedom of Information (FOI) act first came into force, Downing Street adopted a policy of automatically deleting emails more than three months old (paywalled). The IT decision has resulted in a "dysfunctional" system according to former cabinet officials, with Downing Street workers struggling to agree on the details of meetings in the absence of a correspondence chain. It is still possible to preserve an email by dragging it to local storage, but the relevance of mails may not be apparent at the time that the worker must make the decision to do so. Former special adviser to Nick Clegg Sean Kemp said: "Some people delete their emails on an almost daily basis, others just try to avoid putting anything potentially interesting in an email in the first place."
You are making the mistake of assuming that the government is a consistent whole.
There is a fairly high chance that the people who are spying on your email are also spying on those in whitehall who are deleting their email.
Heh.. we've had customers calling in about some stuff they bought ten years ago and wondering if we can help them out with replacement parts. That's when we check the old mailbox to see who we used to manufacture the stuff and ask them if they have any leftover parts that never got used.
Dead projects tend to not be completely dead.
The sad thing was there was a much better system in place, though it may never have made the transition to electronic stuff. There was a public records office, where anything official was put on file. After a fixed number of years it went into the public domain. If you have something that was sensitive you could request that it be sealed for 30 years, or 50, or 100 (some of the WW1 documents had a 100-year seal, but that was really rare). This meant that nothing strategic should ought get out prematurely, but in the end we got to read our history. People will always find a way of hiding or shredding public documents that they don't want. This just made hiding easier and less suspicious than to shredding. We got to see the real minutes of meetings, and not sanitized versions for Freedom of Information Act viewing.
We ought to bring the Public Records Office and the 20-year rule back. People will always find a way of hiding or shredding public documents that they don't want: this just made hiding easier than to shredding.
That Blair fellow is still around, I believe.