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."

Comments

Re: Do as I say not as I do

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that they aren't interested, rather they understood it's pointless. Humanity has reached adulthood and let go of childish dreams like "rights". There are no such things. There are "privileges" and they are expensive.

To quote Elliot Spitzer

[knorthern knight]

> "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."

Reminds me of an Elliot Spitzer quote...

"Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod.
And never put anything in an e-mail."

He should also have mentioned never using prostitutes so expensive, that paying them triggers "money-laundering-detection" and gets the feds to investigate you. But that's another story.