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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."
Illegally capture all the communication of the general public, while evading the lawful requirement to preserve their own.
Typical.
Rather, it's all those uneducated and functionally illiterate VALUABLE EMPLOYEES who keep on failing basic grammar, spelling, even formatting of a simple reply that produces horrible emails. If they were any good you could see at a glance if they contained anything possibly useful later.
If you put a little effort into writing the thing you don't need "chains" of top-posted crap nobody wants to read to figure out what's going on. But it does take that little bit of effort to write something readable. Then there's the whole culture of producing verbal diarrhea so endemic in bureaucracies that isn't helping things.
No wonder the "digital natives" (who are anything but, they just grew up bonking buttons but that didn't get them free understanding of how the buttons work!) flee to alternatives like facebook, twitter, whatsapp... that aren't improvements because the verbal diarrhea gets even less readable and more fragmented, both in the streams-of-unconciousness sense and in the now-smeared-out-over-multiple-services sense.
It seems really bad that this sneaky three month retention time would cause a decade of email history to all but disappear. But realistically the content-to-volume ratio is so low that it's hard to see how it could be anything but a blessing in disguise. It still needs to go though, along with the rest of the incompetencies.
Mission accomplished.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
tangential thread - how many emails do you get in a day and how long do you keep them?
I usually get about 50 emails, half of which I need to engage on, and half of which are just FYIs. I usually delete emails on my first pass if I know I'll never need them. But once the emails get "below the fold" they're not going to be deleted. I have email history going back 6+ years.
it's all keyword searchable, of course. I like it that way.
> "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.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I never delete anything. I can go back to 2005'ish. Storage is cheap.
I work a quarter of century already. I do not keep (in mailbox and local folders) more than 3-4 years of filtered correspondence. There is no reason to go back for project issues. Private mail is different as I have some acquaintances that I have contact with every 2-3 years. I keep the mails to keep memory of those people both nice and evil because after a while memories get blurred.
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.
If only Downing Street workers weren't so underfunded and cuts and stuff then they wouldn't need to hide correspondence from FOIA. They need more funding to prevent them from engaging in suspect activity.
More funding. That will fix it.
Why yes, I said so, didn't I? Are you functionally illiterate that you need to ask the obvious? Are you a "digital native"?
The complaint is that "people don't know what to preserve" so the point is exactly that there's nothing in there worth preserving anyway. Fix that, and it's not a problem to preserve the few emails that matter. The rest ideally will have ceased to exist entirely and therefore don't need saving. Of course, the policy is silly and archiving should be done. Nonetheless, this situation could just as well serve as a wake-up call to stop wasting so much time on useless emails.
Of course, that won't happen: Writing unreadable verbiage is inherent in the institute of bureaucrazy. But that doesn't mean we should perpetuate the thing.
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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.
I work at a US subsidiary of a UK company. We have a similar email policy, except we can't save email locally. The function has been disabled, and the user privileges are locked down. The reason given was to keep email server backup costs down.
This is why I strictly SnapChat all my correspondence... and nude selfies. Ok, they're generally one in the same.
I've also heard of government officials using free services like Hotmail to bypass the FOIs
You can't delete something that is being sought as evidence for trial. You can delete something if policy says that record gets deleted as a matter of course after a period of days. The entire purpose is to prevent something from being discovered for trial (large organizations are constantly being sued and unless you have active discovery for a particular record it is okay to delete as a matter of routine business policy).
This basic legal guidance is used to limit the records retention of just about any government or corporate institution you can think of. Why is this being posted as news or some kind of conspiracy?
How does this work with backups? I have trouble believing that they flush their backups after three months. In which case an FOI request ought to require them to pull the files from backup. Which ought to mean that they've only massively increased the cost of complying with the requests.
Anyway, if you use email seriously, it becomes an important part of your files on projects, etc.. I regularly references emails that are a couple of years old. If people can't rely on email for long-term storage, then they will print stuff out and file it - so the information will still be available.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The UK government could learn a thing or two from Hillary Clinton.
Just keep everything on your personal server. Then pick and choose what you want to disclose.
It's amazing that a country with:
- the most CCTV camera coverage in the world
- laws to imprison people if they don't give up their passwords (RIPA act)
- British politicians and spy masters railing against encryption
; all touting "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" would want to destroy their emails.. I wonder why...
I still have a mail file or two that go back to the mid 00's. For a while I was using Emacs VM as my mail reader. It still has the best threading and thread handling options of any mail reader I've ever used, and I'm still considering going back to it. Paired up with the MIT remembrance agent, you could be typing out an E-Mail and it would remind you of a similar problem you had months earlier. You could also index your source tree in with it, so if you were discussing something going on in code, it would start popping up lines in source files as possibly matching. Especially if you comment as much as the project I was on at the time did. It was awesome in all the ways that gmail and outlook aren't.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Going back to 2003, an outlook pst file for every year except 2008 which I am strangely missing.
Zero sympathy for the self inflicted hardships in day to day business from me.
You guys wanted to make an end run around the law?
You deserve every iota of pain you get from that. =p
I suppose that simply being honest and ethical so that you don't have to fear FOIA requests is just too difficult?
Do you have ESP?
It's been shown time and time again that e-mails are being used as evidence chains that can either make a case or destroy it. In the non-government world, I advise my customers that they should have a written policy about e-mail retention that's based upon any regulatory requirements that they may be subject to and strictly follow it. Why? mainly because of 1) EDiscovery and 2) Consistent policy enforcement to demonstrating that the policy was followed and 3) spurious litigation avoidance. Not having e-mails / documents when retention policy is mandated can make you guilty just as much as having them, worse yet documents that are aged beyond that retention policy demonstrate that your organization was lax in following its own procedures; all of which can twist the actual truth and give litigants bountiful access to your bank account or put you in jail.
In the case of governments or government organizations, these rules don't apply and let's not forget that in the US the federal government does have laws on the book that are there to protect that information. Whether or not Secretaries of State follow it is another matter.
In the UK the three month rule was horribly short-sighted then again, if you're trying to preserve meeting minutes or other documentation, that shouldn't be in your e-mail system anyway; it's just a sad artifact that everybody wants to dump their business and personal lives into e-mail, governments included. This episode should also show how fucking incompetent elected leaders are in general No, they're not smarter than you, they're not better leaders nor do they necessarily have vision beyond what you're own eyes can see. They just had enough support and momentum to get elected into office, therefore you should have done your research before voting for the twits in the first place. Once they're in office, good or bad you're usually fucked.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
... then these folks should get the gas chamber. Either that or emptying you browser history is not a crime.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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As a Civil Servant our department deals with the problem of FOIA and DPA by never using an individual's/sensitive topic by name, and only referring to people by initials or something similar. Searches for information on that topic then don't return anything.
There is always an encouragement to put as little as possible in writing, although that's rarely achievable.
I think they should institute a lifespan of 53 minutes for all correspondence. Rotating backups every 3 hours, tapes burned daily. Anyone using cc: or bcc: will be reprimanded with a brickbat swung to meet the skull's posterior face. Printers will only use lemon juice for ink. No secrets here, nothing to see!
Let me take a contrarian view for a sec. If this is real, then I can not imagine a better possible situation for a government. Instead of unstructured correspondance, it could force people to commit REAL things to structured records (and eventaully a "service oriented government") and the "not real" things that previously just existed in email simply vanish. The short-term FOIA implications may be a problem, but over the long term this could be a HUGE boon to not only the functioning of government, but also to public oversight.
First of all many private companies do the same, in fact have a much more draconian systems, whereby emails older than a week are deleted. This is for liability reasons. Everyone likes to compare private industry to government and why can't government be more like private industry, so there you go, you get your wish.
Second speaking from experience any manager with an IQ larger than a bedbug knows not to send anything sensitive or contentious via email because some sort of record is kept. Instead, it is done with a series of phone calls or face to face meetings. Problem solved, and issue averted. Anytime I get a phone call this is what I expect, something to be discussed or directed without generating an email record. Typically to avoid implication and to avoid responsibility. I've personally had the exact situation where I was being told by management not to disclose information being requested. My response was to send that to me in an email, as it is my ass on the line at that point, and I want a record that I was told to do so from my superiors. Management is perfectly willing to let someone else be the fall guy/scape goat and throw some employee under the bus for their shenanigans. Not to long ago there were several Canadian political examples, where a junior staffer, or intern were fired for inappropriate actions that they supposedly did of their own accord, and my first thought was, yeah right, i'm sure...