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

Do as I say not as I do

[Sean]

Illegally capture all the communication of the general public, while evading the lawful requirement to preserve their own.

Typical.

Re:Do as I say not as I do

[Phillip2]

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.

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.

Re:Do as I say not as I do

[antiperimetaparalogo]

evading the lawful requirement to preserve their own.

Typical.

As explained in the BBC documentary "Yes, (Prime) Minister" by Sir Humphrey Appleby: "some correspondence lost in the floods of 1967..." (now you may ask "Was 1967 a particularly bad winter?" - "No, a marvellous winter. We lost no end of embarrassing files.")

"Yes, Minister - The Skeleton in the Cupboard"

Re:Do as I say not as I do

[Joce640k]

How can we be 'interested' when everything we say is just blatantly ignored?

Re: Do as I say not as I do

[Anonymous Coward]

What a dismal world you live in.

Intellectual defeatism is no way to go through life son.

Re: Do as I say not as I do

[TWX]

Thing is, he's right to a certain degree, in that the powerful usually have a degree of choice in what they do that isn't afforded to what the average person can do with regard to the law.

Look at the American South right before the Confederacy seceded. The population was around 9 million people, and over a third of those people were enslaved of African descent. Of the rest, probably a third were poor share-croppers and black freed-men or their descendants that were effectively serfs, vassals to the plantation owners on whose land they lived and worked. This was in a society that arguably was literally the richest in the world for a time; the wealthiest families centered around Charleston, South Carolina were richer than any royal families of any other countries in the world, all built on the backs of the people they exploited to toil for them. I suspect that this is why they expected the British Empire to side with them in the war, they thought the British and their class system would naturally align even though the British had discontinued direct slavery in the UK itself years earlier. Anyway, it literally took war and a million dead men to unseat those in power in the South, and even after slavery was legally abolished, we're still dealing with the fallout from it 150 years later.

Look at all of the major revolutions and you find that they resulted from the systematic abuse of accumulated power by the wealthy against the interests of the average person, and after revolution sometimes inequality reasserts itself. I've concluded that this is normal; just the way it is, and the altruisim that we believe to have existed in various parts of the world over time is either short-lived or else a fiction. That said we should still work toward it, but so many people at the bottom seem to think that give them one chance and they too can be at the top are willing to go against their own interests for a never-to-realize dream that it's getting harder and harder to push for that result.

Evade FOIA

[phantomfive]

Mission accomplished.

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.

Re:To quote Elliot Spitzer

[antiperimetaparalogo]

Since you started quoting, (as a Greek) i like to quote something a bit older: the (about 2 milleniums old) Latin "verba volant, scripta manent" - roughly translated by me to English as "spoken words fly, written words stay".

Re:To quote Elliot Spitzer

[antiperimetaparalogo]

Since you started quoting, (as a Greek) i like to quote something a bit older: the (about 2 milleniums old) Latin "verba volant, scripta manent" - roughly translated by me to English as "spoken words fly, written words stay".

It's funny that you're a Greek repeating a Latin quote. Glad to see someone remembers who won in the Battle of Corinth!

Of course i remember who won in the Battle Of Corinth my dear barbarian... we did, the Greeks!

With the words of the Roman poet Horace: "Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio" (roughly translated by me to English as: "Conquered Greece conquered its barbaric conqueror and civilized Latins!"), in the same spirit with the similar, and better known to barbarians "Roman arms conquered Greece, Greek civilization conquered Rome" ...

That Latin quote was brought to you by a Greek Nationalist (and i could mention our little revenge in WW2... but let's not mention the war!) - for any Italian that wants to mod me down: "una fatsa, una ratsa" (as we say it in Greece, or "una faccia una razza" more correctly).

Re:tangential: how many emails and how long do you

[x0ra]

I never delete anything. I can go back to 2005'ish. Storage is cheap.

Re:tangential: how many emails and how long do you

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

20-year rule

[Richard Kirk]

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.

The UK could learn a thing or two from...

[mschaffer]

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.

Re:tangential: how many emails and how long do you

[Greyfox]

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.