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

[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.