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Will you be near City Hall around 10:15 a.m.?
By adamg on Mon, 09/14/2009 - 7:52am
If so, look for the knot of mayoral candidates and camera crews: Michael Flaherty, Sam Yoon and Kevin McCrea are holding a press conference to call for criminal investigations into the way top city officials allegedly deleted massive amounts of e-mail, which is against the law (right out front).
As the Outraged Liberal reminds us, there's a certain irony in Flaherty teaming up with McCrea on the issue (which the Globe follows up on today - one guy was going into his deleted folder and deleting stuff there). McCrea won a lawsuit against the City Council - Michael Flaherty, president - for violations of the Open Meeting Law (Flaherty acknowledged the issue in announcing his run for mayor).
Meanwhile, if any probes do get launched, Michael Pahre has volunteered 19 pieces of e-mail that he or people he knows either sent or received from Menino aides Michael Kinneavy and Tom Tinlin.
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Comments
Delete-Delete-Gate
New name for the scandal: "Delete-Delete-Gate."
Because Kineavy not only deleted the email from his inbox, but also then regularly deleted all the contents of his trash folder ("deleted items folder"), too.
Doesn't trash get deleted automatically?
My computer, for instance, continually deletes all contents of the Trash folder that's over a week old.
I think
I think the point is that if you checked right now you wouldn't even find that week's worth of items.
This isn't a case of keeping a clean inbox (still illegal), but of actively attempting to cleanse *all* copies of *any* e-mails from the system at any state of their eventual deletion.
City Hall backs up computer files nightly
If your trash folder automatically deletes files more than one week old, then the nightly automated computer backups that city hall runs should be constantly picking up those deleted emails in your trash folder for an entire week until your own computer automatically deletes them.
But the Globe article states the Kineavy actually went to delete the contents of the trash folder, not just let it do its own deletion every week (or whatever it is configured to do).
He's quite the Boy Scout: leave no sign that you were there.
many configuration options
Exchange can be configured many ways (other mail systems can too.) Sometimes an individual's folder are kept on the local hard drive, sometimes on the mail server. The mail server is likely backed-up up on a cycle and some of the backup tapes are kept for up to two years. It is likely that local hard drives are not backed-up although the machine could be seized and investigated by a forensic technologist.
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What they said
The city of Boston is a large enterprise. Competent enterprises have mail retention polices and systems in place. In the private sector, they could get in trouble under various laws (Sarbanes-Oxley, for example). In the public sector, well, we'll find out, I guess, just how seriously the DA and the (running for office now) AG will take this.
Well Public Officials are
Well Public Officials are supposed to keep any emails they send or receive related to their duties as Public Officials. This would extend to anyone doing the leg work for a Public Official as well. I guess the question is who does Menino support for Senate? IF he supports Coakley do the charges dry up? If he supports Lynch or Capunao, both of whom must have deep connections with the Mayor, does he get hammered by the Attorney General? I have to say this is BAD for Coakley because no matter what she does it will look political to someone.
Well put
Couldn't agree more. This definitely changes the dynamics for both the Mayoral and Senate Race.
political affiliations
If you have political affiliations other than your vote, you should probably identify them.
I will do the same. I am a citizen of Boston, West Roxbury to be precise. I have no affiliation with any elected official. I work in information technology.
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I think you picked the wrong
I think you picked the wrong sub trend to make this statement because my comment was commenting on how hard this will be for a Senate candidate and whoever this other guy is just chimed in that it changes the dynamic of the race.
Noted.
Civics101 and two other ccounts were created on the same day within hours of each other a few weeks ago and they tend to comment on politics which is good. I'm just asking them to be open about any affiliations they might have.
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Ah, ok , makes sense then.
Ah, ok , makes sense then.
One thing to keep in mind is that these stories pull out people in quick bursts due to their being sent out on Twitter etc.
For the record I do not have a favorite for this race. I was originally a Menino guy but am not sure based off of these stories. Not that it helps much as I live outside the city but as someone who does business in the city with many friends in the city it can make a difference.
Anyone see the irony that
Anyone see the irony that Boston, a supposedly high tech IT town, doesn't apparently have a competent IT department in city hall?
Not that I'm surprised.
Blaming the IT is wrong here
Running nightly backup jobs is standard operating procedure all over the place. Backing up nightly means that, if somebody computer died a sudden and painful death, then only one day's worth of work would be lost. Life goes on.
Backing up of files is not usually organized in such a way as to catch people who might be deliberately trying to delete files every minute of the day; you just can't run a backup of every single computer every single minute. You don't set up a backup system under the assumption that everyone is a habitual deleter; you assume that they keep things around, at least for a couple of days.
If you need to catch email from those people trying to delete everything in sight then you have to store every single incoming and outgoing email as it comes through the mail servers. Maybe they did it at city hall, but I am highly doubtful.
and that is why it was done
and that is why it was done the way it was. People ask why do this every day, it seems like a hassle. You do it every day because you know when the computer backs up to the hard drive and know you only have X number of hours to purge the system before it backs up. I would not be surprised if things got printed and then deleted as soon as they happened and then from there shredded. Check the filing cabinet I bet thats where you'll find the most gold.
Sure, I blame them. Why are
Sure, I blame them.
Why are backup run from the system at specific times, and not at real time through the incoming servers?
If you're only backing up whats on someones computer at midnight, there's a big potential gap and you're not complying with the letter of the law in the first place.
And I hate to say it, but most people believe this to be SOP as far as email retention. that's how the email retention at the company I work for does it, and it allows us to keep Outook very tidy.
While this might be a case of breaking the law willfully, I can also see that it might be of IT negligence and the office workers not knowing how IT was keeping things.
So that's where the RedSox
So that's where the RedSox offer to pay for the operations of the Mounted Police Unit went. No wonder the Mayor's Office denies they never received such an offer.
Somewhere Martin Lomasney is
Somewhere Martin Lomasney is smiling...
let's put this in perspective
seriously, forks. one of 12,000 employees of the city deletes his emails everyday.
Adam, no irony here
Adam, Sam Yoon first ran for City Council in 2005, and took office in 2006. He did not have -- clearly could not have had -- any part in the open meeting law violations over which McCrea sued in -- what? 2003? 2004? I've forgotten when he filed his law suit, but if the decision was in 2005, it had to have been prior to that.
You're right
Although McCrea has issues with Yoon, this isn't one of them, since, as you note, he wasn't a councilor then. I've deleted the Yoon reference from that sentence in the original post.
Thanks
Thank you. McCrea has been criticizing Yoon for, along with the rest of the city council, "paying to fight the lawsuit," which is, I think, both a little silly and more than a little disingenuous. I don't think McCrea had any reasonable expectation that his lawsuit would NOT result in legal fees for the city, and I also don't think that as Mayor, or City Councillor, McCrea would opt NOT to defend the city from lawsuits.
It's a red herring. What McCrea has really been after is exactly what happened: leaving the entirely false impression that Yoon violated the open meeting law. He did not. He is not named in McCrea's lawsuit.
McCrea's got some good ideas, but I am not at all confident of his "openness."