Boston City Government Discovers Email Retention 184
An anonymous reader writes "The Boston Globe, covering a battle to unseat the 16-year incumbent mayor, has found out that the city has no email retention policy. A city official who receives hundreds of emails a day was found to have only 18 emails in his mailbox. The city has enabled journaling on its Exchange server in response. The Globe also notes that they had to curtail requests for emails under the Open Records law because for each mailbox, 'City officials estimated they would charge $5,000 for six months worth of email.'"
Shouldn't be a surprise to anybody in Boston... (Score:5, Interesting)
In the recent debate he claimed there was no evidence he was corrupt. I guess this show's it's 'cause he deletes most of it...
When confronted with the fact that he sold city property to two of his friends for really cheap, he said that it was "only two out of hundreds of deals". I guess it's OK to break the law if you only do it a couple percent of the time?
Best part? He's going to win again.
Seems to me that the bigger the city, the more stupid the voters are...
Re:Shouldn't be a surprise to anybody in Boston... (Score:1, Interesting)
Seems to me that the bigger the city, the more stupid the voters are...
one hallmark of success is considered moving out of the city.
Retention is the BIG issue (Score:5, Interesting)
The real problem is is that law makers (and enforcement) often think themselves above the law. They made/enforced it, so can change/ignore it. Worse, the punishments for such violations is almost always minor. "Whaddyou gonna doo 'bout it?"
A simple answer is to charge felony "obstruction of justice", and have the felony provisions remove from office. This is highly unlikely to happen for reasons of "good buddy" through to not causing excessive fear in the bureaucracy.
Re:No retention? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the county government (not in Massachusetts) where I work, there is no standard policy. A draft policy was circulated not long ago that would mandate a standard retention policy of 90 days. Some agencies have different policies by law (child support must hold onto e-mail for I think five years, and the district attorney and public defender's offices must keep case-related e-mail in perpetuity), but the 90-day cap was allegedly intended to balance discovery and e-mail storage requirements. Part of the policy suggested that PSTs, forwarding to other e-mail accounts, and saving messages locally should be disabled; the response from one agency was that they should prepare to start spending more on printers, because a lot of material was going to end up in hard copy, especially for those of us working on projects that can take as much as three years to complete. AFAICT, no IT staff were consulted before the draft was written.
Re:New manning slot? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not enough money? Give me a break. I can build a Linux box that runs MailScanner, stick it in front of whatever e-mail server they run, and have that box archive every single message. Throw in a few terabyte drives and the whole thing might come to $5-10K including my time. I consult to a Community Health Center and have built a fairly elaborate scripted system that archives emails for every single mailbox every night and rotates the archives in accordance with the health center's policies. I think I charged them something like a thousand dollars for that job.
It has nothing to do with not having enough money, and everything to do with incompetence. If they're not archiving email, what else aren't they archiving? How useful is it to have public disclosure laws when the systems are designed to avoid document archiving.
Re:No retention? (Score:1, Interesting)
Like, "Would you like twenty thousand dollar dressing with your Big Dig salad this Friday for lunch?"
Re:No retention? (Score:3, Interesting)
it's not about IT staff it's about what the business and lawyers need.. sorry. At my company we had a 90 day retention for email inboxes and after that it had to be filed in "retention" folders with the purpose marked or in the case of sales, they probably printed the materials out and put it in a physical file folder for contract purposes.
The 90 day camp is cute and common because people think by deleting everything they're spared discovery/FIOA requests.. but that's very not true. If a project takes 3 years then the entire correspondence must be kept for the 3 years, plus the historical period after the project is done. Electronic cleanup doesn't exempt you from discovery or FIOA requests for information you are obligated to keep. Filing stuff in paper means that a clever lawyer can compel the court to shut you down while they dig through your file cabinets for information..and it automatically puts you in contempt-of-court should a judge order 91 day old emails produced (like what's going with Apple vs. Pystar)
Re:This is why term limits are needed (Score:1, Interesting)
Boston City Hall may be ugly, but it's ugly in an interesting way, comparable to some of Le Corbusier's work. I would not call it a stupid, boring piece of architecture, nor is it flashy and bombastic.
It was (and still is) regarded as a milestone of the Brutalist architecture that was in vogue at the time. There is evidence that city employees felt good about working there [lyricstime.com].
Besides, it is ideally located near the hub of Boston's subway system. The waterfront would take an extra 15 minutes driving or subway time to get to, and would likely displace a showcase development project from the private sector that citizens might actually look forward to visiting. And I'm sure they'd make it really big, the better to house hundreds of additional city employees and dozens of extra departments to serve empire-building bureaucrats.