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.'"
Important emails (Score:2)
Alarmed by the deletion of e-mails that could have contained potentially significant information, administration officials recently instituted a new electronic document retention policy and temporary âoejournalingâ(TM)â(TM) program, to keep copies of every e-mail sent and received by every city employee.
Considering all the news about politicians and their "extracurricular activities", I just had this image of a bunch of emails that were sent and received from escorts and 20 something year old girlfriends or boyfriends. Meaning, they are hiding something and that's why they're deleting them.
Yes, I am very cynical when it comes to politicians.
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Actually, it was probably a bunch of PianoCat videos, 9/11 tribute chain letters and Obama-llama hate mail.
Re:Important emails (Score:5, Insightful)
setenv $EMAIL_STORAGE =
Re:Important emails (Score:5, Funny)
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There's a sh syntax?! I just thought the developers all suffered from dyslexia.
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Yeah, I was feeling a little nostalgic for csh, which is ironic, considering I hardly ever used it and couldn't remember much syntax. I and wasn't about to refresh my memory for the sake of making a funny, so I fudged it.
Re:Important emails (Score:5, Funny)
That is the weirdest mix of English and Englicsh syntax I've ever seen.
Re:Important emails (Score:4, Funny)
Its not just politicians. Where I used to work, a disgruntled IT person forwarded emails between an "escort" and a company director to all 6000 company employees. jpg attachments and all.
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Its not just politicians. Where I used to work, a disgruntled IT person forwarded emails between an "escort" and a company director to all 6000 company employees. jpg attachments and all.
Could be a new reality show. "When IT Attacks"
Hey, c'mon now, if "The Office" can make it...
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Its not just politicians. Where I used to work, a disgruntled IT person forwarded emails between an "escort" and a company director to all 6000 company employees. jpg attachments and all.
Could be a new reality show. "When IT Attacks"
Hey, c'mon now, if "The Office" can make it...
Or Salmon Days! Wait a minute...
Re:Important emails (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, if it were just prostitution and extramarital affairs, I wouldn't care if their emails were deleted. Those types of personal vices are rather inconsequential to being a good civil servant. I know that the Republicans saw it as a huge victory when Clinton was impeached basically for having an extramarital affair (and don't tell me that it was for perjury; it was his personal life that was on trial), but, in the grand scheme of things, personal infidelity is probably not the biggest "crime" a public official can commit. I'd choose a president who respects civil liberties & human rights and acts in the interest of the public, but happens to be a philander, over a president who is completely devoted to his wife, but is willing to step on civil liberties, support torture, or sell out the American public to corporate interests. Likewise, I'm much less concerned about a president who lies about his private life than one who lies about justifications for war.
So, no, I'm not particularly concerned about politicians hiding emails to their girlfriends/boyfriends. We should be so lucky if that's all they were hiding. It's more the potential bribes, nepotism/cronyism, and backroom deals that I'm worried about. Those are the type of things that actually conflict with good governance—in other words, government corruption.
Re:Important emails (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, if it were just prostitution and extramarital affairs, I wouldn't care if their emails were deleted. Those types of personal vices are rather inconsequential to being a good civil servant.
It is a question of trust. If they will not keep their word to a person they have pledged their life to, and who is (or should be) the closest to them in the world, then they may be lying to me too...
That said, I don't really trust a damn one of them...
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I'm not saying that it's not a reflection on their personal character. Sure, if I could choose a president who represented the interest of the people and was a good family man, then I would. But given the selection available to us, I'd settle for just the first criteria. And if we're placing our politicians under public scrutiny (as we should), the focus should be on how they're fulfilling their public duty or any potential criminal conduct, not on personal matters which have no bearing on their role as a c
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to a person they have pledged their life to
The statistics disagree with you: 50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second and 74% of third marriages end in divorce ( http://www.divorcerate.org/ [divorcerate.org] ) Average length of a marriage is 8 years ( http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p70-97.pdf [census.gov] )
You just made my point. You pledge "Until Death do us part" but some just don't keep that pledge. And of those that have already proven not to keep that pledge, they are more likely not to again...
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You just made my point. You pledge "Until Death do us part" but some just don't keep that pledge. And of those that have already proven not to keep that pledge, they are more likely not to again...
I don't think GP did make your point. There's still a key open question: does being unfaithful to your spouse correlate with political corruption?
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Since when has any politician actually pledge themselves to you or the people.
It's a matter of importance. If they can't keep a pledge, then why do you expect them to remain truthful to you or the people or the office in which they hold? We have already seen people like Clinton violate the Constitution and the war powers act with the Balkan occupation.
You do not need proof to understand that less of a thread binds them to a job compared to a spouse they gave vows to.
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Police officers and Military personnel aren't exactly elected politicians. However, in most of the cases, it's the half left home who wants the divorce and not the police military officials. For the police officers, I do not trust most of them anyways. You shouldn't either.
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in the grand scheme of things, personal infidelity is probably not the biggest "crime" a public official can commit.
Like Eliot Spitzer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer [wikipedia.org] After Spitzer was forced out, he was replaced by David Patterson, a nice guy, whose main virtue was his ability to get along with the Republicans, who promptly paid him back by throwing the New York State legislature into chaos http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/11/ny [democracynow.org] Tom Robbins said in the Village Voice that the exercise was paid for by billionaire Tom Golisano after Spitzer wouldn't agree to cut state taxes for billionaires. http://www.village [villagevoice.com]
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Some times it matters, I didn't care about Michael Duvall getting caught bragging about his indiscretions with some young thing in front of a open mike (even him being some family values republican). Until that some young thing is a lobbyist, we don't need another loophole where it is now OK to pay for the guys piece of ass, as long as that isn't her only job...
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You know, if it were just prostitution and extramarital affairs, I wouldn't care if their emails were deleted. Those types of personal vices are rather inconsequential to being a good civil servant. I know that the Republicans saw it as a huge victory when Clinton was impeached basically for having an extramarital affair (and don't tell me that it was for perjury; it was his personal life that was on trial), but, in the grand scheme of things, personal infidelity is probably not the biggest "crime" a public official can commit. I'd choose a president who respects civil liberties & human rights and acts in the interest of the public, but happens to be a philander, over a president who is completely devoted to his wife, but is willing to step on civil liberties, support torture, or sell out the American public to corporate interests. Likewise, I'm much less concerned about a president who lies about his private life than one who lies about justifications for war.
So, no, I'm not particularly concerned about politicians hiding emails to their girlfriends/boyfriends. We should be so lucky if that's all they were hiding. It's more the potential bribes, nepotism/cronyism, and backroom deals that I'm worried about. Those are the type of things that actually conflict with good governance—in other words, government corruption.
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Those types of personal vices are rather inconsequential to being a good civil servant.
the only problem with such vices is the possibility of blackmail influencing policy decisions. unfortunately, that is a big problem, because there is little reason to trust a given politician will put the public interest before his career.
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I think they ultimately did have legal grounds to impeach him. So the act of impeachment was not illegal. But they basically got him on a technicality.
It's like if you outed a gay public official during a time of homophobic public sentiments and bring him to trial for that. He knows that if he admits to being gay, his political career is over. And with all the media attention, attacks on his personal character, extra public scrutiny, etc., he lies under oath about being gay. So you find proof that he is gay
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Actually, Clinton signed into law back in 1994 or 96 a provision that allows a person claiming sexual harassment to include outside references of the behavior in order to establish a pattern. Clinton probably didn't realize it at the time but that law made the Lewinsky material relevant to the Jones case. You can't say there was no grounds to involve it because Clinton Signed into law the very grounds that allowed it's involvement.
Now, Clinton also had the option of taking the fifth and then publicly claimi
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That's where Bush and Cheney won in spades because they kept their dealings as "executive rights" so nobody could get them in court to answer for things like Gitmo...they simply refused the summons and fired any DoJ officers that pushed them. They also used "executive privilege" to get out of several other related cases for them and their buddies. It was hilarious when a Republican President had to deal with Democrat controlled Congress "after Clinton" and the Democrats went out of their way to prove they w
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Wow, I don't know why anyone modded you insightful, you spouted nothing that hasn't already been said by the Bush bashing comic strips and you even kept it as vague as possible to leave no avenue of address to the specifics of your claims. If you hadn't done that one thing, you would have been shot down by the simplest observations in the scenario. So I have to ask, what was done that warranted impeachments and be specific enough that it can be addressed. Your not going to be able to hash anything out that
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So I have to ask, what was done that warranted impeachments and be specific enough that it can be addressed.
Um, wiretapping people without warrants? A clear violation of the law. A felony, in fact, for each offense. Um, duh.
Why in the fuck can you claim on person violated the constitution or deserved to be impeached with no hard facts to back it up while advocating that the current administration do one of the most abhorrent acts any sitting president could do that not only is forbidden in the constitut
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Like I said, you can provide nothing that hasn't already been discredited. Not one creditable judge has said the wire taping was illegal and the one judge who did, not only got overturned, but also had ties to the ACLU which was a plaintiff in the case. There is good legal evidence that makes the wire taps seem legal in specific situations and congress did not think it was an impeachable of
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I actually think the Republicans had a legitimate complaint about the lying-under-oath part; Clinton did effectively perjur himself
To be entirely accurate, he did not lie. Asked if he had sex with Lewinski he emphatically said "no." Sex is copulation, not what they did. You can't make babies doing what they did together. So one can only assume that Republicans don't understand what sex is.
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Were you born yesterday? He was asked if he had sexual relations with Lewinsky, not just sex. Furthermore, the court defined what sexual relations entailed and found that Clinton lied during his statement to the court. This lie ended up getting him fined by the court, he lost his law license, and he paid Jones a settlement and lawyers fees to stop it from going to trial again.
I understand your intent on protecting what you believe in no matter what, even if you have to lie about it, but this is well documen
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Clinton perjured himself answering questions that would have been better left to judgement day. If the questioning had stuck to whether he compromised his presidential duty (more than a finger wagging), then I would take the perjury charge a lot more seriously. Most of the major institutions of America contain men at the top ruling their institutions while concealing their extra-marital activities or their Percocet habit.
If Alan Turing had been in a situation where no hard evidence had been found, would h
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That's an interesting point. I actually wasn't aware of that second requirement. In that case I think even a president (or governor) has some basic right to privacy (e.g. a reporter can't install spy cameras in the President's bathroom or bedroom just because he's a public figure), which justifies his not answering honestly about questions prying into his personal life—and that will go into public records.
I mean, he did a stupid thing to lie, as that turned even many democrats against him. But the ent
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He lied in the middle of a sexual harassment case about ever previously having sex with other employees. That was certainly material to the case, and had he been successful there was a good chance Jones would have lost.
It was not lying about smoking pot that got him in trouble, it was lying about having sex with Monica Lewinsky in the middle of a sexual harassment lawsuit. Whether or not he had sex with other employees was an important point in the case, and he had good reason to lie about it.
That is perj
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Just going by the Wikipedia definition, mind you, but according to it the matter simply needs to be material to the judicial proceeding. I.e. lying about your age is not perjury, unless your age is a key element in the case. Then it is perjury.
As it was a sexual harassment case and Clinton having sexual relations with other employees is evidence that he had done such things in the past, Clinton had good reason to lie about it as it could influence the outcome of the case.
It was, therefore, purjery. He wa
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Impeachment trials are a simple vote by the senate.
Apart from that, there is no right to due process. If the senate says you're out, then you're out no matter how innocent you are.
Which is probably one of the many checks and balances the framers put into the Big C.
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IAAL and quite familiar with the definition of perjury, and the arguments over whether he lied about a material fact, which is why I put in an "effectively." I have also read the grand jury and deposition transcript excerpts; he dances at the edge of perjury several times, and in my
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...
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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?
I wish he was Hungarian. I don't know of a single state property being sold without corruption involved since the Soviet army moved out.
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Seems to me that the bigger the city, the more stupid the voters are...
"How fortunate for leaders that men do not think"
It's a matter of power, not intelligence (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems to me that the bigger the city, the more stupid the voters are...
You obviously don't understand how machine politics works. Voters are not dumb:
1. individuals allied with the incumbent receive substantial benefit and thus vote for the incumbent
2. those who are not allied are systematically disenfranchised
It's not a matter of dumb/smart, it's a matter of organized/unorganized. Those who are organized (the incumbent) wield significant power to ensure that those without power have difficulty organizing (and thus threatening their power).
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I should say that in itself that doesn't mean he's hiding something. He is, after all, almost seventy. My dad doesn't use email either.
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.
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The only issue then is storage space and backups, which any decent IT department can handle given a reasonable amount of funding. And it's something that should be done either way.
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I don't see why it is crucial. Phonecalls aren't recorded. Paper mail isn't steamed open and photocopied. I don't really mind if official emails are retained, but mostly what it does is decrease efficiency by steering people away from email even when it would be the most efficient means of communication.
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Officials hold offices and are doing public things. They have no right of privacy WRT offical acts. And ought not be doing non-offical acts on the public dime.
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paper mail is very legal. If you certify a document sent via "normal Mail" like many court summons, then it is legally binding that you received the document at that address. In the case of paper mail You would have a copy that was notarized and the post would have copy of the register if you paid for registered service, but "normal mail" is legally enough. Fax documents can be traced by the phone company (non-repudiation is one thing email doesn't do yet) that your fax called their fax. So if you press
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Err, registered mail and traced faxes prove that you sent SOMETHING. They say nothing about the contents.
See people mailing bricks and then showing USPS shipping receipts to PayPal.
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It's still binding on who for what? You have proof that you mailed something to me. You have no proof that you mailed the document in question.
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Where I live (GA), that's only binding if the court does the mailing. If you personally mail the subpoena, with any sort of confirmation/tracking you can name, you've got no proof of receipt. That's the way it should be, in the same way as evidentiary chain of custody. If anyone involved in the process isn't "part of the system" and legally trusted then the process is suspect.
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phones can be recorded at any-time, paper is "hard" evidence and any fraud going through federal mail is automatically a felony. Email has to be more difficult unless something is built into the system, and without a context, and history it isn't all that convincing. IE if whistle blower turns on him, a retained email you received isn't good evidence, unless we have a hard log somewhere that has the meaningful bits in it. If you record a call you have voice prints, and difficulty to have undetectable mod
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Originally, I felt that email for government should be retained, however there really does need to be a different consideration between formal and informal email ie. email that is a part of formal administrative functions and email that just represents informal communications.
The question is where exactly do you fit in email between old world snail mail and a conversation whether in person on via say voip. Very interesting when you compare voip to email, as they both represent digital electronic transmiss
New manning slot? (Score:5, Insightful)
No hands. Sucks to be an IT admin for the City of Boston about now.
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Nothing will happen for the near future. The city will say "We don't have enough money to implement this" (which is probably true) and ask for more money, which will be rejected. Eventually someone will get a court order, ordering
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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 c
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FTFY
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Want to give us some details rather than an offhand comment?
Presumably the City already have some backup and archiving systems in place; how expensive is adding email archiving to that infrastructure?
Regardless of how expensive it might be, it is mandated by Massachusetts law.
Why tagged "republicans"??? (Score:5, Informative)
Since 1930, every mayor of Boston has been a Democrat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_Boston [wikipedia.org]
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Shockingly, there have only been 5 mayors since 1950. Loyal city.
Re:Why tagged "republicans"??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shockingly, there have only been 5 mayors since 1950. Loyal city.
"Loyal" is not the word I would choose.
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End users can't enforce retention (Score:4, Insightful)
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interesting fact about government in our state. (Score:2)
Question to the exchange sys admins (Score:2)
Does it reasonably cost $5000 in man hours to retrieve 6 months worth of emails from one persons mailbox in Microsoft Exchange?
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Depends on if they have daily backups that are retained that long. So if there really are 180 tapes that have to be loaded (more like 170, as the most recent tapes are probably still in the library), and each restore takes about one hour of work to do, and the employees involved get paid about $30 per hour, then yes that works out to about $5,000. Where I work, it takes longer than an hour to retrieve a set of tapes because the tapes are sent-off site (you are paying for travel time and mileage), and one
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Yes. Someone else pointed out that after the mailbox is restored, the contents have to be vetted by the lawyers, prior to be handed over to the newspaper. So there are more expenses than just the retrieval. $30,000 for five mailboxes does sound a bit high. Not ludicrously high, but high.
Absolutely not...if you intended to recover data (Score:2)
If they are hiding something...it WILL be found. (Score:2)
Re:No retention? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I know where I am, but if you'd RTFA:
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So what? It shouldn't be left up to the end user to decide whether the email should be retained or not. Who's to say that a messag
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must be nice to live in a world without SOX!!
At corporations, ALL non-spam email must be kept for every employee... even the delete stuff for a certain period of time BY LAW. Spam is usually an exception because it's deleted by an automated process BEFORE the end user sees it... hence no action was ever taking on it. Everything else must be retained for 2,7,10, or more years.
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Generally speaking, employees shouldn't be able to delete email or other communication period. They should be able to remove it from their personal inbox, to prevent clutter, but SOX retention should be getting handled at the server level. Employees shouldn't be handling their own data retention at all.
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No one ever said that a firefighter had to be smart. All that is required is that he is ballsy, understands how fires work, how to control fires, and is able and willing to obey orders.
I speak as a graduate of the U.S. Navy's finest fire fighting training. ;^)
Re:No retention? (Score:5, Funny)
No one ever said that a firefighter had to be smart. All that is required is that he is ballsy, understands how fires work, how to control fires, and is able and willing to obey orders.
I speak as a graduate of the U.S. Navy's finest fire fighting training. ;^)
With all due respect, Navy firefighters have it easy. All you need to put out the fire is a corkscrew long enough to bore through the hull.
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ROFLMAO - good one.
Problem is, when I've sunk my home, my working space, my battle station, my EVERYTHING, where do I put my sorry dumb ass? Oooops!
I'll admit that maybe we do have it easier than civilian firefighters. We drill, and we drill, and we drill. With all the practice, directed by sadistic SOB's in officer's uniforms, there isn't a square inch of the ship that we aren't intimate with. A dozen men on each team with that sort of training means we can handle a lot of stuff that a civilian would w
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Because of this sort of training, I knew my way around Spru-cans pretty well. You forgot to mention that there are parts of our "home" that we KNOW are hazerdous for any number of reasons, even more so if they are flooded or on fire.
We have to know how to handle different classes of fires AND how to get them under control quickly, without endangering the rest of the ship.
Submariners have other problems to deal with too.
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Ummm.... No. If you did that, you would flood the ship, sinking it. It may not be as big a deal if you're moored to the pier, but if you're at sea, that would be Bad News indeed.
There are some similarities between shipboard firefighting and fighting a house fire, but on shore, firefighters generally don't have to worry about flooding the only thing between them and a very long swim (or worse).
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Excuse me - I was certified as an EMT in 1980. Again, you don't need to be exceedingly smart to be an EMT. A certain APTITUDE is required, and moderate intelligence, but not enough to qualify as particularly "smart".
Go blow smoke somewhere else, alright?
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You also need to be certified as a First Responder, because quite often you're the first on the scene and that means you're the first to provide medical support. So, yes, firefighters DO need to be smart.
The ability to take training does not imply "smart", at least not in the way I understand the word. In my experience, the average firefighter is just about average in intelligence, or perhaps slightly above-average. A few are very smart, and a few are dumber'n rocks. This seems t'be true in virtually every profession that isn't pure manual labor but doesn't require much in the way of critical thinking.
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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
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Are you kidding? Between Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Bog Knows What Else, there is so much crap out there that historians will spend lifetimes perusing through 'information'.
And the best part about it is that you don't have to be stuck in some drafty basement near the "Beware of Leopard" sign. You can do all of your 'research' in the comfort of Starbucks or whatever wifi connected place your hea
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And when facebook closes down in 2014? They have no retention policy, they have no open file formats for exporting to archivists.... when they go bankrupt and the power company turns out the lights that information's just gone. Poof.
It's all electronic and there are no mandates to keep information in useful formats. If they're following Google's model then they don't even keep "backup" tapes they just keep information in three or more redundant parts of their cluster when one box fails they trash it and in
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You said it like it's a bad thing...
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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 yea
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The trains didn't run on time. What that actually demonstrates that, under fascism, no one reports the trains aren't on time.
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I haven't seen every building in the world, but City Hall is certainly the ugliest building I have ever seen. I hate it, and so does everyone else I have ever spoken to about it. I would happily endorse any amount of government corruption to get rid of that thing. Having it gone would improve my life, and I wouldn't care how many of Menino's friends got rich off the projec
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That's not that far fetched, you have to have someone go through them, information on Employee contracts have to be redacted as well anything HIPPA or ADA related, on-going negotiations ect. There are a lot of laws concerning what can be made public and a lot of conflicts between different laws.
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Well, first you have to read each email to make sure it doesn't make the city look bad, and if it does if you can just rewrite it to sound better (for clarity, of course), and if you can't do that, then you have to delete it, and all this 'proof-reading' takes manpower. And then, of course, there's the bribes that have to be paid...