Ignore email archiving / public record laws at your own peril

The saga of the deleted emails continues, with now the AG getting involved.

Prior to that, the Secretary of State stated that he was unhappy with the City Hall's continued failure to comply:

Galvin expressed frustration Tuesday over what he described as the city's failure to fully cooperate with investigators. He told the Globe he was considering taking further action against the Menino administration. Under state law, he could turn the case over to Coakley for possible prosecution.

Now state Attorney General Martha Coakley (who is running for Ted Kennedy's senate seat BTW) states that she is "involved."

Coakley said in a statement issued this afternoon that Secretary of State William F. Galvin's office has been working to ensure that public records are preserved and "to determine whether there have been any violations of the public records law by City officials."

"We are now involved in that review," Coakley said.

She said her office would continue to work with Galvin's office going forward in the effort to find mayoral aide Michael Kineavy's e-mails and "we remain prepared to conduct a full investigation and take all necessary steps to guarantee the preservation of evidence and full compliance with the law."

Apart from jokes about the Chicken being 'involved' and the Pig being 'committed' in the making of Ham and Eggs, what does that word mean, anyway?

I personally know that there are Encase-certified digital forensics experts working for Coakley's office. Since City Hall is 'cooperating', it would be trivial to have the AGs office take a look at the hard disk instead of paying an outside consultant, right?

Tangled web woven at Boston City Hall

The saga continues at Boston City Hall. Readers of this blog will remember that in response to public record requests, it came out that the Boston Mayor's right-hand man was deleting emails in a way that they were not getting backed up. So the Secretary of State got involved and ordered the City Hall to change the practice and also to retrieve the emails.

Today it came out that our international man of mystery actually complained in April 2009 that his computer was running too slow and as a result, received a new computer. But gosh darn, he plum forgot! And he still does not remember getting a new computer.

City corporation counsel William F. Sinnott said in an interview yesterday that he had been relying on what Kineavy had told him and that Kineavy, the mayor’s chief policy aide and key political strategist, still does not remember getting a new computer.

Fortunately for people who like sunshine on their government affairs, and possibly unfortunately for Mr. Kineavy, that computer's hard disk was not wiped clean and reissued to another user--it was just sitting in another room. Now it has gone to the forensics firm hired by the City, and presumably the emails (or their remnants from temp files) will be recovered.

Ironically, I bet that this particular PC was not recycled because the user was a powerful man, and IT suspected/feared that he will ask for some old file from the hard disk that was not accurately transferred to the new PC.

Now to the cost of recovery. The most well-known commercial software used for digital forensics, Encase (there are others), will suck out anything relevant form that disk in a few hours and nicely categorize them in emails, word documents, etc.

One might even call the work technologically trivial. If StoneTurn group is really asking for 250K for a single hard disk examination, they are either smoking weed, or abusing a single-source, no-bid contract. I know many highly reputable forensics consultants who will do this for under $10,000, probably for as low as $5,000.


There are some good lessons here.

• Mr. Kineavy is every information security officer's dream. That man knows how to protect against information leakage
• Mr. Kineavy is every compliance officer's nightmare. That man is costing the City Hall time, money and prestige
• Not having a good decommissioning policy is hurting Mr. Kiveavy but may help make the City Hall become compliant with the public records law (or at least get away with a slap on the wrist and the hundreds of thousands of dollars in forensics expense)

Bottom line: the wheels of justice grinds slowly, but once caught in its maw, there is often no escape

Records retention in local government, and Boston City Hall

I have a city-hall as my client. Last month I was teaching an awareness class there, and when I mentioned that they should not have any expectation of privacy when using their computers, there was not a single raised eyebrow. Being the employees of a city government, they all knew about public record laws and freedom of information act requests.

This is different from a private enterprise, where there is always someone who will argue that point.

(as an aside, I had to throw away most of my examples of what is "confidential". Individual's salary figures? Not confidential. Next year's budget numbers? Not confidential. Agh).

Looks like the City of Boston's senior management knew all about the "no expectation of privacy" too:

The acknowledgement came after the Globe filed several requests for e-mails sent and received by Menino’s Cabinet chief of policy and planning, Michael J. Kineavy. He is one of Menino’s most powerful and trusted advisers, intimately involved in nearly everything at City Hall, but a search of city computers found just 18 e-mails he had sent or received between Oct. 1, 2008, and March 31 of this year.

The unusually low figure prompted administration officials to question him about what happened to the rest of the e-mails he was presumably sending and receiving during that period. Kineavy, who is also one of the mayor’s chief political advisers and a strategist on Menino’s reelection campaigns since 1993, told them that he deletes all his e-mails on a daily basis, in such a way that they are not saved on city backup computers, administration officials said.

There are indications that Kineavy was not the only city employee who may have violated the law. In June, the Globe filed requests for copies of six months’ worth of e-mails sent or received by five other employees, including Transportation Commissioner Thomas Tinlin. City officials said that a search for Tinlin’s e-mails turned up only those he had received, none he had sent.