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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Law - Maintaining governmental emails in Boston and elsewhere

Last Sunday, Sept. 13th, Donovan Slack and Michael Levenson of the Boston Globe reported under the headline "Boston Mayor Menino’s office acknowledges city employees routinely deleted e-mails." The story began:

Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s administration, prompted by public records requests from the Globe, has acknowledged that city employees were routinely deleting e-mails, a potential violation of the state public records law.

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. * * *

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 “journaling’’ program, to keep copies of every e-mail sent and received by every city employee.

The city’s chief lawyer, William Sinnott, said the city is working on a more permanent fix. Sinnott also said problems with preserving e-mail are not unique to Boston. “E-mail retention is a challenge with which cities and towns throughout the country struggle,’’ he said. “Both the law and the technology in this area have been evolving and the city has made every effort to comply with the law as we understand it.’’

This spring the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press set up this website on access to electronic communications, including a state-by-state guide. From the introduction:
As technology brings electronic communications such as e-mail, text messaging and instant messaging into the mainstream of workday activity, governments from the federal down to the local levels are charged with evaluating how to treat those communications. Are they public records, subject to release just as any other record? Can the activity that occurs in those exchanges constitute a “meeting”? While new cases and legislation may specifically address these and related issues, many governments are still figuring out how to treat their electronic communications.

An overview of access to electronic communications

  • State law developing, but far from settled

  • Electronic communications under sunshine laws

  • E-mail records as public records

  • Electronic communications as public meetings

  • Public e-mail, cell phone accounts used for private communications

  • Text messages

  • E-mail retention policies

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 15, 2009 01:12 PM
Posted to General Law Related