By Dan Ilett, 20 December 2004 14:30
NEWS
The Cabinet Office denied on Monday that millions of emails are being deleted in response to a law that will make government information available to the public from 1 January.
The Civil Service department insisted the move was part of an ongoing management policy to avoid wasting taxpayers' money and not a way of ducking the Freedom of Information Act (FoI).
A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office said: "This is about management of record systems. This is not about trying to quieten down or hide things before 1 January. It's nothing to do with FoI. It's about making sure that staff have been managing and deleting emails properly."
Civil servants have been ordered to delete 'unimportant' emails more than three months old, and to print out and archive 'important' emails.
The Cabinet Office (CO), which is the Prime Minister's right-arm department, said it would not monitor its 2,000 staff deleting emails because it was each employee's responsibility to judge the situation.
The FoI, which comes into force in 11 days, will allow public access to some government records, excluding confidential information or enquiries that would cost more than £600 in administration.
But many inside Parliament have criticised the Civil Service for acting irresponsibly.
Lord Erroll, member of European internet security lobbyist EURIM, said: "It's impractical and they're working on an idiotic time scale to do this. But the CO might think what they have is embarrassing. The time scale is unrealistic and there will be some miscarriages of justice. It's a knee-jerk reaction and will have an effect on useful information in cases. If they do purge emails that are only three months old, a lot of background information on things will be lost for good."
The move could make it tougher for independent inquiries, such as the recent David Blunkett enquiry or the Hutton report, to look into government records.
"We should be embracing data and storage," said Erroll. "If we'd only behave more seriously towards emails and realise they are more akin to people talking rather than official documents."
Financial regulations, such as Sarbanes Oxley and Basel II, stipulate that companies must store all emails for at least seven years. Although none have been convicted yet, chief executive officers found to have failed in such auditing regulations can face heavy fines and jail sentences.
Comments
There are 20 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Au contraire, deleted emails should be ARCHIVED.
Even if they are never read, the Civil Service needs to know it's always accountable to the public.
2. Ian J. Kennedy
Why should emails be archived? Are you going to insist on an archive recording of every telephone conversation as well? What about conversations in corridors? You have to draw the line somewhere!
3. Charles Wood
What nonsense, since when has a government and particularly the civil service been accountable to government? Just try asking the Inland Revenue if they enact the law or interpret it? Just ask your local council to explain why it is using such a trivial waste disposal policy...they will avoid answering.
Accountability means OPEN information and having to provide an answer, we just do NOT have that in the UK.
Minister why did you send back these people to Hungary?...no comment.
We never will.
4. anonymous
exactly, and while it's unrealistic to try and record conversations it is totally realitic and practical for the IT dept to archive emails
5. Steve Watkins
Just before the Berlin wall fell in November 1989 the Stasi destroyed LOTS of documents. Do I sense a parallel here? Anonymous is right; the Civil Service need to have it impressed upon them that THEY are accountable to US, not the other way round. Perhaps they should also remember the words of the Requiem Mass: "Liber scriptus proferetur, in quo totum continetur, unde mundus iudicetur." Words which are terrible to contemplate.
6. Nick Gallop
In an environment where trust in the Government is at an all time low, this 'tidying up' activity is bound to raise doubts about their true motive.
Storage is so cheap, these e-mails could be archived for lower cost than asking civil servants to thank about each one and then delete, or print & file.
Once filed on paper, it will be much harder to find anything useful in those which were judged worth keeping.
So the evidence suggests there is an ulterior motive.
7. Simon
NO Government correspondence should be deleted.
Surely their systems should archive all email as it comes through their servers as a backup just in-case somebodies hard-drive goes down.
Just common sense, but we are talking about the Government, and their two do not neccessarily go hand-in-hand.
Any company, large or small, should have some facility for keeping emails.
Personally, I have referred to emails over 1 year old because a client has lost data that was on an email, so I backup my email box once every 3 months and archive to a CD.
8. Michael Decker
The Cabinet Office appears to have approved (more than a year ago) just one vendor specialising in forensically compliant email archiving - Cryoserver. It must be true - there's a press release on their site giving all the details(!), and it was splashed all over Computing magazine a while ago (search for the 'SCOPE' project run by Joint Intelligence Committee which aims to bring together and make easily searchable communications for Cabinet Office, Foreign Office - plus intelligence agencies).
Amusingly, Cryoserver is a product that does NOT allow any deletion therefore I cannot imagine why the Govt considered it in the first place, when what is clearly needed is a system that can delete anything embarrassing while preserving what the 1958 Public Records Act defines as a 'public document' which is.... erm.... just about everything transmitted via email by Govt.... Doh!
There's clearly an opening in the market for a new 'archiving' product that keeps everything *except* messages carrying certain words and phrases e.g. 'favour', 'drink', 'bung', 'Cherie', 'Kelly', 'fake suicide', 'first class return to Sheffield'.
Oh, and best not forget 'Edwina Curry' - just in case Tony's 'done a Major'.....
9. James Barry Mckinnon
Now that storing data in digital form is becoming ever more practical compared to paper based systems, this move by the UK Government looks decidedly fishy.
This UK Government is becoming a real enemy of freedom.
10. Terry Carlin
The government is keen for the publics emails and site visits to be recorded.
Didn't they pass a law about it?
So is this not just the usual double standards of one rule for us and one for them?
11. A Civil Servant
Sensationalist rubbish. People who should know better jump on a routine request for good practice. No one is asking anyone to delete important e-mails, just the noise level rubbish that builds up. Where I work there’s an average of 5000 e-mails per user in the system. A very small percentage of those are significant, the rest are junk, phone messages, leaving do invites, Christmas cards etc. And we’re not unique. FOI’s not about being able to trace every e-mail ever written. About time these people looked at the big picture and stopped getting hysterical about some routine detail.
12. Dave Leslie
Ho, ho, ho ... I read that a spokesperson said they're *saving* money by printing and filing the ones they do want to keep!
13. Neil Postlethwaite
The comment from the Civil Servant is utter rubbish. Government has an ingrained culture of note taking and record keeping whether on the phone, verbal meeting or formal meetings so there can be an audit trail or who said what etc.
It is utter hipocracy for govenrnment to delete this source of information to cover up possible invesigations in
the future like Blunkett, NPfIT in the future investigation etc.
Any commercial company whould be hounded, fined and persecuted. Esp. in light of US SoX laws and forthcoming Companies Bill in the UK.
Agree with the comment about ISP's and tracking ordinary users mail and web visits.
One rule for them, another for normal people from Emperor Blair.
14. anonymous
Sauce for the goose: RIP Act
"Sweeping proposals to give law enforcement agencies access to the communications records of every UK telephone and internet user will not be restricted to anti-terrorist investigations, despite assurances to the contrary from the home secretary."
from http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4293489,00.html
From 'Anonymous #1' again.
15. anonymous
How did civil servants exempt themselves from SOX?
Are the people sitting at their civil consoles NOT British citizens nor located in the UK?
16. anonymous
There appear to be 2 types of emails discussed here - 'good ones' or 'business ones', and the 'junk ones'.
I would hope that the good one are kept, but while I understand people's comments about wanting to delete the junk ones, there is a small problem.
If they were sent internally, then they are part of the company records.
ANY correspondence is part of the business records, and therefore MUST be kept under the business laws of 5+current year, or 7+current year.
(As for phone call recording, well, you would hope that at least the general guist of the call is recorded in a CRM/call system if not the actual conversation verbatim. Otherwise, I'd hate to be their IT dept/call ctr managers, trying to justify and identify call centre stats.)
What if someone sent around a joke or inappropriate matter, and someone found it offensive, then there was a law suit about it etc?
Deleted emails on the 'company' email system will not be a defence for the 'company'. Especially if ONE PERSON prints it out.
The real problem goes back to ensuring that business communications are used for appropriate purposes.
17. M. Ripley
I'm with the civil servant on this one (and I find it hard to believe that I am). But he's right although I'd call it increased paranoia and not sensationalism. There is an ever increasing paranoia amongst some sections of the public that government is out to get them and/or that they are all involved in secrets, lies and deceipt. I think you'll find 99.99% of government business is trivial in the extreme (my neighbours dog barks at midnight, the waste bin on the lampost has fallen off, why is the green bin blue etc etc) . And that 99.99% is accompanied by a mountain of totally irrelevent data such "breast enlargement", "penis enlargement","100 software titles for the price of 50" etc etc
Any relevant information has to be in printed form for legal purposes (including the 99.99%) and the volume is huge. That costs money and space. So keeping absolutely everything is ridiculous and unnecessary. One last thing: anybody with half a brain cell who intends to cover up something will destroy the data without drawing attention to the fact, duh!
18. Kevin Inskip
Above & beyond all the issues of motive or right & wrong, what amazes me most are 2 things
1. the fact that all emails will in fact be retained in archives, but these will be so poorly designed (deliberately or not) that searching them for disclosure will be impracticable. There surely is no excuse for this. furthermore if access is merely deliberately blocked, what loophole in the FOIA do they know about for refusing to comply? It certainly can't be one of motive, as we are constantly reminded by the legal profession.
2. How farcical is it that anything the civil servants deem important enough to keep, must be printed out for filing!! The amount of time and cost involved is surely a bigger & more flagrant waste of tax-payers money, as teh existance of the electronic archive renders this 100% unnecessary.
What they shouold be concentrating on is taking steps to ensure that the evidential value of the electronic files and records is strong an sustainable for decades, something which, sadly, is not being done at present.
19. Phil
I bet Oliver North wished that the messages he thought he'd deleted actually had been. The backup got him though.
20. anonymous
SOX is a US rule! We aren't run from Washington - yet!