Tuesday, September 15, 2009

That Word You Keep Using...

...I do not think it means what you think it means...

State tells city to seize aide’s computers

Secretary of State William F. Galvin yesterday ordered the city of Boston to immediately seize City Hall computers and software used by the top policy aide to Mayor Thomas M. Menino and to hire an independent computer forensics specialist to try to retrieve e-mails the aide deleted.

Alan N. Cote, head of the Public Records Division in Galvin’s office, wrote a letter to Menino’s chief lawyer saying the demand was based on a “credible belief’’ that the city violated state public records law by allowing the aide, Michael J. Kineavy, to routinely delete e-mails in such a way that copies were not preserved by city servers.

How many e-mails were deleted? Put it this way - there were only 18 e-mails found for a six-month stretch. I routinely save more than 18 e-mails a day at my job, and easily 18 e-mails a week from the e-mail account I use for this blog. Here's a city employee, bound by the rules of his job to keep records, and he's got 18 e-mails in a six month period. Three e-mails a MONTH?

Asked for comment, Mayor Mumbles replied,
“I’ll cooperate with anybody, because this was an honest mistake made by the administration.’’

Uh, no. An honest mistake is deleting a block of e-mail once. Over a time period of months is not a mistake, it's a pattern. Especially when:
The key witness in federal corruption cases against former state senator Dianne Wilkerson and Councilor Chuck Turner identified Kineavy yesterday as Wilkerson’s sole contact in the Menino administration in her alleged effort to secure a liquor license for a Roxbury nightclub.

"Honest mistake" my hairy Italian ass.

That is all.

4 comments:

libertyman said...

I just wonder if Mayor Menino is smart enough to be dishonest, but certainly the people who work for him must be.

Weer'd Beard said...

I'm wondering what his chances of dodging all of this are.

Somthing tells me it'll take a bigger hammer than this to knock out the Dictator of Meninostan.

Still it would be nice to see the vice chair of Mayors against illigal guns added to the list of Members serving time...
http://daysofourtrailers.blogspot.com/2009/01/eight-naughty-mayors-sitting-in-jail.html

Steve said...

Borepatch can probably elaborate more than I can on the forensic piece of all this, but I think it's smoke and mirrors unless the city of Boston is so corrupt and backwards they've been willingly violating federal law.

In the corporate mail and messaging world, where I live, we routinely build in compliance archiving to the server and storage design. Some lucky souls have everything archived (CxO level), lower level folks are supposed to mark and save items to be retained, although some firms archive everything.
Mr. Kineavy might be screwed and deleted nothing as far as the server is concerned, or back to theory one, the city is so corrupt and backwards their system is carrier pigeons that they call e-mail. Either way, mumbles is probably tongue tied.

notDilbert said...

Steve is correct. Depending on the Mail software in place on the server, Archieving should be configured to take place at the Server level. IF PROPERLY CONFIGURED, it would make no difference what the users did at thier end, a full history of all mail in either direction should be availabe.

Of course, this all assumes that the IT staff is doing the right thing and not just doing as they are told --- or that they were properly funded to be able do that kind of archiving.

...... my guess is that both of the last two are what's happening.