Caifornia Governor Vetoes Law That Would Have Mandated Retention Of State Government Emails

from the passing-the-savings-on-to-you! dept

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed off on some significant wins for state residents. He approved a bill banning the use of facial recognition tech in law enforcement body cameras -- the first such statewide ban in the United States. Well… I guess that's it really. To be fair, he hasn't been in office all that long.

He also signed off on a mostly-worthless police use of force reform bill and Hancocked a bill that will prevent "hollowing out the middle class" by hollowing out the middle class -- namely, freelance writers who will find it almost impossible to make a living under the state's gig economy law.

To sum up, Governor Newsom may be doing more harm than good this year. Let's hope things improve. One week after signing a bill that would eliminate (some) excessive public record duplication fees by allowing residents to take pictures of documents with their cellphones (rather than pay a public servant an exorbitant amount of money to run a copier), Newsom has restored a bit more opacity to the halls of power. Matthew Keys has the details:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a measure last weekend that would have required local governments to preserve copies of email records for disclosure under the state’s public records law.

The measure, Assembly Bill 1184, would have required local and state agencies to preserve communications sent by email for at least two years so that members of the public may inspect and copy them.

California government agencies have been arguing for years now that emails are not subject to the state's two-year retention period. Since they're not going to voluntarily retain records that many residents would certainly consider to be public records, the bill would have erased the faux confusion over government agency emails.

Instead of providing clarity, Governor Newsom went the other way, leaving it to individuals at individual agencies to make personal judgment calls on email retention… all in the interest of "striking a balance."

Expressing concern for the taxpayers he just screwed out of records, Newsom claims email retention is cost prohibitive.

Gov. Newsom said he was concerned that codifying a preservation requirement for email could require additional personnel and data management policies, the costs of which would be passed on to taxpayers.

But of course taxpayers would be expected to absorb the costs. This much taxpayers understand. They fund the agencies creating the records. They fund public records response efforts. They fund the creation of these emails -- the ones the governor has now decided they can't have access to.

With this veto, agencies have the official blessing to delete emails whenever they feel like it. They can alter policies and practices to ensure as many emails as possible are destroyed, putting them permanently out of reach. Transparency and accountability are great... but maybe they're just too expensive? This isn't logic. It's post hoc rationalization by a governor who's decided there should be a bit more distance between the government and governed.

Filed Under: california, emails, foia, gavin newsom, retention, transparency

UK Government Instituted Automatic Email Deletion Program Right Before Its Freedom Of Information Law Came Into Effect

from the AUTOBURY dept

Loads of politicians continue to skirt the requirements of open records laws by using personal email accounts to handle official business. Others simply implement voluntary/poorly defined data retention policies that ensure nothing of interest will be handed over to the public. Given a short enough retention period, any request can be stonewalled until the autodestruct has rendered responsive files unavailable.

This is what the UK government is doing. Tony Blair, the prime minister behind the implementation of the UK's Freedom of Information laws, has publicly lamented ever inviting the public into the conversation. It now appears they'll still be mostly excluded from any email correspondence. (via slashdot)

Weeks before Tony Blair’s Freedom of Information (FOI) act first came into force, Downing Street adopted a policy of automatically deleting emails more than three months old, resulting in a system described by those who worked under it as ‘dysfunctional’. Campaigners have described the timing of the IT policy as ‘not a coincidence’.

Any emails retained past this point have to be saved by the recipient. The deletion system works so efficiently and thoroughly that some government employees thought they'd been issued faulty devices.

One former permanent secretary told the newspaper that he thought there were problems with his BlackBerry when he noticed his emails kept disappearing.

The public might call this system opacity at its finest. But it's apparently not all that popular with those on the inside, either. It's one thing to be on the outside and attempting to peer in with a stack of FOI requests. It's quite another when government employees often experience email-induced early-onset dementia. The "90 Days or it's Deleted!" policy has been referred to as "extremely frustrating," especially when no one's able to verify what was agreed upon in meetings held only three months ago.

On top of 10 Downing Street's disappearing act, there's a concerted effort by other staffers and lawmakers to keep emails out of the public's hands. Some delete theirs almost immediately after reading. Others avoid discussing anything "interesting" in official emails.

The problem obviously traces back to Blair's hesitant implementation of the law. A promise of new openness was immediately undercut by a deliberate email retention policy change. When the leadership openly regrets and resents new avenues of accountability, the rank-and-file will only be more than happy to follow. In his memoirs, Blair called the FOI law a "weapon" in the hands of "journalists," showing just how deep-seated the government's disdain for openness actually is.

There's not a government on the planet that welcomes the scrutiny of the public. Fortunately, some legislators have recognized this as an unhealthy attitude. The battle over the freedom of information didn't end with FOI laws. It was only the beginning. The UK government -- like ours -- still has plenty of "weapons" of its own to deploy in the interest of opacity. Destruction of "retention" policies, easily-abused exemptions, stonewalling, disingenuous search efforts, exorbitant fulfillment fees -- all of these are the tools the government uses to remain in its natural vampiric state of living off the income of others while recoiling from the sunlight.

Filed Under: email, email deletion, foia, freedom of information, retention, tony blair, uk

After 2-Year-Old Emails Detailing Impropriety Surface, Los Angeles School Board Votes To Limit Retention To One Year

from the accountability-is-for-the-little-people dept

In a set of strange coincidences not unlike those surrounding the IRS/Lois Lerner email disappearance, the Los Angeles Unified school board has decided it will only retain internal emails for one year going forward.

The Los Angeles Unified school board voted Tuesday to buy a Microsoft email archiving service programmed to automatically destroy staff emails after one year.

Why only one year? According to the Chief Information Officer of the school district, the one year limit is mandated by district policy -- which is handy, but likely not the real reason. (Keeping all those bytes is considered "too expensive.") After all, if this policy was already in force, why the vote on retention limits?

More likely, this decision was prompted by recent events -- namely the publication of emails more than a year old.

The decision comes less than three weeks after KPCC published two-year-old internal emails that raised questions about whether Superintendent John Deasy's meetings and discussions with Apple and textbook publisher Pearson influenced the school district's historic $500 million technology contract.

A half-billion that ultimately went nowhere. Deasy allegedly cozied up to the companies before the district awarded them the tech contract, holding personal meetings with both a year before the plan went up for public bidding. The superintendent claimed he did nothing wrong ("discussed a pilot program that went nowhere") but nevertheless cancelled the program three day after KPCC's story went live.

What was implemented never worked properly, making this $500 million (which ultimately turned out to be $1.3 billion) project a complete washout.

The rollout of the iPad program has been plagued with problems, from unfinished software and stolen devices to insufficient wifi at most district schools.

This list doesn't mention another factor, which almost killed the dubious program before it got off the ground: students were able to bypass the built-in protection systems in less than a week. Having already spent a great deal of public money, the school district is going back to the till by reopening the bidding process.

In order to head off future expensive, badly-implemented plans public embarrassments, the district is cutting the public (and accountability) out of the loop. A one year time limit on internal emails is ridiculous in this age of cheap storage and processing power. The only possible motivation for this public reaffirmation of the "destroy after one year" policy is the elimination of some accountability. One year isn't nearly enough time for investigators and journalists to know what they need, ask for it and have it returned. A two-year retention cycle proved to be damaging. The district is simply ensuring the same mistake won't be made again.

Filed Under: email, los angeles, los angeles schools, los angeles unified schools, retention

Behind The Veil Part 2: Let's All Look At Comcast's Customer Retention Playbook For Its Employees!

from the always-be-closing dept

Following one Comcast customer-retention rep's brave attempt to set the record for the most annoying cancellation call, The Verge put out a call for past and current Comcast employees to weigh in on just how rare or frowned-upon this sort of thing is. As the initial submissions noted, this sort of thing isn't so much frowned-upon as it is, oh, let's call it super-actively encouraged. So much so, in fact, that the latest confession dump on The Verge includes Comcast's employee handbook for customer retention reps, and it's exactly as infuriating as you think it is.

A current employee at Comcast who participated in the Comcast Confessions series provided The Verge with a copy of the 20-page guidelines the company uses for evaluating retention specialists. The guidelines are divided into 13 sections:

1. Greet customer clearly
2. Clarify reason for call
3. Relate and empathize
4. Take control
5. Set the agenda
6. Ask targeted questions
7. Consider unstated needs / active listening
8. Take ownership / make offer
9. Overcome objections
10. Close the save
11. Confirm details
12. End on a positive note
13. Documentation

It has all the hallmarks of a playbook designed to piss off and annoy someone who wants to cancel service. Legislated courtesy followed by manufactured empathy that devolves into the assertion of the rep's dominance on the call, all leading to a close of the "save." If you're not in some kind of sales role, this list probably doesn't look familiar to you. I've been in sales all of my life, however, and this is the kind of playbook you get in a sales role at a faceless mega-corporation. Trust me, it's as frustrating for the sales person as it is for the customer. But you know what this isn't? Customer service for someone looking to cancel their damned account.

But the handbook does offer indirect advice on how to get past these Comcast retention people in the form of what "objections" cannot be resolved with some contrived buddy-talk and a "special" offer.

Save Attempt is Not Applicable in the Following Scenarios

-Customer is moving in with an existing Comcast customer (CAE must verify Comcast services active at new address)
-Customer is moving to a non-Comcast area (CAE must verify by looking up zip code)
-Account holder is deceased / incapacitated
-Temporary / seasonal disconnect and Seasonal Suspend Plan is not available in their area
-Natural disaster
-Customer doesn't know what address they're moving to

So, if you're a Comcast customer looking to cancel your service, your playbook is quite clear. Once you are transferred to customer retention, you say the following: "I am cancelling my service because my home was hit by a tornado, flinging me out of the window and into an unknown address that I'll be sharing with someone who already has Comcast service. Also I'm dead."

Happy cancelling, folks!

Filed Under: broadband, cancellation, customer service, retention, sales
Companies: comcast

Frenchman Fined For 'Theft' And 'Fraudulent Retention' For Finding Health Docs Via A Google Search

from the le-cluelessness dept

The basic downloading tool Wget is much in the news at the moment, and here's another story where it plays a central role. The French blogger and activist Olivier Laurelli, also known by his Twitter name Bluetouff, was searching on Google for something else when he spotted an interesting link that turned out to lead to several gigabytes of internal documents held on the French National Agency for Food Safety, Environment, and Labor's extranet (ANSES in French). Ars Technica explains what happened next:

Laurelli merely used the Linux Wget tool to download all of the contents of the Web directory that he found. He left the files on his drive for a few days and then transferred them to his desktop for more convenient reading (which the French government would later spin as "the accused made backup copies of the documents he had stolen"). A few days later, Laurelli searched through the documents he downloaded and sent some to a fellow … writer [on the activist news site Reflets.info], Yovan Menkevick. About two weeks later, a few interesting scientific slides pertaining to nano-substances from the cache were published on Laurelli's site.

When ANSES discovered this, it reported what it called "potential intrusion" and "data theft" to the police. Then France's Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (DCRI in French) became involved. The lower court that heard the case decided Laurelli should not be punished for accessing data that was not secure; ANSES was happy to let it go at that, but DCRI appealed.

It was clear that things would not go well in the appeals court when the presiding judge seemed not to know even how to pronounce "Google " or "login" -- he said "Googluh" and "lojin" (original in French.) The prosecutor was just as bad: he started off his speech by admitting "I didn't even understand half the terms I heard today." Ars Technica reports the denouement of this high-tech French farce as follows:

The appeals court acquitted Laurelli of fraudulently accessing an information system but saw fit to convict Bluetouff of theft of documents and fraudulent retention of information. The court wrote: "It is well demonstrated that he was conscious of his irregular retention in automated data processing, accessed where he downloaded protected evidence; and that investigations have shown that these data had been downloaded before being... disseminated to others; that it is, in any event, established that Olivier Laurelli made copies of computer files inaccessible to the public for personal use without the knowledge and against the will of its owner"

Leaving aside the fact that the appeals court was clearly ill-equipped to understand the technical issues involved, and that the original files were completely unprotected and found by Google's crawler, not Laurelli, there is another disquieting aspect to this affair. Alongside his writing and activism, Laurelli also runs a small computer security company. One of the services it offers is a standard VPN. He was using this VPN service when he accessed the ANSES site, and the fact that his connection was routed via Panama -- the VPN's exit node -- counted heavily against him, he believes:

"This VPN (in fact above all this Panamanian IP address) is probably one of the strongest elements which had driven the prosecution to pursue a criminal case," he wrote.

VPNs represent one of the few tools available to ordinary Internet users to help them bolster their security and privacy against global surveillance. It's deeply troubling that the mere fact of using a VPN to access a Web site was apparently viewed by the court as evidence of criminal intent, rather than simply good online practice in the post-Snowden world.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: anses, bluetouff, documents, france, liability, olivier laurelli, retention, search, security, theft, wget

Newsday Exec: We Didn't Put Up A Paywall To Get People To Pay

from the success! dept

With lots of people finding it rather amusing that a grand total of 35 people have subscribed to Newsday's paywall, a Newsday exec has responded by saying the purpose of the paywall was never about getting people to pay in the first place. It's all about reducing churn from cable subscribers. While the exec claims that those mocking the low number of subscribers ignored this, that's not at all true. In fact, at least in our case, the very title of our post about Newsday's paywall was all about how it was designed to reduce churn for Cablevision subscribers. The bigger point that people were making wasn't specifically about Newsday, but to alert all of those other folks who seem to think that people will jump up and pay for online access to their local newspaper. As Newsday is discovering, that's not the case.

Furthermore, if the goal was just to reduce churn, with no interest in getting outside subscribers, why offer a subscription plan at all? Why not just limit access to those who subscribe to Cablevision? Claiming no interest in signing up outside subscribers is shown to be a lie in the fact that they set up a system specifically to do just that.

Filed Under: paywall, retention
Companies: cablevision, newsday