8 ms·

Federal judge sanctions Seattle officials for deleting texts

128 points by Pigalowda 4y ago

mr_beans 4y ago
Summer of love!
Steltek 4y ago
I dunno about you guys but I'm pretty sick of the word "sanction". What's next? "My kids didn't clean their room before bedtime so I had to impose crippling sanctions"? "CEO enacts sanctions on employees after poor quarterly results"?
- pc86 4y ago
  It's a term of art, not sure why it bothers you on such a personal level.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dylan604 4y ago
    My issue with the word sanction is that it is not really defined other than "cripiling" so I have no idea what it is actually doing. It also means that the individuals are not directly being punished. I have the same feeling towards Congress when they censure someone. Ooooohh, you've used a big word to say you didn't like something someone did/said. Big whoop. It means nothing. It's not even as scary as being sent to timeout. Then again, the website told me "Your browser is set to private mode. To continue reading, log in or subscribe." so I was unable to read the full article. Whether I'm in private mode or not is none of their damn business.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      > My issue with the word sanction is that it is not really defined other than "cripiling" so I have no idea what it is actually doing. They explain the sanctions directly in the article. "For that reason, Zilly said that when the case goes to trial he’ll instruct the jury that it may presume the text messages were detrimental to the city’s legal position and that there’s significant circumstantial evidence they were deleted intentionally." "He also ordered the city to pay the attorneys fees for those who showed city leaders destroyed significant evidence about their decision-making during CHOP, including their move to abandon the Police Department’s East Precinct." Instructing the jury to assume the evidence of wrongdoing existed is indeed a crippling sanction; that's an immensely high bar for the lawyers to have to jump over now.
      - dylan604 4y ago
        >They explain the sanctions directly in the article. Maybe you missed where is stated: >>Then again, the website told me "Your browser is set to private mode. To continue reading, log in or subscribe." so I was unable to read the full article. Whether I'm in private mode or not is none of their damn business.
        ceejayoz 4y ago
        > I was unable to read the full article. Then it is rather odd to complain that the article lacks information.
        dylan604 4y ago
        Just like you not reading where arguments have already been stipulated. what's your point?
        ceejayoz 4y ago
        The point was to provide you with the information you were looking for.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bell-cot 4y ago
It really feels as if "Never outgrew junior high school" was an unwritten requirement to be a municipal official in the U.S. Fond fantasy: Judges send such idiot officials to prison for ~50 years. And that is repeated so often that we start seeing occasional grown-ups in municipal offices.
- pc86 4y ago
  As someone who, in a previous life/career, routinely worked with municipal officials, I'd love to see many of them spend the rest of their lives in prison. As would many people who had to work with them day to day. But, if you think it's hard to get good people to do thankless work for $40k/yr now, just try doing it when the last couple people in that chair are in prison for a few decades right now.
  - jackmott42 4y ago
    Everyone wants higher quality public servants. Nobody wants to pay taxes.
    - Pigalowda 4y ago
      It just depends on the job. Looks like many make substantially more than me, though I'm an "apprentice" https://www.thecentersquare.com/washington/hundreds-of-seattle-employees-out-earned-the-mayor-in-2019/article_28bbf57e-d5d1-11ea-b7d6-635a94b15c83.html https://www.thecentersquare.com/washington/hundreds-of-seatt...
      - alephnerd 4y ago
        Every single one of those "high salary" jabs includes Insurance and Pension contributions and force overtime. That's the equivalent of saying an employee earning $90,000 is actually earning around $200,000 because of UI, Healthcare, and 401k plan spend by an employer.
        Pigalowda 4y ago
rayiner 4y ago
> For that reason, Zilly said that when the case goes to trial he’ll instruct the jury that it may presume the text messages were detrimental to the city’s legal position and that there’s significant circumstantial evidence they were deleted intentionally. This is a common and fitting, though usually devastating, sanction for spoliation of evidence.
- next_xibalba 4y ago
  To which side is it usually devastating? I would assume it would be for the destroyer of evidence, but maybe good lawyers can explain that away and seed sufficient doubt?
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > To which side is it usually devastating? To the obvious one. "Assume there was evidence so bad they risked criminal charges to get rid of it" makes instilling doubt a lot harder.
    - next_xibalba 4y ago
      Are you a litigation attorney?
    - unyttigfjelltol 4y ago
      It's a terrible result for everyone, plaintiff, defendant and court. Plaintiff because, culpable or not, those texts may be the best explanation for whatever happened. Losing them means they're framing their arguments a bit in the dark. It's easier to persuade if you land pretty close to an actual truth, and that's harder without complete discovery of executive communications. For defendants, because the explanations are actually pretty plausible for a municipal IT operation, and it's dumb for big liability to ride on some stupid, irrelevant IT gaffe on some peripheral technology. The court because there isn't a good answer and deciding big cases on questionable legal presumptions and fictions that themselves turn on irrelevant technical arcana-- these are the things people dislike about lawyers.
Wyoming23 4y ago
Doesn't the service provider (AT&T or whoever) have a copy of the messages they could subpoena? It seems shocking to me that deleting the messages off the phones makes them inaccessible to prosecution, when presumably there are backups on multiple servers controlled by telecom companies and other government entities.
- Rimintil 4y ago
  It makes no sense that a telcom would be 'backing up' your SMS (or maybe not even SMS -- could all be iMessage which the telcom doesn't see) texts. What reason would they have to do so? Where's the business value of storing all of that data, supporting the infrastructure, supporting restore requests from customers?
  - justinclift 4y ago
    Some countries have legislation around this. eg telecoms providers must at all times keep the latest 2 days worth of SMS messages from all subscribers
    - late2part 4y ago
      Just long enough to be quickly copied off if appropriate filters exist.
  - from 4y ago
    Here is a graphic from a VICE article: https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1634930279896-retentionperiods.png https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1634930279896-r... Actual message content is kept only for a short period of time.
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    The carriers themselves likely wouldn’t do it. The government just needs a data hose https://www.dhs.gov/fusion-center-locations-and-contact-information https://www.dhs.gov/fusion-center-locations-and-contact-info...
  - 4y ago
uxp100 4y ago
This happened a month ago. The case settled, afaik.
- lesuorac 4y ago
  It settled literally 2 days ago! That's pretty recent. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17292181/hunters-capital-llc-v-city-of-seattle/?page=2 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17292181/hunters-capita...
- Jacobinski 4y ago
  How do these types of settlements usually work? Do the offending officials help pay for the settlement or are all the costs paid for using taxpayer money?
  - degrees57 4y ago
    Yes, generally the taxpayer pays. I work for a County local government. When we lose a case, we have our litigation insurance pay. Then the insurance policy rate immediately goes up. Sometimes the government employee does something so agregious that we say "we cannot defend you: you are on your own" but that is really rare.
  - mrtweetyhack 4y ago
    [dead]
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    Typically the defendant is the City/ an agent of the City so the defendant (the City) pays. Cities get a lot of money through taxes so one could say that it's paid for by taxpayers although it wouldn't be completely accurate as they have other revenue sources (fines, Federal money, etc).
tssva 4y ago
Buried near the bottom of the article is the fact that one of the main plaintiffs purposely deleted texts and was also sanctioned.
cxf12 4y ago
"The former mayor has offered a number of explanations for the missing messages, including that she dropped her phone in water, that she inadvertently changed the phone’s deletion settings and that “someone” set a new phone to delete messages older than 30 days, resulting in a rolling deletion of previous messages." Could the writers of this piece not come up with a more lurid and entertaining headline?
- lesuorac 4y ago
  That part isn't a great quote, The actual explanation is all of the above. The mayor dropped their phone in water and it stoped working and after they received a new phone it had the 30d retention setting set (and this all being city equipment, the mayor didn't set their own phone up). Also pretty much everybody in the case (defendent + plantif) had deleted some messages ... [1]: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17292181/166/hunters-capital-llc-v-city-of-seattle/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17292181/166/hunters-ca...
- layer8 4y ago
  That one bit seems unlikely though: > the former chief apparently deleted more than 27,000 of those text messages by hand.
  - therealdrag0 4y ago
    Can you see what’s been deleted by hand or not?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - lesuorac 4y ago
      No. Part of the reasoning provided by the judge as to why the sanctions were limited was that the plantif's own efforts could not determine which of the deletions by the defendants were manual or automatic.
zephrx1111 4y ago
I’m from China. This reminds me the often seen CCP—ish operations. Surveillance cameras are everywhere on street. But if asked the footage to against themselves, the usual answers are cameras broken, storage broken, or even server is missing.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  they learned from the bast....
- mrtweetyhack 4y ago
  [dead]
water-your-self 4y ago
> The former mayor has offered a number of explanations for the missing messages, including that she dropped her phone in water, that she inadvertently changed the phone’s deletion settings and that “someone” set a new phone to delete messages older than 30 days, resulting in a rolling deletion of previous messages. I would expect this from a middle schooler, not a mayor.
- colpabar 4y ago
  How do we allow these people in government? Why are such statements that are obvious bullshit to anyone who has ever used a smartphone not immediately ridiculed and barred from any position of power for their rest of their lives? How are we supposed to trust our government when this is what they do?
- buildbot 4y ago
  It was extremely intentional - she is a prosecutor and would know exactly what she was doing.
  - mrandish 4y ago
    Further, she had the experience to understand exactly how damaging the text messages would be AND she would know that the fact she deleted them would be revealed in discovery and severely punished by most judges YET decided to delete them anyway. That's how damaging they must have been. Also, the texts were sent to someone and both parties had to delete them for deleting to work - so... conspiracy too.
  - evil-olive 4y ago
    > she is a prosecutor and would know exactly what she was doing yes, but it's even worse than that > Jenny Durkan is a partner and co-founder of the Seattle office of global law firm Quinn Emanuel. Her practice focues on cybersecurity issues, white collar investigations and litigation. [0] and > Durkan served for two years on Attorney General Holder’s original Attorney General Advisory Committee, and has chaired his advisory Subcommittee on Cybercrime and Intellectual Property Enforcement since 2009. [1] of all the federal prosecutors (US Attorneys) in the country, she chaired the cybercrime subcommittee. and her private practice focused on cybersecurity issues and white collar crime. and she committed a white-collar cybercrime. 0: https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/print-edition/2015/11/20/jenny-durkan.html https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/print-edition/2015/11/20... 1: https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/us-attorney-jenny-durkan-justice-department-leader-cybercrime-step-down https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/us-attorney-jenny-durka...
aaronbrethorst 4y ago
This article is out of date. CHS has a more up-to-date article on the status of the lawsuit: https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2023/02/city-settles-chop-deliberate-indifference-lawsuit-with-capitol-hill-property-owners-and-businesses/ https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2023/02/city-settles-chop...
Jun8 4y ago
Interesting note; the NYT profile linked in this article (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/us/defund-police-seattle-protests.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/us/defund-police-seattle-...) was by Nellie Bowles. She left NYT in Nov 2021 and revealed that she was bullied to leave. Articles that went against the NYT grain like these probably were the main cause. BTW, a similar bullying is underway on the topic of trans care, see this letter by NYT staff targeting a small group of journalists: https://nytletter.com/ https://nytletter.com/ Interesting fact about Bowles that’s relevant to HN: Years ago she did a profile of Jessica Livingston that ticked pg off: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2014/8/21/11630108/ycs-jessica-livingston-was-hit-on-by-a-vc-on-the-way-to-this-interview https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2014/8/21/11630108/ycs-jess...
- lumpit 4y ago
  That letter sure does like to smear gender critical folks, or even just those concerned about standards of medical care, as "anti-trans hate groups" and "far right hate groups". No wonder the NYT told them thanks but no thanks.

128 points by Pigalowda 4y ago

Summer of love!

I dunno about you guys but I'm pretty sick of the word "sanction". What's next? "My kids didn't clean their room before bedtime so I had to impose crippling sanctions"? "CEO enacts sanctions on employees after poor quarterly results"?

pc86 4y ago
It's a term of art, not sure why it bothers you on such a personal level.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 4y ago
  My issue with the word sanction is that it is not really defined other than "cripiling" so I have no idea what it is actually doing. It also means that the individuals are not directly being punished. I have the same feeling towards Congress when they censure someone. Ooooohh, you've used a big word to say you didn't like something someone did/said. Big whoop. It means nothing. It's not even as scary as being sent to timeout. Then again, the website told me "Your browser is set to private mode. To continue reading, log in or subscribe." so I was unable to read the full article. Whether I'm in private mode or not is none of their damn business.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > My issue with the word sanction is that it is not really defined other than "cripiling" so I have no idea what it is actually doing. They explain the sanctions directly in the article. "For that reason, Zilly said that when the case goes to trial he’ll instruct the jury that it may presume the text messages were detrimental to the city’s legal position and that there’s significant circumstantial evidence they were deleted intentionally." "He also ordered the city to pay the attorneys fees for those who showed city leaders destroyed significant evidence about their decision-making during CHOP, including their move to abandon the Police Department’s East Precinct." Instructing the jury to assume the evidence of wrongdoing existed is indeed a crippling sanction; that's an immensely high bar for the lawyers to have to jump over now.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      >They explain the sanctions directly in the article. Maybe you missed where is stated: >>Then again, the website told me "Your browser is set to private mode. To continue reading, log in or subscribe." so I was unable to read the full article. Whether I'm in private mode or not is none of their damn business.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        > I was unable to read the full article. Then it is rather odd to complain that the article lacks information.
        dylan604 4y ago
        Just like you not reading where arguments have already been stipulated. what's your point?
        ceejayoz 4y ago
        The point was to provide you with the information you were looking for.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

bell-cot 4y ago

It really feels as if "Never outgrew junior high school" was an unwritten requirement to be a municipal official in the U.S. Fond fantasy: Judges send such idiot officials to prison for ~50 years. And that is repeated so often that we start seeing occasional grown-ups in municipal offices.

pc86 4y ago
As someone who, in a previous life/career, routinely worked with municipal officials, I'd love to see many of them spend the rest of their lives in prison. As would many people who had to work with them day to day. But, if you think it's hard to get good people to do thankless work for $40k/yr now, just try doing it when the last couple people in that chair are in prison for a few decades right now.
- jackmott42 4y ago
  Everyone wants higher quality public servants. Nobody wants to pay taxes.
  - Pigalowda 4y ago
    It just depends on the job. Looks like many make substantially more than me, though I'm an "apprentice" https://www.thecentersquare.com/washington/hundreds-of-seattle-employees-out-earned-the-mayor-in-2019/article_28bbf57e-d5d1-11ea-b7d6-635a94b15c83.html https://www.thecentersquare.com/washington/hundreds-of-seatt...
    - alephnerd 4y ago
      Every single one of those "high salary" jabs includes Insurance and Pension contributions and force overtime. That's the equivalent of saying an employee earning $90,000 is actually earning around $200,000 because of UI, Healthcare, and 401k plan spend by an employer.
      - Pigalowda 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago

> For that reason, Zilly said that when the case goes to trial he’ll instruct the jury that it may presume the text messages were detrimental to the city’s legal position and that there’s significant circumstantial evidence they were deleted intentionally. This is a common and fitting, though usually devastating, sanction for spoliation of evidence.

next_xibalba 4y ago
To which side is it usually devastating? I would assume it would be for the destroyer of evidence, but maybe good lawyers can explain that away and seed sufficient doubt?
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > To which side is it usually devastating? To the obvious one. "Assume there was evidence so bad they risked criminal charges to get rid of it" makes instilling doubt a lot harder.
  - next_xibalba 4y ago
    Are you a litigation attorney?
  - unyttigfjelltol 4y ago
    It's a terrible result for everyone, plaintiff, defendant and court. Plaintiff because, culpable or not, those texts may be the best explanation for whatever happened. Losing them means they're framing their arguments a bit in the dark. It's easier to persuade if you land pretty close to an actual truth, and that's harder without complete discovery of executive communications. For defendants, because the explanations are actually pretty plausible for a municipal IT operation, and it's dumb for big liability to ride on some stupid, irrelevant IT gaffe on some peripheral technology. The court because there isn't a good answer and deciding big cases on questionable legal presumptions and fictions that themselves turn on irrelevant technical arcana-- these are the things people dislike about lawyers.

Wyoming23 4y ago

Doesn't the service provider (AT&T or whoever) have a copy of the messages they could subpoena? It seems shocking to me that deleting the messages off the phones makes them inaccessible to prosecution, when presumably there are backups on multiple servers controlled by telecom companies and other government entities.

Rimintil 4y ago
It makes no sense that a telcom would be 'backing up' your SMS (or maybe not even SMS -- could all be iMessage which the telcom doesn't see) texts. What reason would they have to do so? Where's the business value of storing all of that data, supporting the infrastructure, supporting restore requests from customers?
- justinclift 4y ago
  Some countries have legislation around this. eg telecoms providers must at all times keep the latest 2 days worth of SMS messages from all subscribers
  - late2part 4y ago
    Just long enough to be quickly copied off if appropriate filters exist.
- from 4y ago
  Here is a graphic from a VICE article: https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1634930279896-retentionperiods.png https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1634930279896-r... Actual message content is kept only for a short period of time.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  The carriers themselves likely wouldn’t do it. The government just needs a data hose https://www.dhs.gov/fusion-center-locations-and-contact-information https://www.dhs.gov/fusion-center-locations-and-contact-info...
- 4y ago

uxp100 4y ago

This happened a month ago. The case settled, afaik.

lesuorac 4y ago
It settled literally 2 days ago! That's pretty recent. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17292181/hunters-capital-llc-v-city-of-seattle/?page=2 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17292181/hunters-capita...
Jacobinski 4y ago
How do these types of settlements usually work? Do the offending officials help pay for the settlement or are all the costs paid for using taxpayer money?
- degrees57 4y ago
  Yes, generally the taxpayer pays. I work for a County local government. When we lose a case, we have our litigation insurance pay. Then the insurance policy rate immediately goes up. Sometimes the government employee does something so agregious that we say "we cannot defend you: you are on your own" but that is really rare.
- mrtweetyhack 4y ago
  [dead]
- lesuorac 4y ago
  Typically the defendant is the City/ an agent of the City so the defendant (the City) pays. Cities get a lot of money through taxes so one could say that it's paid for by taxpayers although it wouldn't be completely accurate as they have other revenue sources (fines, Federal money, etc).

tssva 4y ago

Buried near the bottom of the article is the fact that one of the main plaintiffs purposely deleted texts and was also sanctioned.

cxf12 4y ago

"The former mayor has offered a number of explanations for the missing messages, including that she dropped her phone in water, that she inadvertently changed the phone’s deletion settings and that “someone” set a new phone to delete messages older than 30 days, resulting in a rolling deletion of previous messages." Could the writers of this piece not come up with a more lurid and entertaining headline?

lesuorac 4y ago
That part isn't a great quote, The actual explanation is all of the above. The mayor dropped their phone in water and it stoped working and after they received a new phone it had the 30d retention setting set (and this all being city equipment, the mayor didn't set their own phone up). Also pretty much everybody in the case (defendent + plantif) had deleted some messages ... [1]: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17292181/166/hunters-capital-llc-v-city-of-seattle/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17292181/166/hunters-ca...
layer8 4y ago
That one bit seems unlikely though: > the former chief apparently deleted more than 27,000 of those text messages by hand.
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  Can you see what’s been deleted by hand or not?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    No. Part of the reasoning provided by the judge as to why the sanctions were limited was that the plantif's own efforts could not determine which of the deletions by the defendants were manual or automatic.

zephrx1111 4y ago

I’m from China. This reminds me the often seen CCP—ish operations. Surveillance cameras are everywhere on street. But if asked the footage to against themselves, the usual answers are cameras broken, storage broken, or even server is missing.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
they learned from the bast....
mrtweetyhack 4y ago
[dead]

water-your-self 4y ago

> The former mayor has offered a number of explanations for the missing messages, including that she dropped her phone in water, that she inadvertently changed the phone’s deletion settings and that “someone” set a new phone to delete messages older than 30 days, resulting in a rolling deletion of previous messages. I would expect this from a middle schooler, not a mayor.

colpabar 4y ago
How do we allow these people in government? Why are such statements that are obvious bullshit to anyone who has ever used a smartphone not immediately ridiculed and barred from any position of power for their rest of their lives? How are we supposed to trust our government when this is what they do?
buildbot 4y ago
It was extremely intentional - she is a prosecutor and would know exactly what she was doing.
- mrandish 4y ago
  Further, she had the experience to understand exactly how damaging the text messages would be AND she would know that the fact she deleted them would be revealed in discovery and severely punished by most judges YET decided to delete them anyway. That's how damaging they must have been. Also, the texts were sent to someone and both parties had to delete them for deleting to work - so... conspiracy too.
- evil-olive 4y ago
  > she is a prosecutor and would know exactly what she was doing yes, but it's even worse than that > Jenny Durkan is a partner and co-founder of the Seattle office of global law firm Quinn Emanuel. Her practice focues on cybersecurity issues, white collar investigations and litigation. [0] and > Durkan served for two years on Attorney General Holder’s original Attorney General Advisory Committee, and has chaired his advisory Subcommittee on Cybercrime and Intellectual Property Enforcement since 2009. [1] of all the federal prosecutors (US Attorneys) in the country, she chaired the cybercrime subcommittee. and her private practice focused on cybersecurity issues and white collar crime. and she committed a white-collar cybercrime. 0: https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/print-edition/2015/11/20/jenny-durkan.html https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/print-edition/2015/11/20... 1: https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/us-attorney-jenny-durkan-justice-department-leader-cybercrime-step-down https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/us-attorney-jenny-durka...

aaronbrethorst 4y ago

This article is out of date. CHS has a more up-to-date article on the status of the lawsuit: https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2023/02/city-settles-chop-deliberate-indifference-lawsuit-with-capitol-hill-property-owners-and-businesses/ https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2023/02/city-settles-chop...

Jun8 4y ago

Interesting note; the NYT profile linked in this article (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/us/defund-police-seattle-protests.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/us/defund-police-seattle-...) was by Nellie Bowles. She left NYT in Nov 2021 and revealed that she was bullied to leave. Articles that went against the NYT grain like these probably were the main cause. BTW, a similar bullying is underway on the topic of trans care, see this letter by NYT staff targeting a small group of journalists: https://nytletter.com/ https://nytletter.com/ Interesting fact about Bowles that’s relevant to HN: Years ago she did a profile of Jessica Livingston that ticked pg off: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2014/8/21/11630108/ycs-jessica-livingston-was-hit-on-by-a-vc-on-the-way-to-this-interview https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2014/8/21/11630108/ycs-jess...

lumpit 4y ago
That letter sure does like to smear gender critical folks, or even just those concerned about standards of medical care, as "anti-trans hate groups" and "far right hate groups". No wonder the NYT told them thanks but no thanks.