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Judge orders CDC to stop deleting emails of departing staff: 'likely unlawful'
- sigzero 2y agoLikely? It is.
- halJordan 2y agoFortunately for those within our legal system, they have to be a little more rigorous than simple assertions.
- declan_roberts 2y agoInjecting "Trump-allied legal group" is an incredible way to taint the news story and get people to take sides. FOIA is a blessing, and does more for investigative journalist than almost anything else, but it doesn't work when our government is allowed to illegally covers its tracks.
- eynsham 2y ago[flagged]
- recursive 2y agoSomehow it's refreshing to me that a "Trump-allied legal group" can sometimes do something that seems good to me.
- actionfromafar 2y agoThey are like diodes. Won't work when the shoe is on the other foot. But, yes.
- lelandfe 2y agoTo call America First Legal "Trump-aligned" is putting it mildly, and it would be incredible not to mention it: > Stephen Miller, the former senior advisor to president Donald Trump, is the organization's founder and president. The vice president is Gene Hamilton, a Department of Justice official under Trump, and the executive director is Matthew Whitaker, the acting U.S. attorney general under Trump following Jeff Sessions's resignation. America First Legal's board of directors includes Whitaker and former chief of staff for Trump, Mark Meadows. The name itself is even derived from a Trump campaign slogan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Legal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Legal
- throwup238 2y ago[flagged]
- paulddraper 2y ago[flagged]
- HarryHirsch 2y agoThis is politics, one is permitted to ask for motives. It's not a search for truth, it's a quest for power.
- paulddraper 2y agoThis is very dangerous thinking. It's okay for government to delete emails if the Good Guys want it but not the Bad Guys want it.
- HarryHirsch 2y agoCould there be a misunderstanding? Any organization, Good or Bad, has the right to request materials from the government, and anyone has the right to impugn their motives. (Someone who shouts "ad hominem" in politics has, of course, their own motives.)
- paulddraper 2y agoShouting ad hominem in a lawsuit. How closely do you need to scrutinize the ACLU's motives.
- koolba 2y ago> It's not a search for truth … FOIA requests are as “search for truth” as you can get. Deleting staff emails days after they depart or asking people to email your private Gmail account is impeding any and all searches for truth.
- 2y ago
- cyanydeez 2y ago[flagged]
- liberalmongo 2y ago[dead]
- ikekkdcjkfke 2y agoDivided we fall
- jfengel 2y agoThat ship sailed a long time ago.
- evanjrowley 2y agoI wonder what factors led to the CDC Office of the Inspector General (OIG) missing this. Will the IG be auditing them on this in the future?
- Jtsummers 2y agoNot reported or not caught in spot checks (audits). You'd need a list of "lower level" (whatever that means) employees who had left more than 90 days prior to catch this. Also, many audits are somewhat optimistic in their approach. Ask for some portion of the archives. See a few hundred employees here (perhaps all GS-13 and up) who left 4 years or so ago and are still in the archives. Great! They don't dig into who the employees are to notice that lower ranked employee emails are gone and everything looks compliant. This isn't the only audit they need to do this week so this is as far as they go.
- gopher_space 2y agoIt’d be a mistake to assume a compliance process exists at all if it’s never been triggered.
- tptacek 2y agoPresumably CDC's records retentions policies go back many years, and the GRS 6.1 Capstone rules were promulgated in 2019, so (a) the policy discrepancy is pretty recent and (b) the douchebags-of-liberty† challenging it only had an opportunity to do so after the previous Republican administration left office --- they themselves being right-wing partisans. † a technical term, see Colbert
- dredmorbius 2y agoI had to look up that technical term. Presumably from Jon Stewart, actually: <https://creativeloafing.com/content-211263-rip-douchebag-of-liberty https://creativeloafing.com/content-211263-rip-douchebag-of-...>
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
- figmaballs 2y ago[dead]
- mjevans 2y agoDon't they use a time based legal discovery archive? I'm not sure when a government org is allowed to expunge old records though, maybe never? Still filing / dividing / partitioning it by at least year and month would speed up searches with time windows.
- foolswisdom 2y agoThe article says that the judge wrote that in order to comply with protocol they were required to hold onto emails for longer than they did, he did not say that they could never be deleted.
- chaps 2y agoHah. They almost definitely do. Not sure how it works at the federal level, but in Illinois here we have the Local Records Act, which requires that retention policies be created for all documents/records. When I FOIA'd for all of the retention policies they initially told me that my request was too difficult, because they were all digital files -- but he was going on vacation the next day so he told me to expect an unduly burdensome denial. I got it the next day from whoever took over. Anywho -- Most of the retention policies are older than me. That, and the question of whether third party data that's shared with a gov agency should fall under a retention policy or not.. is clearly an open ended question. Edit: found it: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/illinois-168/retention-policies-from-the-city-of-chicago-77532/ https://www.muckrock.com/foi/illinois-168/retention-policies.... Also at one point had to FOIA-sue the White House OMB for their email metadata when they said that they don't routinely use powershell. But they were sued years before where the nearly identical question came up, where they showed that powershell was used. And that's for data that they're legally required to collect for NARA archiving. Point being -- lol it's a shit show.
- Natfan 2y agoJust wondering, what's the issue with PowerShell here? Is it because 5.1 is closed source?
- PaywallBuster 2y ago
- greenchair 2y agoI guess they had to delete the emails because they weren't smart enough to use secret gmail addresses to avoid oversight like their leaders do.
- HarryHirsch 2y agoThat tactic is strongly recommended against. If there is an indication that someone is evading discovery by using their private email, then the private email becomes discoverable. Judges take avoidance antics very poorly, generally.
- petermcneeley 2y ago> then the private email becomes discoverable. Has this happened in the case in question?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ericjmorey 2y agoYes.
- michaelt 2y agoYes - the right way to avoid discovery is in-person meetings, telephone calls, and discussions with your lawyer cced. I find it pretty understandable that politicians would end up with the personal and professional blurred together to be honest - it's not really a job that lends itself to a clear distinction between the two. You can't really separate the Obama Presidency from Obama.
- ericjmorey 2y agoCopying your lawyer on an email with a third party does not make that email privileged communication subject to attorney client privilege.
- 2y ago
- hooverd 2y ago[flagged]
- kccoder 2y agoWe do not.
- coolhand2120 2y agoThey might contain proof of civil rights abuses, such as censoring scientists like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who has been quite vocal about such abuses.
- aeurielesn 2y ago[flagged]
- ajross 2y agoThis is the kind of comment that really can't be responded to without drawing accusations of trolling. But I'll risk it: I'm genuinely curious what you mean? You're implying the existence of a conspiracy of some sort, but I checked and the document you mention is a real one and... not particularly controversial? It's here, for those curious: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/disparities/mai/pdf/LGBTQ_Inclusivity-508.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/disparities/mai/pdf/LGBTQ_I... Basically from my perspective as one not steeped in the relevant conspiracy lore, this seems pretty boring and sincere. I'd assume that the "intentions" behind the document were exactly what it claims in its text: it's a somewhat boring and unimaginative guide for schools to use when implementing inclusivity programs for queer youth, something that almost all schools are doing in some form at this point. Basically, spill it: what are you accusing the CDC of here?
- rocqua 2y agoI believe OP was questioning the intentions of the trump-aligned laywers who sued for access to records regarding the LGBTQ document.
- hooverd 2y agoI believe "they" in this case is the America First org.
- MBCook 2y agoI don't think GP was a troll implying the document itself was a problem. I think they were implying that the request for the document or information about its creation is the issue. At last that's not my reading. The document's mere existence or quotes take from it, likely out of context, could easily be used as proof by various groups as some sort of agenda or other problematic behavior on the part of the CDC. There are plenty of groups out there happy to gin up any "evidence" they can, no matter how flimsy, to "prove" their world view and can do a lot of damage in the process. And if it's "official government evidence" that's "being hidden" all the better. A simple example we've seen: focusing and promoting the damage caused by vaccines as proof all vaccines are bad and no one should ever be forced to have one. If a vaccine had a 20% side effect rate there are plenty of people who would go nuts for "official evidence" of lots of side effects. Even if that side effect was a headache in the 24 after injection and the vaccine was a one time cure for all disease. Unfortunately there's a lot of bad faith acting out there, and many of those same people seem willing to harass the hell out of the people they view as evil.
- roamerz 2y agoI would have assumed that everyone in this gov/enterprise space used an auditable email logging solution that keeps communications for whatever their applicable policy dictates.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y agoI've been reading stories about US Gov agency dirs/mgmnt using private email for Gov business. Ostensibly because it went a long way dodge FOIA. The practice was widespread in every admin, from W until at least 2020.
- adastra22 2y agoThat’s what the whole “Hillary’s emails” thing was about. Not that she had any damning emails, but that she was using a personal email account as Secretary of State to dodge FOIA requests.
- HideousKojima 2y ago>Not that she had any damning emails Hard to say this since tons that were under subpeona were deleted Edit: the best part is Hillary claiming the emails weren't work related and the press just mindlessly repeating that claim. No way to tell if the claim is true or not since they were, y'know, deleted: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-deleted-33000-emails-secretary-state/story?id=42389308 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-deleted-3300...
- coding123 2y ago[flagged]
- irrational 2y agoI almost don’t even bother reading my email anymore because almost all work happens over slack and zoom. Do they have the same retention requirements for all other non-email communication channels?
- rib3ye 2y agoI started working in the entertainment industry several years ago. If there's accountability on the line, bosses want it in an email so they can point the finger at someone when they try to slither their way out of a fuckup.
- Nerada 2y agoI work in a heavily regulated industry, and 'yes' is the answer for us, even going as far as mobile-first IM platforms. There's a very small number of vendors who pull in lots of money making UI hooks for things like WeChat and WhatsApp just so we can store the messages for the people in Risk and Compliance.
- nailer 2y agoI can’t remember what the case was but I recently read an article where somebody was joking about a company doing something illegal and the response from the legal department in Slack was “ha ha shut up”
- darthwalsh 2y agoThis is the norm at big companies. During your Company Ethics training (when you learn about insider training and not bribing government officials) they also tell you "never comment on the legality of something unless you're a lawyer. But if you do, say it in a meeting and not digitally."
- datavirtue 2y agoAll the emails are still in other people's inbox/sent. Completely discoverable.
- coryfklein 2y agoNot if most of them are to other CDC employees.
- cafard 2y agoMany years ago, I worked for a contractor at a civil agency. Simply to make the email system function, we needed to keep retention at two or three weeks. The only persons for whom email was to be held were political appointees. What I saw was that they would take most of their last couple of weeks as vacation, and that there was almost never anything but department-wide announcements. It would have been possible to retrieve a point-in-time snapshot from a monthly backup, and that did happen a couple of times.