Did a Texas Sheriff violate email compliance laws? [part 2]
February 4, 2008 at 7:13 pm (archive email, business, data retention, Email Archiving, email backup, email compliance, email management, email retention, email security, legal, message archiving, news, politics, texas, thoughts)
UPDATE: I have some more news to add to my January 21st post regarding Texas sheriff Tommy Thomas violating the states email compliance laws. Charles Kuffner reports that Willie Mata of the sheriff’s email admin wrote a letter to the editor of the Houston Chronicle disputing some of the assertions made in a story about the sheriff’s new email retention policy.
Mata wrote: “I must take issue with the comment that the sheriff overnight erases thousands of e-mails all on his departments computers without warning. In actuality, I moved 5 1/2 months worth of e-mail from nearly 4,000 mailboxes onto archive tape. At no time were e-mails erased from computers as Casey asserts, and all of these e-mail messages, attachments included, are recoverable. It must also be noted that no investigative information has been lost, as suggested by some deputies, and the deputies who have made such suggestions are not assigned to investigative functions.
Casey was correct in his statement that the users were given no warning. Let me explain why. As our public information officer, Capt. John Martin, has stated to the media on numerous occasions, we have a critical storage problem on our servers. If I had taken the time towarn our users, they would have off-loaded their email from the mail servers to our file servers. As both mail and file operations are served by the same storage system, there was insufficient storage to allow this. The storage system, placed into operation in March 2006, was sized to serve us for approximately two years before needing an expansion.”
My thoughts: Why couldn’t the sheriff respond himself? This is the first problem I have with Mata’s letter to Rick Casey of the Houston Chronicle. This might have been taken more seriously if it appeared legitimate. Secondly, if there really is an email archiving system in place, why has there been no mention of it before? Lastly, was it really necessary for the sheriff to keep all of his users in the dark about what was going on? Was it worth all of the bad press? There might indeed be a critical storage problem in the sheriff’s department, but this was handled terribly. I think Charles Kuffner summed this situation up best on his website, and I am going to post what he wrote here:
“If Sgt. Newby is typical, then the users didn’t understand what was happening. And I suspect he was typical, because as Mark Bennet shows, the memo and accompanying information (both PDF’s) that Sgt. Newby and his coworkers would have received makes no mention of moving emails to archive tape, where presumably it can be retrieved as needed. It baldly says: ‘Please consider this memorandum as authorization for the immediate deletion of all departmental email that is, as of the date of this menorandum, older than 14 days.’ There may have been some confusion here about what the sheriff’s office was doing, but I don’t think it was Rick Casey who was the cause of it.”
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