I filed a report for NPR News today about how and when our government — city, state, and federal — hangs on to official email, and what that means for both IT budgets and public knowledge.
Short version: policies are all over the map, there's no consistency, and government watchdogs believe more frequent purging means the public loses access to valuable historic information.
Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty recently ordered that all e-mails not flagged as "save" by city government workers will be deleted and purged from the city's email system in January of 2008. After that initial purge, all city employee email older than 6 months which is not specifically flagged as "save" will be auto-deleted.
The more e-mail government employees send, the more there is to store, costing taxpayers money. But costs must be balanced against the need to preserve history, and ensure government transparency. If individual officials decide which emails to save and which to delete, will they choose to save potentially incriminating or embarassing emails?
We hear from Wired News reporter Ryan Singel, who often covers news involving technology and government transparency; Purdue University professor and cyberforensics expert Marcus Rogers, Christina Fleps, general counsel for the office of the Chief Technology Officer for the DC city government, and Kevin Hall, who is spokesperson for Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine.
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Link (and direct MP3 Link) for "How Long Should Government Email Linger?"
Link to audio streams for a related conversation that ran today with Day to Day host Madeleine Brand, about deciding when and how to delete or archive personal email.
Or, listen in the "Xeni Tech" podcast (subscribe via iTunes here). NPR "Xeni Tech" archives here, and "Day to Day" archives here.
