Sunday, August 19, 2007

As former special counsel in the D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Officer, I can testify that it's a bad idea for the D.C. government to delete its e-mail after merely six months [Metro, Aug. 3].

All D.C. government e-mail should be retained for at least several years for two reasons: productivity and accountability. The price of storing e-mail is not very high and is rapidly decreasing, while our need to rely on and analyze electronic data is rapidly increasing. Moreover, we citizens lose important protections when e-mail is destroyed. While Mayor Adrian Fenty is on the right track in trying to reduce costs at the office of technology, he would strengthen his administration by protecting these vital records.

I've directed data-mining efforts and cost-benefit analyses of data-retention policies for government and private clients for more than 30 years. The cost of maintaining copies of communications is trivial and dwarfed by the labor needed to review and save predefined categories of information. Additionally, we shouldn't place this screening in the hands of the wrong people -- you wouldn't let a potential embezzler edit your checkbook ledger.

Also, it's impossible to foresee how important any message might be someday. We've all faced the problem of trying to find the e-mail address of someone with whom we corresponded a year ago whom we now desperately need to contact. What if a message helped locate a citizen who needed assistance on an important mayoral commitment? What if it could help identify a witness to a crime that only recently had been discovered?

Yes, better procedures and technology are needed (look at the failure of the White House to preserve e-mail). For example, copy retention procedures might include off-site transfer to an independent third party that could certify validity and completeness.

Recent efforts to improve privacy protection point to the need for stricter requirements for retaining government employee communications as well as tracing information transfers and disclosures. In the same way that fully indexed electronic document retrieval services (e.g., Google) have revolutionized research, traceable communications can revolutionize privacy protection.

Every government use and transfer of information should be documented by an electronic record. Sanctions against improper disclosure of protected private information are much more effective if all disclosures can be certifiably documented.

To better support and protect D.C. government employees and city residents, Fenty should:

· Mandate that all D.C. government electronic communications will remain online and searchable until a reasonable period of time after the end of his administration; an off-line archive may be suitable thereafter.

· Lead the way in developing government communications audit guidelines, modeled after Sarbanes-Oxley standards.

· Implement systems and software that support these audit standards and reduce costs (e.g., eliminate redundant attachments while preserving the ability to reconstruct original e-mail).

Fenty must ensure the efficiency and integrity of the people who work for him by protecting and saving their e-mail.

-- John Chelen

Washington

The writer is a trustee of the World Educational Software Trust, a nonprofit center for public software and information services.