Two years ago, Governor Cuomo unveiled a new government portal called “open.ny.gov.”\u00a0 At that time the governor proclaimed, “”This new website will dramatically increase public access to one of our most valuable assets – data. As it expands and evolves over time,\u00a0open.ny.gov\u00a0will spark innovation, improve efficiency, promote accountability, and bring the people back into government.”<\/p>\n
Fast forward to last week and the governor was under siege for his program to purge from the state email system all electronic correspondence that was over 90 days old.\u00a0 How can the Administration reconcile moving so dramatically from proudly promising openness to undermining it?<\/p>\n
Ironically, as the state was unveiling its open.ny.gov, it was quietly implementing a policy to delete all of the emails of all state workers.\u00a0 What provoked the media\u2019s interest last week was an internal memo that surfaced outlining the policy.\u00a0 The logic, according to the governor\u2019s office,was that as the state consolidated its older computer systems to a new cloud-based system, the 90-day deletion policy was put into place for the entire new system.<\/p>\n
The state\u2019s new system purges deleted mail after 90 days and makes sure that mail “cannot be recovered.” The Cuomo Administration document says that all mail — whether manually deleted or not — “will be subject to the 90 day retention policy.”<\/p>\n
The state\u2019s policy requires employees to manually retain emails that are the subjects of FOIL requests or are necessary for litigation. \u00a0Of course, how will government workers know if such emails are necessary for litigation before the 90 day deadline?\u00a0 Unless the litigation has already been filed, they probably won\u2019t.<\/p>\n
The Cuomo Administration announced that mass purging of email records is beginning across several state government agencies. The governor\u2019s chief information officer argued that the email purge was a cost-saving measure aimed at “making government work better.”<\/p>\n
But the move seems designed to hide information.<\/p>\n
New York\u2019s contract with Microsoft, which runs the new cloud-based system, allows each employee to have 50 gigabits of email storage. The storage is enough to handle 30 years” worth of messages. <\/em><\/p>\n Cuomo\u2019s new policy stands in contrast to the federal government\u2019s, which mandates that emails be retained for three to seven years. Starting in 2015, the emails of federal employees will be saved for at least seven years, and executive staff emails will be saved indefinitely.\u00a0 New York State can surely be as transparent as the federal government.<\/p>\n Government runs on email, and access to email and other electronic records has become a cornerstone of public accountability and transparency. \u00a0The Cuomo policy of using centralized software to automatically delete state employee emails after 90 days is resulting in the destruction of emails, which are considered public records under New York\u2019s Freedom of Information Law.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been said, “90% of government emails are junk.” But under theCuomo Administration\u2019s 90-day email destruction policy, how does the public know whether the 10% of emails that are supposed to be saved are being saved? And, what can be done if they are not?<\/p>\n New Yorkers should demand that the Cuomo Administration end the automatic destruction of emails after 90 days, and instead take advantage of the state\u2019s modern email technology by issuing a uniform policy of saving state emails for seven years. \u00a0\u00a0If the Administration won\u2019t budge, then the legislature should act by making it illegal to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two years ago, Governor Cuomo unveiled a new government portal called “open.ny.gov.”\u00a0 At that time the governor proclaimed, “”This new website will dramatically increase public access to one of our most valuable assets – data. As it expands and evolves over time,\u00a0open.ny.gov\u00a0will spark innovation, improve efficiency, promote accountability, and bring the people back into government.” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1326"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1442,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326\/revisions\/1442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}