Mayoral candidates Yoon and Flaherty have asked Coakley to investigate Menino’s office over a Globe story citing deleted emails written by Menino’s closest advisor. Will Coakley investigate? I think not. It took the FBI to take down woefully corrupt Wilkerson, and she did not dare to take a crack at Sal-huge crook-DiMasi. It is easy going after crooked concrete vendors. It is another story to take on real corruption in the party’s elite. Come on Martha, prove me wrong.
Please share widely!
I am disappointed by the apparent lack of enthusiasm that Ms. Coakley showed in going after corrupt public figures. I am, for that matter, disappointed by her lack of enthusiasm in going after flagrantly corrupt Big Dig contractors (and the government officials, of both stripes, who enabled them). I was similarly disappointed by former Attorney General Tom Reilly’s utter failure to aggressively pursue Cardinal Law and his administration regarding the abuse scandals.
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p>I believe that Massachusetts government does, in fact, suffer from a pervasive culture of corruption.
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p>An aggressive posture towards this issue raised by the Globe would certainly help convince me of her sincerity in addressing the problem — and would help her gain my vote.
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p>And .. by the way .. I’m heartened to see the Globe pursuing stories like this.
It’s not Ms. Coakley. She was elected statewide as the Attorney General. Did you call him Mr. Kennedy or Senator Kennedy? It’s Attorney General Martha Coakley.
Titles and honorifics. Specifically I call him Mr. Kennedy as often as Senator. I use “Mr.” and “Mrs.” instead of the unadorned last name — “Mr. Kennedy” and “Ms. Coakley” instead of “Kennedy” and “Coakley”, a practice set — I believe — by the New York Times.
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p>What, if anything, do you think she should do about the deleted emails?
I always bristled when someone said “General Ashcroft.” That feels forced to me. Attorney General is a great title.
Though I agree it sounds military.
General Coakley has a nice powerful ring to it.
By that I mean let’s go all the way back to the rationale for this law, or at least this interpretation of this law. I’m sorry, but I just can’t get myself all worked up about not being able to read or hear every word that passes between the Mayor and one of his advisors.
that when people worry that something fishy may have been going on, or just want to know how a particular situation played out among government actors, they can access the communications relevant to that scenario. Emails played a role in uncovering the Cognos scandal that undid Sal DiMasi, and Deval Patrick’s administration was burned somewhat by emails during the Marian Walsh debacle. Not every email is substantive, much less somehow incriminating, but if we let people start deciding which ones they’re going to delete, then of course any unscrupulous individuals in government will feel free to delete all their sketchy, potentially embarassing emails first.
when they come from computers, or are sent with networks paid for by taxpayers, I think.
What makes you think that? Laws may stipulate, as in this case, that certain public officials have to retain their e-mails for some period of time, but that does not apply to everyone using government computers, nor does that mean that the e-mails are “public property” in the colloquial sense.
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p>Do you honestly think that every e-mail sent from a public library computer is “public property”?
When Mr. Cheney and his staff deleted the emails, you didn’t think that perhaps the public interest was being violated? When Mr. Nixon was conducting his shredding parties, you didn’t think that perhaps an obstruction of justice was taking place?
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p>You’re starting to sound like Republicans, guys. Emails are public records, and just as important as paper. If staffers are sending paper notes by carrier pigeon, those notes are still public records if they pertain to public business.
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p>I agree that the public doesn’t need to see love notes between staffers and their girlfriends, wives, or partners. I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here. And enough with the “public library computer” stuff.
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p>As far as I’m concerned, I want the same standards applied to Democrats as to Republicans. I want emails from staffers for Mitt Romney, Bill Weld, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush to be preserved and available for inspection. The same holds true for staffers for Deval Patrick, Tom Menino, Barrack Obama, and Joe Biden. If folks don’t want to live by those standards, then I question their suitability for positions on the public payroll.
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p>Are you guys working for or against Martha Coakley?
The claim was that e-mails are automatically “public property” when the come from computers/networks paid for by taxpayers. That is categorically false. That is what I was rebutting. I am tired of people on blogs just making up law.
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p>I made no claim that these particular e-mails should not be considered public records and subject to the same laws as any other records.
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p>Please try to read more carefully before flying off the handle.
“Categorically false”?
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p>Here’s what I do know:
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p>If an employee of a corporation sends email (or does anything else) on a company-owned machine or network, the work product belongs to the company. There is, explicitly, zero expectation of privacy. That policy has been argued, and settled, multiple times. If you use company equipment, it belongs to the company.
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p>The obvious point being made by the commentary that you responded to is that the same heuristic holds true for public employees: if they use public equipment, it’s a public record. I’m under the impression that this is a minimal, rather than maximal, standard. If I am discussing company business, the company owns it. Period. Doesn’t matter what medium I use. That’s what virtually every employee agreement reads. Perhaps there is a different, looser standard set by the government, but I doubt it.
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p>There’s a long chain of decisions that support the premise that if you are a public servant and you create documents (including email) that pertain to the public business, your documents are public records.
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p>While I agree that your comment regarding public libraries is microscopically true, it has only the faintest relevance to the discussion it appears in. We are talking about public employees in the Mayor’s office deleting email written during working hours from computers owned by the government. That has nothing to do with public libraries (and, by the way, even if the emails were written on computers in public libraries, if they concern city business then they are, in fact, public records). In the context of that discussion, it most certainly does create the appearance that you are disputing the contention that these are (or were) public records.
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p>How about it? Do you:
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p>1) Agree that these emails were public records, and
2) Agree that Martha Coakley should investigate their deletion?
3) Agree that what appears to be a systematic policy of deleting emails itself appears to violate the law regarding public records?
Companies do not automatically own the content of all e-mails that pass through their networks. That is simply not correct. Many companies require their employees to sign agreements stating ownership of work produced on company time or company resources, but without such a contract there is no law that states that companies automatically own all such IP. It is definitely not the case that merely passing content through a corporate network grants ownership of that content to the network owner.
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p>So repeat my assertion. It is categorically false that e-mails sent from public machines are public property.
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p>Regarding these particular e-mails, I agree that they were most probably public records. I don’t feel very strongly about who should be responsible for investigating their deletion, but I suppose someone should. However, I also feel it is highly likely that nothing is going to come of the investigation regardless of who does it. Whether or not the problem was an honest mistake or part of a cover-up, I do want to see City Hall institute technology to prevent this from happening in the future. It can’t be all that hard to archive everything that passes through the mail servers to some archival media.
what needs to be investigated is just that. Did they have these archiving machines in place and were they circumvented? Do we have backups and were they tampered with?
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p>Many questions need to be answered and the AG and/or DA need to follow up. If they do and they find no evidence, great. But, at this point with all that has swirled around City Hall we need to know the facts. Where are you AG Coakley? DA Conley?
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What part of “That’s what virtually every employee agreement reads.” is unclear to you?
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p>Of course companies do not “automatically own” such content. That’s why employee agreements universally contain language spelling this out. Again, you are microscopically correct (“without such a contract …”), and miss the point: without signing such a contract, you can’t work.
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p>Perhaps we have different understandings of what your phrase “categorically false” means. In my view, “categorically false” means “That which is unqualified or unconditional.” A theorem that asserts that one equals zero is “categorically false”. There are no exceptions, context doesn’t matter, no further inspection is required.
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p>I disagree that your assertion about emails of public employees meets this standard. The staffers in question were public employees. State and federal law appears to support the contention that emails sent by staffers are “public records”, regardless of whether sent using public or private computers. The use of computers provided by the government in a government office to a government employee is generally a threshold requirement for demonstrating that these were public records — sufficient, albeit not necessary.
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p>I’m disappointed by your apparent cynicism (“I also feel it is highly likely that nothing is going to come of the investigation regardless of who does it”). In addition, your standard of acceptable behavior is apparently far lower than mine. You seem to be saying that to you it doesn’t matter whether this “was an honest mistake” or “part of a cover-up.”
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p>In my view, this is a crucial distinction. I think it matters whether or not this was a cover-up. If it was a cover-up, then a government that does not take steps to hold the perpetrators responsible is, pretty much by definition, corrupt.
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p>In my view, Martha Coakley’s job is to establish whether or not a cover-up occurred, and hold the perpetrators responsible if so. That’s what an “Attorney General” is for.
wouldn’t emails be on the server? So what if a user deletes a message. I don’t understand the response to the Globe’s request.
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p>Plus, Yoon and Flaherty both sound like bozos if this is what they want to push instead of how to make the city better. Same crap, different person is not the answer.
but they are not. They are not because they were deleted and not everyone’s emails were deleted, just his and other key officials.
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p>It doesn’t sound odd to you that the time line starts in October 2008, around the time that Senator Wilkerson was being charged? We need to know why emails were selectively deleted. What was the content? Did they have to do with the federal corruption probe at Cith Hall? To say that doesn’t matter is putting your head and the sand. Stating that this is more of the same is right if you are referencing an administration that bullies and intimidates.
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p>Also, General Counsel for the Mayor’s office Bill Sinnott made what I think to be an error in judgement. Is he trying to tell us that they handed over emails from the adminstration and didn’t notice that Michael Kineavy’s mailbox only yeilded 18 emails? Seriously?
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p>Bill Sinnott is not a war-time consigliere. They need to take this out of his hands and fast. Spoliation of Evidence? Lawyers can answer that question…
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p>You really believe that? This did not come up? We can all discuss it until the cows come home, but this needs to be investigated by the AG or DA, period. These are not emails written by joe public on library computers. These are top officials hiding something from all of us. If you don’t see that, then your eyes are close.
What I didn’t understand is how they do not keep a backup, that’s fairly standard. What we do, is change the status of an email to “deleted”, all messages are still available but it displays those that are not in “deleted” status. So any at time we can pull a report with all emails. This is not something new or unique.
easy in this day and age to keep backups, nightly, daily, hourly, weekly, whatever. This is why it appears to be a deliberate attempt to hide whatever is in those emails. That is the exactly the point. What is this 1998?