Panel suggests changes to e-mail policy

RALEIGH -- A panel appointed by Gov. Mike Easley to review his administration’s deletion of e-mails unanimously approved recommendations Thursday aimed at ensuring state employees know the public records law and have the technology needed to comply.

But the panel’s suggestions, if implemented, will do nothing to prevent employees from knowingly circumventing the law — the very accusation that triggered the group’s creation.

“They treated the symptoms, but the disease rages on,” surmised Beth Grace, the executive director of the N.C. Press Association, after the panel’s vote.

The panel recommended Easley start a new training program that would require state employees who handle public records to complete a one-hour online tutorial about what the law requires. Similar training has been available previously, but was voluntary.

The panel also recommended extending the automatic back-up of e-mail on state servers from 30 days to five years.

The panel called on the executive branch to work toward the consolidation of its 18 separate e-mail systems and install new hardware and software to archive e-mail in a searchable database. However, the panel did not specify a deadline for the installation of such an archiving system and made no recommendation for a specific allocation to pay for it.

Also, the panel suggested the creation of an archiving system that would capture and store only the e-mail that employees choose to keep, though the state’s chief information officer said it is technically feasible to buy a system that stores all e-mail not filtered out as spam.

The panel recommended no changes to a policy instituted under Easley that gives employees discretion to immediately delete e-mails they judge to be of no “enduring administrative value.”

“We’ve always had the situation where you had to trust state employees to preserve paper records,” said Franklin Freeman, Easley’s senior assistant for governmental affairs and chairman of the panel. “The same thing applies to e-mail. At some juncture you’ve got to trust.”

The governor appointed the group after Debbie Crane, former chief public information officer for the state Department of Health and Human Services, alleged she and others had been instructed to immediately delete e-mail sent or received by the governor’s press office.

“The governor’s office, press office, to bypass the public records laws, they ask the second you e-mail them anything, to kill it, then kill it again out of your trash so it doesn't exist,” Crane said.

Following such instructions would exploit a key weakness in the state’s computer system.

The system automatically backs up e-mail each night. But if employees delete e-mail before the nightly backup occurs, then the messages are gone.

Freeman ordered that Crane, a public information officer for 18 years, be fired in early March amid fallout from a News & Observer investigation of the state’s mental-health system.

Easley’s chief legal counsel, Reuben F. Young, and his deputy press secretary, Seth Effron, denied that any instructions to delete e-mail had been given. Effron painted Crane as a disgruntled former employee and liar.

But the newspaper later uncovered written notes taken by two other public information officers of a 2007 meeting where they and others were told to destroy e-mail messages each day.

The News & Observer and nine other North Carolina news organizations sued Easley last month over his administration’s “systematic deletion, destruction or concealment of e-mail messages sent from or received by the Governor’s Office.”

Easley filed a legal motion Tuesday asking a judge throw out the lawsuit because the newspapers haven’t shown they’ve been denied records. The position effectively challenges the news organizations to prove the existence of e-mail that was destroyed before digital copies were made.

George Bakolia, the chief information officer for the executive branch, explained to fellow members of the panel Thursday how e-mail deleted before the nightly backup would be gone forever.

“They would be purged,” Bakolia said. He also said the cost of searching the backup tapes for specific groups of e-mail messages could be “prohibitive.”

The administration’s interpretation of state law allows it to charge members of the public for the cost of searching backup tapes for e-mail.

In at least two past instances where The N&O has inquired about searching the backup tapes for e-mail that may have been deleted, state officials estimated fulfilling such a request would cost the newspaper several thousand dollars.

Bakolia said the new archiving system, if implemented, would be much easier to search. But he said without a major infusion of cash and resources, his staff would be unable to install such a system across all of the administration’s agencies by the end of Easley’s term in January 2009.

Freeman said the administration is committed to installing the proposed archiving system before Easley leaves office.

“We will seek whatever we have to,” Freeman said.