How long should emails sent by state officials be saved? In some states, emails are purged after five days, while in other states those emails are kept for five years. While laws vary by state, advocates of open government say those emails should be preserved for transparency and historical value, Jenni Bergal reports for
Stateline.
(Associated Press photo)
Melissa
Melewsky, media law counsel for the
Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, told Bergal, “It’s the public’s information. The fact that it can be deleted without
consequence or review—everyone should care about that. The public cannot hold their government accountable if they don’t have
access to the records. It shouldn’t matter whether that record is
written on a piece of paper with ink or whether it’s written on a
computer screen.”
Content is the main issue in many states, Bergal writes. "An employee may be required to
keep certain types of email, such as official memos or messages dealing
with administrative policy, which may be retained for several years. But
they also may be allowed to delete email that is deemed 'transitory,'
which means it has little value after its use and nothing important in
it. Transitory email can range from a 'help yourself to cookies in the
break room' note to a list of staffers who participated in a meeting to
drafts of a presentation."
"While states have strict retention schedules, it’s often up to the
individual agency to determine how to make that work," Bergal writes. "Problems often
arise when retention rules bump heads with information technology
policies, which favor unclogging email boxes, deleting junk mail that
can bog down the system and keeping the cost of storage to a minimum."
Tanya Marshall, president of the
National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators, told Bergal, “It’s a little bit of the Wild West. The processes that are being used are based on paper records. You
often don’t see much of a process set up for electronic records. There
are very few states where it’s clear to the employee what they need to
do and how to manage it.”
The
National Archives and Records Administration "has proposed a new
approach
that would designate email accounts of senior level federal officials
as permanent records that would not be deleted and would save
nonofficials’ emails for at least three to seven years," Bergal writes. "The idea is to
shift the burden of deciding which messages should be erased or archived
away from the individual user."
Frederick Frank, an attorney representing several newspapers, "said that he’s even more disturbed that there’s no
way to restore deleted email once it’s purged after five days," Bergal writes. Frank told Bergal, “The potential for mischief here is very clear. That’s
particularly true when an employee feels that there may be an
investigation. When he is asked where his emails are, he says they were
all transitory and they’ve been deleted. There’s no way to get them back
from the server.” (
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