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For those of us activists that seek as much openness and transparency as possible with our government and its multiple webs of bureaucracy, there is no doubt that there is good reason for the effort. Reality demonstrates that people are not always prone to do the right thing. Just because they are in the government doesn’t automatically mean they are without blemish. That’s not to say that everyone is a crook, but, you just never know. How many stories do we hear of some government employee somewhere caught with his/her hands in the till or abusing the credit card, etcetra.
The best disinfectant for abuse is a little sunshine. The more open and visible certain aspects are, the less suceptible they are to fraud and abuse. Part of this, along with access to financial and meeting data being placed on the Internet for all to see, should include the preservation of records and correspondence– including emails. Otherwise, how can citizens get the full picture of what their government does in word and in deed. In a big corporation, anything that happens within its confines paperwise or on its computers and machines, is subject to inspection at all times. After all, they are the company’s computers– they belong to their owners. Why should government be different? We are the owners, and we should have access and retain all rights to what happens on "our" equipment.
Consider this story as reported in yesterday’s New York Post:
THE office computer of suspended Power Authority Inspector General Daniel Wiese was "wiped totally clean" of e-mails and other records just days before being seized by investigators probing an alleged State Police dirty-tricks squad, The Post has learned.
[snip]
"The hard drive had been wiped totally clean just a day or two before investigators got to it," the source said.
"Given the way it was scrubbed, it does not appear that the attorney general’s investigators can recover the information that was there."
Investigators also found Wiese’s computer had been equipped with a rare and sophisticated "destroyer program" that automatically wiped out files and e-mails stored for more than 60 days.
The use of a destroyer program may have violated a state law requiring the retention of official records, a second authority source said.
Had the emails and other records been preserved, perhaps investigators would be able to handily piece together whatever wrongdoings may have occured. How could innocent government officials possibly be opposed to any such means to prove themselves so? Unless they are up to something? Make no mistake, this case as reported by the Post involves some pretty bad stuff…
Wiese, a former State Police colonel and longtime associate of former Govs. George Pataki and Eliot Spitzer, was the power behind State Police operations in New York City, Westchester and Long Island for more than a decade.
No way! Why, he was part of the GOVERNMENT– the cops! They never do wrong, do they? There’s absolutely NO reason to keep tabs, right?
He was linked last summer to the Dirty Tricks Scandal involving Spitzer’s efforts to gather purportedly damaging information on Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (R-Rensselaer), and was accused by former Rep. John Sweeney (R-Saratoga), a Pataki political rival, of involvement in the leak of an embarrassing State Police report on a domestic dispute that may have cost him re-election in 2006.
Gov. Paterson, who directed Cuomo to conduct a criminal probe of the State Police five weeks ago, said Friday that fears that a renegade State Police unit was circulating damaging information on him led him to disclose past marital infidelities and youthful drug use just after taking office in March.
People didn’t tolerate Nixon’s empty spaces on official government recordings. The same must be so for emails and other data that is contained on the public’s computers.