What was the State Dept.'s protocol for maintaining and archiving emails?

[Yavin4]

Last edited Mon May 9, 2016, 05:52 PM - Edit history (1)

Did they have established procedures in place? If so, when were they established? If not, did they leave it up to the individual employees to back up their emails? How long are emails allowed to stay on their servers? Just because you delete an email from Outlook that does not mean that it's deleted from the server.

Are there backup tapes some where that may have these emails? Most enterprises have some sort of disaster recovery program in place where they can restore data? Does the State Dept. have such a system?

[Babel_17]

1. Good list of questions

Easy ones for the press to hammer away with, repeatedly, so they probably will, given the optics of it all.

[NWCorona]

2. Yes there is a federal record retention SOP. Whether or not it was followed is another thing.

Individual employees have control over their accounts but when they hit delete it doesn't really delete. Everything is kept within the pst file. Including the record of you deleting or moving emails.

Brian Pagliano's situation is vastly different because of his position in the IT department.

It should be noted that Hillary wouldn't have been able to set up her server unless Brian had the particular job that he had.

[Yavin4]

3. It seems odd to me that the State Dept did not have an established procedure for archiving emails

Esp. since they deal in sensitive information. This is very sloppy data security and management.

[NWCorona]

4. They do, in accordance to NARA guidelines

I actually just posted this https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/email-mgmt.html

The issue is to what degree the rules are/were followed.
It should be noted that Hillary refused to appoint an IG for the State Dept during her tenure who's purpose was to make sure the rules were followed. Once Kerry took the helm and an IG was appointed. The audits since of Hillary's time at State have been brutal.

[Yavin4]

5. Do you have a link to the State Dept's data management guidelines?

Yes, what you've posted is a general guide. The State Dept. should have a much more explicit set of rules in accordance to what you've linked.

[NWCorona]

6. Yes they have a specific SOP and it can be found in various PDF's floating around.

When this story first broke a few months ago. This was one of the things I looked for and it took awhile.