My business is the service of legal process. As a part of this
job, I occasionally find myself motoring up to Google in Mountain
View or Yahoo! in Sunnyvale with what our legal brethren call a
”
subpoena duces tecum’
”
a document that legally compels these companies to provide
copies of e-mails sent or received by a specific person.
My business is the service of legal process. As a part of this job, I occasionally find myself motoring up to Google in Mountain View or Yahoo! in Sunnyvale with what our legal brethren call a “subpoena duces tecum'” a document that legally compels these companies to provide copies of e-mails sent or received by a specific person.
I hand the document to a clerk in the legal department and hit the road. Each of these companies then copies the documents subpoenaed and sends them to the attorney requesting them.
This is because, as most people apparently don’t understand, e-mails live practically forever in cyberspace. You can erase one you receive on your end, and so can the sender, but the Internet Service Provider almost always keeps a copy for longer than most people would like when they back up their servers.
I remember one day at my Leadership Gilroy Class when the comical and knowledgeable former public relations representative for Saint Louise Hospital, Frankie Munoz, predicated the most basic of e-mail rules for us: “Never send an e-mail you wouldn’t want to wind up on the editor’s desk at the local paper.” Also, we are all aware of press reports in both civil and criminal investigations where some poor schnook’s entire computer is seized. Rare, but not unheard of.
The City of Gilroy has a “Virtual Private Network'” a “VPN'” which councilmembers can use to access and send e-mail without using their personal Internet service providers. I used it during my first year on council, but the encryption was 168-bit, I had an old computer, and it was slow. Also, you have to log in to check your e-mail, and I often forgot. So, it became easier (and more timely) to simply have the city forward e-mails from my council address to my home computer. Since I’ve learned from the legal community over the years that they can’t subpoena what you don’t have, I made a folder in my e-mail program for council business, and erased it every 30 days.
However, that solution can be risky. The “erase” button doesn’t guarantee that some computer guru can’t recover it from your hard drive. Ergo, I used discretion in anything I said, paying attention to Frankie’s rule above.
Think about it: council is a part-time job. Receiving or sending e-mails from one’s home computer puts everything on one’s hard drive subject to a subpoena. All councilmembers have other jobs, other people who use their computer, such as a wife or children, and records that are not really anyone’s business, like financial or insurance information. Would you like it if, right now, the federales grabbed your computer and looked at EVERYTHING on it? Me neither.
So, I think the laptop computers some councilmembers have ordered are justified in a lot of ways and silly in one other; more on the “silly” below.
The ways they are justified is easy. Privacy at home is assured. Given a subpoena for documents, they hand over the computer and smile.
Agendas for council can be e-mailed instead of killing trees. Since a council agenda with staff reports usually runs 100 pages or more, by the time seven packets are copied and distributed, both staff time and paper are conserved. Also, there is enough of the latest software loaded to make sure that they can follow along during council meetings, things like PowerPoint and Word.
But, I gotta tell ya – $1,900? Gimme a break. Vista operating system? Oh, my aching back! I’m willing to bet none of the three councilmembers who ordered laptops knew that they’d be $1,900, especially since Dell laptops running the “Old” XP operating system are now sharply discounted. A $600 per computer price would have been perfectly acceptable, and up to any of the tasks they need to do. Indeed, I’ve seen the mayor using his personal laptop any number of times during council meetings, and heard no complaints.
Hmmm. What’s going on here? Since I happen to know staff wasn’t exactly wild about the proposed laptop purchases, I’d say passive aggression. One way staff can show disapproval is to publicly state that they’ll get unneeded Cadillac machines, following which they are publicly castigated for blowing big bucks on extravagances.
And if you’ve read my previous two columns (available online) you’ll begin to understand what I’m talking about. So, for Correa, Gartman, and Valiquette, a reasonable decision, except for perhaps a failure to ask “How much are these things gonna cost?”
For staff? Well, you know what I think. Machiavelli would be proud.
