from the accountability-is-for-the-little-people dept.
Techdirt reports
In a set of strange coincidences not unlike those surrounding the IRS/Lois Lerner email disappearance, the Los Angeles Unified school board has decided it will only retain internal emails for one year going forward.
The Los Angeles Unified school board voted Tuesday to buy a Microsoft email archiving service programmed to automatically destroy staff emails after one year.
Why only one year? According to the Chief Information Officer of the school district, the one year limit is mandated by district policy(PDF) -- which is handy, but likely not the real reason. (Keeping all those bytes is considered "too expensive.") After all, if this policy was already in force, why the vote on retention limits?
More likely, this decision was prompted by recent events -- namely the publication of emails more than a year old.The decision comes less than three weeks after KPCC published two-year-old internal emails that raised questions about whether Superintendent John Deasy's meetings and discussions with Apple and textbook publisher Pearson influenced the school district's historic $500 million technology contract.
Related Stories
KTLA TV reports:
Beleaguered Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. John Deasy announced [October 16] that he had tendered his resignation. Deasy would stay on with the district on a special assignment through the end of the year, according to a join[sic] statement from the superintendent and the school district. [...] As part of the severance agreement, he would receive about 60 days' pay, which would equal about $60,000, according to the paper.
Deasy, 53, has led the nation's second-largest school district for 3.5 years. During that time, he has faced much scrutiny and criticism, particularly over a technology program that he pushed for which would have spent more than $1 billion to provide an iPad to every student, teacher and administrator at LAUSD schools.
The program was suspended in August after it was discovered that Deasy and his top deputy had ties to Apple executives and the company that was providing the curriculum for the iPads.
Update: Los Angeles Schools iPad Program Target of Federal Criminal Probe
No sooner had I submitted about the previous development ($500 Chromebooks or $700 iPads) [Eds Note: See Below] when the defecation contacted the rotary ventilator again.
The Daily Breeze reports:
LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines is scuttling the district's iPad curriculum contract with Pearson in the wake of an FBI probe of the deal.
According to documents released December 2, as part of a criminal investigation being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a federal grand jury will weigh information pertaining to Los Angeles Unified's plan to buy $1.3 billion in iPads.[1]
The federal probe--which dispatched FBI agents to collect 20 boxes of records from LAUSD's headquarters Monday afternoon--along with a report from LAUSD's inspector general, prompted Superintendent Ramon Cortines to ditch the controversial deal with Apple and Pearson.
[...]While Cortines had hoped students at 27 schools in the next phase would have the devices this school year, they will now have to wait until fall 2015.
[1] I can't believe that the Daily Breeze editor allowed that sentence to go through in its original form.
Apple is ready to fight Google's Chromebooks with cheaper iPads
Apple has a big problem. Just five years ago, its iPads and Mac laptops reigned supreme in US classrooms, accounting for half of all mobile devices shipped to schools in 2013. Apple has now slipped behind both Google and Microsoft in US schools with Google's Chromebooks leading the way in classrooms, securing nearly 60 percent of shipments in the US as overall iPad sales declined for three straight years. Apple is now ready to strike back against Chromebooks with some cheaper iPads.
Apple is holding a special education-focused event on Tuesday that promises "creative new ideas for teachers and students." Rumors suggest Apple is preparing to launch a $259 budget iPad model this year, while Bloomberg reports that a "low-cost iPad" will be announced alongside new education software. The new iPad could even support a stylus, like the Apple Pencil found on the more expensive iPad Pro models.
The article notes a cancelled $1 billion program to give iPads to students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Administering the iPads back then wasn't easy, but Chromebooks store their data in the cloud. If a student forgets their Chromebook at home, they can log in to another device using their Google account. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticized Google's G Suite for Education for storing students' personal information in the cloud without their knowledge or consent.
Related: L.A.'s iPad-Friendly School Superintendent Resigns Under a Cloud
Los Angeles Schools Halve Email Retention after Scandal
Los Angeles Schools iPad Program Target of Federal Criminal Probe
NH School District: One Chromebook Per Student by 2018; Paper Textbooks Going
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:09AM
30 years ago, I came to school in my senior year a few weeks from graduation to find the admin building torched. Burned to the ground. As all records of everything were "lost", the US Army had to contact my Junior HS to get transcripts of my 9th grade Algebra class. I am not sure why the admin building of my high school would be torched but it does seem suspicious. No other building in the HS was affected in any way.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:25AM
That sounds a lot more like something a pissed off kid would have done.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:29AM
Is Obummer heading it up? It sounds like shit his administration would try to pull. It was probably to fight terrorists and pedophiles.
Obummer lied; thousands died.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mendax on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:18AM
A year's worth of e-mails would probably fit on a 32 gb flash drive, assuming most of it is text only. If there a lot of attachments (PDF's, PPT's, DOC's, etc.), then something larger would be required. That something larger is an old-fashioned hard disk. Most people here know what a 1 TB hard drive costs. And if for some inescapable reason they need more space, then there are 2, 3, and 4 TB hard drives, all of which are easily affordable, certainly less than the labor costs expended by the school district in the making of this decision!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by forkazoo on Thursday September 18 2014, @08:50AM
You misunderstand. When they say that keeping the email is too expensive, they mean that "having" it is too expensive. "Storing" it is relatively cheap, all things considered. (Though you probably wildly underestimate how much email LAUSD generates in a year, tape is still relatively cheap.) The expense comes from what happens if somebody reads it, and a scandal leaks out. All corporate "data retention" policies are actually about shredding files as soon as possible, rather than retaining data as long as possible. It's standard corporate doublespeak. Any sys admin would take pride in having backups going back further than policy requires him to, but in many corporations he would be fired for exposing the company to undesirable subpoenas.
(Score: 2) by everdred on Thursday September 18 2014, @02:51PM
> they mean that "having" it is too expensive
Quoted for truth.
(Score: 1) by SunTzuWarmaster on Thursday September 18 2014, @12:41PM
1 years' Email for me is probably around 1 Gb (100 10 MB E-mails... not out of the question, especially when collaborating). Generally, the rule of thumb is "3 places or it doesn't exist" (http://www.ballyhoo.co.uk/If-Its-Not-In-Three-Places.html), and "if you don't test your backups they don't exist".
So you get:
1GB general storage
1GB off network storage
1GB backup/cloud
Lets just say 200 employees, with 3 GB each, for a total of 600 GB, backed up to one cloud hosting provider, one server in Australia/whatever, and one server locally. This is probably about 20% of a manyear (1 day/week) for an IT person (monthly updates, backup tests, hard drive replacements, server tests, cloud storage negotiation, regulatory inspection, data gathering requests, etc.), and generally costs something like $60/month for cloud, $1000/year for hosted server, and $5000/year for local server. So, in total, for something like $27K/year you can host your data in accordance with sound policy. Obviously you can cut corners to make this cheaper, by trusting all of your data to Google, or not doing offsite backups, or whatever.
Next year these costs go up by about 40% (twice the data), from $27K to $37K. Then you ask yourself "why am I paying $10,000 to store records which I am not legally responsible to store?", and you stop. Why? Because it is the definition of waste.
It's not about expense. This is a cheap bill for the IT department, and trivial compared to the overall budget. However, the cost of retaining records for 10 years is non-trivial ($50K for 200 people?), and "we want to go above and beyond what is required by law because we feel like we can" isn't a good reason to do it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:22AM
The Mayor's longtime Chief of Staff enforced his own retention policy by systematically deleted emails (on the mail server) for correpondence to the mayor's office to/from people who had business before the city, over a period of years. He should've been canned, or worse, but the Massachusetts AG happened to be running for US Senate at the time the story broke. She needed the mayor to "get out the vote" in Boston, so she postponed the investigation until after November. (She lost; later, her investigation absolved the chief of staff of wrongdoing).
BTW the same AG is now the Democratic nominee for Governor of Massachusetts.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:40AM
I am having trouble finding it, but a month or two ago, before Ferguson, I ran across a story about one of the LA suburbs deliberately deleting discipline records of their local police that were more than a couple of years old. There was some BS about how the officers didn't deserve to have a black mark on their permanent records. It made me realize that when they say a cop has no record of disciplinary action all it really means is that there is literally no record on file.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @02:04AM
How do you feel about convicted criminals who receive a pardon after serving their sentence? Although they've paid for their misdeeds, should they be burdened with it for the rest of their lives?
If a criminal who has paid his or her debt to society is forgiven, should the same not be done for a police officer who may have engaged in misdeed and paid for it as appropriate?
Ferguson is actually a very interesting example. Here we have a situation were a man violently attacked a cashier at a store, and then most likely physically attacked an armed police officer shortly afterward. The police officer acted in what was probably a very reasonable manner given the circumstances, and defended himself using force. The man who violently attacked the cashier died as a result of this.
Activists who benefit from racial strife have tried to paint this as an issue of race, but it obviously isn't about that. It's about one person defending himself from another person who had a tendency to engage in violent behavior. Since the evidence suggests this was a matter of self defense, I don't think that the police offer should suffer any long term consequences. He's already been subjected to undeserved punishment, for a situation he probably didn't even ever wish to be in. He shouldn't get any sort of a record due to this incident, even if some people incorrectly believe he should.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @02:29AM
I'm all for accepting that maybe you've changed if you can keep your nose clean for a few years, but it has to go both ways. Every one of these cops with an expunged record would almost certainly be glad to dig up a 30 year old shoplifting arrest if it helped them build a case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @02:34AM
Repeatedly shooting an unarmed surrendering man that has already taken a few bullets.
No need for a black mark on his police record, if he is no longer a policeman...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @02:57AM
If a criminal who has paid his or her debt to society is forgiven, should the same not be done for a police officer who may have engaged in misdeed and paid for it as appropriate?
You make a false equivalence. Police are employees and their discipline record is part of their employment record. It isn't public information, it sits in a private file that is only ever used as part of that job. If a cop leaves the force, his discipline record has impact on his life going forward.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hamsterdan on Thursday September 18 2014, @04:18AM
I still have all my email (and news posts) since 1994 (even the sent ones), and it takes about 5GB. Just email is around 3GB (that's for 20 years)
Granted, it's only one user, but a thousand users would scale to around 3TB, that's not an expensive capacity, I'm pretty sure a University can afford that...
Thay don't want liability. I don't know about US, but in Canada we are required to keep official papers for 7 years, shouldn't corporate email count as official stuff?
(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Thursday September 18 2014, @05:38AM
I bet it cost them more than what it costs to write a cron job that selects dates and archives/deletes email.
Microsoft has always been good at exploiting ignorance.
This move is definitely an attempt to avoid incrimination, storage of email is ridiculously cheap.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Thursday September 18 2014, @04:12PM
You can delete all the e-mail you want off the active server.
If you want to delete all the actual records of an e-mail conversation, that's insufficient. At least, it's insufficient if you keep backups (as most IT groups do). No software program in the world can delete the record of an e-mail off of an offline LTO tape sitting in a warehouse somewhere. Nor will it delete the e-mail off someone's offline e-mail client (e.g. Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.)
If you want to truly remove/shred records, you need to look holistically at your entire IT process and everywhere data lives or could live, and understand how you're going to deal with each location (or understand that there are things you can't deal with, like "someone downloaded it to their home computer and never deleted it.").
And if you're trying to shield yourself legally, failure to understand this makes your life a LOT harder. If there's a court order for you to produce records, the court doesn't care if the only place that record lives is on a backup tape somewhere. You're required to produce it if you can. Arguing "oh, we SHOULD have deleted that because it's our policy" doesn't shield you from production of documents.