Emails Undeleted

Hard to figure out exactly what's going on here, at least for me. Information and Privacy Commissioner  Ann Cavoukian's statement suggests that Ministry of Government Services staff found the long-gone emails, put does not get more specific than that.  If I were to guess, I'd guess that the original computer advice she was given indeed turned out to be BS, and that while the docs were gone from peoples' hard drives, government IT guys were able to find them on their servers, which shouldn't surprise anyone and, therefore, shouldn't have surprised an information commissioner.

Not sure what this means about the culpability of the government aides who have been under the gun.  If you know stuff will be backed up on a server, than you might feel more free with the delete button when cleaning out your inbox. What is clear though is that Cavoukian's earlier statement was seriously in error, and the anger evident in last evening's statement from her is an attempt to direct attention away from that error.  As Norm Spector noted:

Hate to say this, but shouldn’t Cavoukian have verified this *before* filing her report? http://t.co/iIk3LjWOEJ #onpoli
— Norman Spector (@nspector4) July 10, 2013

Cavoukian Fed A Line Of BS

JIMMO is still talking  OLP "cover-up", but his account of how files get stored and backed-up sounds right enough, as does his assertion that Anne Cavoukian has been misinformed re how difficult it is to recover the lost emails at the center of the l'affair de gas plant:



And in fact I would second his point at the end: that an independent data recovery team might still be able to pull lost data from the servers in question, and therefore one should be called in.  That's because I suspect that were the contents of these emails to be made known they would tell us little more than what we have already discovered, which is that the OLP panicked towards the end of the last election campaign and blew a ton of money to save a couple of ridings they would have won anyway.  In other words, there are no secrets hidden in them; what the Libs did was all done pretty much up front and in public.

Incidentally, the video also seems to clarify a point WK made a few days ago:

[Cavoukian] pays no heed to the fact that records of emails concerning government business were kept by officials, and/or the government server, for many months and ultimately deleted only by them...

What happened on the hard-drive of some Premier's aide is far less important to the ultimate fate of the emails than what happened on the governments' servers.  Whether or not emails were deleted from personal PCs to keep in-boxes tidy (or to cover something up--who knows?) would have no bearing on whether they were kept or not on the servers they passed through.  And archiving material on the servers is someone else's responsibility (not our hypothetical aide's); if there was any failure of diligence, that's where it would have occurred.