Go ahead, private citizen, knock yourself out with your use of disappearing message apps to your heart’s content.
It’s nobody’s cyber-business but your own.
Public employees supposedly doing the people’s business, and working under the proper strictures of the California Public Records Act, which requires that government communications not be destroyed? Not so much. It’s very much our concern if you are making our property disappear. The CPRA requires government records be made available to the public and the press upon request. You sir, and you, ma’am, are breaking the law when you communicate with disappearing messages.
But documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times show that the use of Google Chat by city of Los Angeles staffers “was widespread and that public business was sometimes discussed on the platform,” reporters Tony Barboza and Dakota Smith discovered. “Screenshots of employee chat logs displayed prominently, ‘HISTORY IS OFF. Messages sent with history off are deleted after 24 hours.’”
Bad, bad — not good.
What is good is that the city attorney’s office is consequently investigating the illegal practice.
Why should public employees be subject to different rules than the rest of us? It’s not against the law for you to disappear your own messages with colleagues if you work together in a private business, after all.
Precisely because the public sector has so much power over the rest of us. If Planning Department employees, say, are gossiping about the ins and outs of whether to issue a homeowner a crucial building permit, for instance, citizens have a right to know about it.
“The City of L.A. has a history of corruption and self-dealing, and this allows a platform for those deals to be facilitated without fear that anyone will find the evidence, because the chats are deleted within 24 hours,” said Jamie T. Hall, an attorney representing a homeowners’ group fighting a proposed house on what they say is an overly steep Mt. Washington lot.
They say that ensuring the fix is in on many decisions made in City Hall is made easier because of secretive dealings by staffers.
Sunlight, as the journalistic saying goes, is the best disinfectant.