Treasury Board President Tony Clement believes the Canada Revenue Agency should not have deleted any instant messages if they were related to government business, according to his spokeswoman.
“If the (messages) were of business value and deleted, then the rules were broken. If the CRA can prove that they were transitory in nature — if it was, ‘meet you at the coffee shop in five minutes’ — then that is considered not of business value, but that is up to the CRA to prove,” Stephanie Rea, his director of communications, said this week.
The Toronto Star reported in December the Canada Revenue Agency asked Shared Services Canada, which is responsible for information technology services at the federal government, to delete all records of instant messages, including texts, PIN-to-PIN messages and BlackBerry messenger communications (BBMs), between its employees on Aug. 27, 2014 and disable the ability to log future instant messages.
The destruction of instant messaging records came at a time when the Canada Revenue Agency was facing questions from critics about its audits of charitable institutions regarding their level of political activity.
New Democrat MP Charlie Angus, who asked Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault to investigate the deletion, said he is concerned that many important political decisions are being made through instant messages.
“If you want to track political interference in an office, if you want to track political directives, it’s going to be in the PIN messages, because they are very, very careful now not to put stuff in writing,” Angus said.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the front-runner in the Democratic nomination race, is under fire for having used a personal email account while in cabinet.
In Canada, keeping government business off the books through instant messages is against the rules, but the system relies on the goodwill of everyone agreeing to follow them.
Treasury Board protocol says instant messages are to be treated like any other form of communication, such as notes from a telephone conversation, when it comes to storing them for posterity.
If they are of “business value” — such as a message related to the decision-making or approvals process — then they need to be forwarded to a government email account, copied and pasted or transcribed into a document or captured with a screenshot.
The protocol says the original instant message should be deleted and that if the instant messages are “transitory,” then they can and should be deleted without being stored in another way, unless they pertain to an access to information request.
The Canada Revenue Agency says its employees are not allowed to use instant messaging for anything of business value, so there was nothing wrong with deleting them en masse last summer.
“SMS and BBM messaging channels are not secure modes of communication, and the CRA informs its employees that such forms of communication should never be used for storing information of business value, records of decision, or for communicating information that is sensitive or confidential,” CRA spokesman Philippe Brideau wrote in an email.
Different departments have different policies on what instant messages can be used for but the requirement to properly document anything of business value goes across the board.
“It is incumbent upon all employees to do it,” said Rea, Clement’s spokeswoman.
Not everyone agrees this honour system is good enough.
“It’s not a credible way of running government, because I think you’ll find the practice has been nudge-nudge, wink-wink, let’s just not talk about the PIN messages,” Angus said.
Someone else who disagrees with the status quo is Legault, who recommended in a November 2013 special report that instant messaging be disabled across all departments and agencies, because their existence outside government servers poses a risk to the right of Canadians to access information about the federal government.
Legault was not available for an interview, but spokeswoman Natalie Hall said the Treasury Board protocol implemented after the report came out does not go far enough.
That is because Legault recommended that if instant messaging had to happen, it should be “archived on a government server for a reasonable period of time”.
“The TBS protocol . . . does not follow this recommendation. It recommends, on the contrary, that departments not use automatic logging of instant messages,” Hall wrote in the email.
Hall pointed out Legault had also recommended Parliament change the Access to Information Act so that it comes with “a comprehensive legal duty to document decisions,” which would go farther than the current requirements.
The Canadian Press obtained a December 2014 briefing note from Treasury Board that noted how some BlackBerry devices were actually incapable of forwarding PIN-to-PIN messages to government email accounts.
The document, obtained through an access-to-information request, said “it is a recommended best practice” to use BBMs instead of PINs for this reason.
Rea said it would be up to the deputy minister of each department to decide whether to prohibit their use rather than using a workaround.
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Joanna Smith
Quelle/Source: Inside Brockville, 21.03.2015
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
