The CIA Wants To Delete Old Email; Critics Say 'Not So Fast'

NPR ^ | 20 Nov 2014 | David Welna

[Theoria]

It's a question we've all wrestled with: which emails should be saved and which ones should be deleted?

The Central Intelligence Agency thinks it's found the answer, at least as far as its thousands of employees and contractors are concerned. Sooner or later, the spy agency would destroy every email except those in the accounts of its top 22 officials.

It's now up to the National Archives — the ultimate repository of all the records preserved by federal agencies — to sign off on the CIA's proposal.

The CIA's move to revamp its email retention policy might have gone ahead with little fanfare had a small item not caught the eye of Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy.

It was a routine notice in a Sept. 17 issue of the Federal Register that listed a number of federal agencies proposing new plans to the National Archives for destroying email considered not worth saving.

"And when I looked at it closely," Aftergood says of that notice, "I realized it was actually pretty important."

That's because one of the agencies listed was the CIA. Aftergood, who's a longtime critic of the CIA's aversion to public scrutiny, found that in August, the National Archives had quietly given the agency a kind of thumbs-up.

"The Archive had done a preliminary assessment of the CIA proposal," says Aftergood. "They decided that it tentatively looked OK, and they were ready to move forward on it."

An Avalanche Of Email

The National Archives has been pushing more broadly for better management of the avalanche of email generated daily by federal agencies.

[a fool in paradise]

Emails can be archived?

Since when?

[garyb]

I hear there is this cloud thing they could use.

Judging by the ads in the trade mags, cloud is the answer to every question.

[Bubba_Leroy]

Why not do like the IRS and just have hard drive failures whenever you want to get rid of some e-mails?

[DoughtyOne]

C. I. A. spends ten years destroying eMails.

Then asks permission to do so.

(well, you were thinking it too)


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[sasquatch]

They’re already gone.
May be a song like that.

[Chgogal]

They were archived during the Bush Administration. Not so much during the Obama Administration.