Subtexts

I disagree.

Public scrutiny of elected officials is becoming overbearing and burdensome. Would you argue that all phone conversations need to be recorded? That, of course, would be the next logical step if they make all text messages public.

The point is, elected officials need space to carve out ideas and to speak freely outside the constant view of the public. What matters is what they do in public, at public meetings, in hearings, and the votes they take.

There is plenty available to judge public officials on.

How would you retain them? I'm not aware of a single phone that allows you to sync them or otherwise download such messages. Or do you think they should go and manually type every text message into a computer database?

If McGinn wanted to lobby O'Brien privately, yes he should have called him (and no, I don't think that needs to be recorded) or met with him 1 on 1.

Written communications, like email, are currently disclosable. As texting becomes a more standard form of written correspondence, it needs to be disclosable as well.

.. provided of course the participating electeds aren't conversing amongst themselves with what constitutes a majority voting block
to skirt public disclosure laws. kinda like they did last year.

This continues the longstanding tradition of arguing that government is inefficient and unable to provide a service as well as a private company, and then creating regulation on government agencies that force them to be inefficient and unable to provide said service. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that conservatives have used forever. Force government agencies to take the low bidder that would never get a job from a private company and then SURPRISE the work is shoddy. Adding exponentially to the tracking of every little text, call, post-it note used by government officials is not the point of open government. What you'd probably find out from the tens of man-hours to track all of this info is that McGinn said “I think that a yes vote is a bad idea”. Whoop-de-freaking-do. If you want to make a claim that something underhanded went through it probably wasn't on text message. Until then, this just reeks of either journalistic sensationalism (if we don't know what was said we have to assume it was a conspiracy) or just petty (we CAN force the government to waste tens of thousands of dollars by repeated freedom of information requests so we WILL). At some point it amounts to a denial of serve attack.

Obviously I am not anti-open government. I agree that meeting minutes, emails, budgets, etc. which are easy to compile and part of normal buisiness need to be retained. I keep my important emails in case my company is sued too. But at some point we are needlessly handcuffing the people we elect in order to effectively keep the honest honest. The underhanded will just talk in person, or have someone else pass info as a conduit.

I know you're looking for your next big scoop, but the point of government is not to provide info to bloggers. Instead it is to effectly govern.

To those asking how to retain text messages: A $10 app called TxtForward automatically forwards every text message you send to your email. It's really no more difficult than retaining emails (which the city has been required by city policy to retain since 1996).

http://electricpocket.com/txtforward/

Delighted that with McGinn in office people are thinking it might be time to gut public disclosure laws. Speaks volumes.

Why don't you think verbal communication should be disclosable? What's the dividing line for you? Technology? If so, what's the core philosophy of that?

Look, I get that you want as much as you can get, but I think this movement is counterproductive.

“The city has had a policy requiring employees to hang on to emails since 1996; it’s time for them to adopt a similar policy for text messages as well.”

You guys know that city employees SELECTIVELY decide what to archive, right? Horrible idea. Yes, I know that means you'd be archiving personal mail and spam. But you know what? We paid for whatever@seattle.gov; that's how it rolls. If you want to exclude your mails from you@seattle.gov to your wife or boyfriend, use your gmail to mail them.

“Public scrutiny of elected officials is becoming overbearing and burdensome.”

If they don't like it, the private sector is ==> thataway.

Passively saving data from computer and technology systems doesn't handcuff anyone. If they think the fact their emails and texts from city-owned property are saved and public record for x years is somehow a 'handcuffing' they're being pointlessly paranoid.

Do you people realize that in a standard technology environment–whether you're using Exchange, Lotus, or plain old vanilla flat mbox mailboxes that it's ludicrously trivial for a competent sysadmin to save *ALL* of that data indefinitely and read it, without you even knowing it?

So, if you work at Some Big Corp, and your email is billy@somebigcorp.com, and I'm your sysadmin, I can read everything you've received and sent, and probably in real time?

Did you people know that the knowledge of this is so common it's even a staple of t-shirts in geek circles?

http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex…

Erica, we can't do this in Seattle. The city is $56,000,000 in the hole. $10.00 as a budget item is clearly unacceptable.

Look, elected officials need the ability to work things out amongst themselves, and sometimes those conversations are best done in private. Forcing everything to be public is not productive for better Government, it's less productive.

None of this means that votes or formal procedures should happen in private. They should all be public. But, again, I ask, what's the core philosophy behind the movement that any communication (because that's what this amounts to) should be public?

Precisely the problem with your viewpoint. What you propose is counter to attracting people to public office, and hamstrings those who are there.

It's just bad policy, imo. Again, what's the philosophy behind this movement? Can you justify the notion that all elected officials communication should only be done in public view? What's the expected outcome here?

Because written correspondence is public record by law; telephone records are too, but not the actual conversation.

Precisely. This is only an issue due to current technology, and what's missing is a sense of the private; we need to strengthen privacy laws, imo, not weaken the notion of privacy.

Of course it's easy to do. That's not my issue. The question is whether it's prudent.

This is the bigger issue. Why doesn't the city have an archiving agreement with its service provider requiring it to archive the messages for the legally required amount of time? Surely its IT department takes care of this for emails. I would hope that it does not rely upon individuals to retain emails and then produce them for public disclosure upon request.

While I tend to be on the side of more openness in government, and less obstacles towards obtaining records that are and should be available to the public, I'm going to have to say that I really don't think text messages are at a point that they should fall into the same category.

As previously noted, we don't require public officials to record conversations they have, except in relatively rare circumstances that are very clearly laid out.

A text message, with its whopping 160 character limit per message, is not enough to really relay that much information. While an email can/will contain attachments and detailed reasons as to why someone should vote one way or another, a text message lacks that ability.

Personally, I view text messaging as a way of talking without having to actually call someone. And until we require all elected officials to have all of their telephone conversations recorded, I don't see why we should have all of their text messages recorded.

Because the law says so is simply circular reasoning.

We can change laws, and do all the time.

The question is, what's the aim of the law, and are we achieving that aim?

In theory e-mail could be stored FOREVER. Sure that is possible. Are the great citizens of Seattle willing to pay for that? Storing data is not free. I think there are more important things to pay for at the moment.

The city is currently running MS Exchange 2007 (migrated from Novell GroupWise last year). Messages are kept on the Exchange system for 45 days (with exceptions) and then purged from the system. This is done due to space issues on the primary storage system.

That e-mail is also copied to a different system called Iron Mountain NearPoint. That system is the City's brand spanking new archiving system. In theory, all e-mail goes into this sytem and COULD be retained forever ($$$) but is currently set to archive depending on what the user has decided the message needs to be held on for. FIOA, HR, and Legal searches can also be done like this.

The problem with that system is that there has been very little communication to the users on how to use this system. Most do not understand how to use the system.

[i]The point is, elected officials need space to carve out ideas and to speak freely outside the constant view of the public. What matters is what they do in public, at public meetings, in hearings, and the votes they take.

There is plenty available to judge public officials on.[/i]

One of the problems is that during a public meeting people can text privately. This could be elected to elected or say a lobbyist in the audience. Everybody gets an equal chance to speak at a meeting and hear what other people are saying, but only people that have access to the elected's cell can text to them. I don't think electeds should be allowed to have cells on the dais.

The “movement” started a long time ago. The people through initiative passed the Public Disclosure Act in 1972.

The difference between a phone call or an in person meeting and a text is that the latter is a written record. A promise or deal or whatever in writing has a different level of value than a verbal statement.

If texts are allowed to be private, not only the electeds will conduct business that way, but so will the bureaucrats. The whole point of the PDA will or at least could be subverted.

Before the PDA government was conducted in secret to a much larger extent, that's why the people, without paid staff, gathered the thousands of signatures needed.

One last point, should electeds know what kind of deals are being made in writing between others in their body? I'd say yes.

Storage is damn near free.

45 days ain't s*** because often people don't know that anything is up for longer than that.

Getting back to non e-mail forms of communications (the reason I was writing). The issue is multi-fold in that not only are there regular text messages to deal with but there are black berry PIN messages as well as instant messages (public IM is blocked at the City however).

We could capture those forever as well, but did the citizens want to pay for this? It's all about money right now and the city not having it.

Um…no it's not. There's servers to store shit on, the cost of running those servers, the cost of maintaining those servers. And when you're talking about a “company” as large as the city, shit gets expensive.

How much extra would it cost?

It is free if you use like a 2TB single SATA hard drive from fry's connected via usb. But, that is not an enterprise solution. That drive likely wouldn't last a week servicing 100's of users let alone over 11,000. We generally buy more expensive drives that are designed to be accessed by thousands. Not only that but they're built redundantly because even the best disk can crap out randomly. RAID arrays (RAID 10) use a LOT of disk to hold a relatively small amout of information.

As an example, the Exchange system is sized to be about 4 Terabytes. Fry's disks would cost about $200-$300. Total storage (raw) being used to house the Exchange system is about 50 terabytes. Even at Fry's prices that is not cheap.

AFTER the 45 days is up they go into NearPoint and are held there longer.

Hey Fizzy…then why not record all phone calls? That would make them just as viable as the written word, no? Perhaps we should just attach microphones, 24/7 to elected officials? Why not? Where's the dividing line in this philosophy of yours?

That is being worked on as wel speak (2 years for all, selective for longer that is). We're talking 7 figures to retain two years of everything doing it on the cheap. The city could do it “better” but add additional licensing costs and we're talking times by .25 whatever that 7 figure amount is.

I think those making the request should also have to pay for the resources and manpower used to produce their disclosure requests. The result may be two fold: 1) get rid of many ignorant disclosure requests; and 2) reduce the burden to the taxpayer.

Legit disclosure requests will still happen but those making the requests will actually have to put some thought into the purpose rather than embarking upon a “fishing expedition”…..

Some calls are recorded in the City. City Light's Power Marketer phone calls are recorded. We're talking a low 6 figure amount for 11 people. Again, the city can do it. Did you (the tax payer) want to fund that?

The philosophy is open government, sparked by this, from 1966:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Informa…

If people want privacy they can go work in the private field–it's as simple as that. Government service is NOT the private field in any way, and it's a mental pollution spread by the dying conservative mindset (may Reagan rest in hell) that spread that disinformation as a concept and ideal.

We've seen time and time and time and time again that politicians do idiot, stupid and dangerous things on the record, and the FOIA and it's ilk, like our state level one, is one of the only defenses we have beyond lawsuits (which the regular man can't get due to cost). The NSA wiretapping, the viaduct videos WDOT did on the local level; McKenna's expenditures on the HCR lawsuit; any number of other debacles.

FOIA laws are the main check and balance we have as people beyond voting in this nation. The courts (nominally) keep everyone in check; the legislatures keep the executives in check and vice versa, and knowledge and information allow voters to keep EVERYONE in check.

That's the philosophy. If people are so insecure that they can't deal with people reading their email–which happens in the private industry, too–then they aren't cut out for public service.

Are you in public service? How on earth does the public keeping check on public sector employees hamstring a goddamn thing? You do nothing wrong, violate no ethics laws or other laws in your public role, and you got nothing to fear.

The expected outcome is compliance with state and Federal law. Simple as that.

Each individual does indeed I have been told select mail for archiving. Untenable, dangerous policy.

Did you even read what I wrote? I explicitly said that ALL the technology we need to do this passively and with minimal manpower already exists.

Your issue is irrelevant, by the way: state and Federal law runs counter to what you're pushing hard here. It's all public record. Can't change that without overturning the sunshine & FOIA laws, and good luck with that.

You retain all mail for whatever duration the law as written says. That's it. Cost in budget has to account for that, and it's a legal requirement so it can't be scrimped on.

The fact that–as confirmed to me by the city attorney's office–that individual staff decide what to archive is dangerous.

How many city employees have email? I'm betting it's not as expensive as everyone makes out to be if done right with the correct enterprise class tools. More importantly, it's the LAW. The law comes before the budget. Everyone needs to remember that.

How long are they saved?

7 figures????

What vendors are being looked at?

The line is what the law says.

Ok fine. Since the city cant print its own money (like the fed) how should it be paid for? Raise taxes? Cut something else?

Brilliant, of course then there'd be quite a few folks out there in need of an iPhone; those are cheap……how many people would that be again?

The law does provide for some limitation on time frame.

It's also the LAW that class sizes be reduced across the state…unless there's a budget crisis. Laws are amazingly flexible.

And, unless I'm mistaken, the law does not address text messages.

Those are general estimates based on “retail” pricing of various options.

They go into NearPoint for about 6 months + 45 days as a whole for now but is subject to change due to overall storage usage.

Look you could just as easily ask the question the other way. Why record any records or why make anything but the final product available to the public?

I think that if it's written it should be a record. When speaking it is or should be more precise than when just talking.

The 24/7 microphone argument is a straw man. No serious proponent of open government has ever suggested we do that.

Much of city business is conducted by Blackberry or similar devices. Why shouldn't those communications be public? Obviously, if text and other written communications are exempt public servants that wish to hide what they are doing will use those forms instead of email or the god forbid a letter.

Yes, people will be able to use voice communication, but that's my line.

It is perfectly clear that text messages are subject to the law.

Courts shall take into account the policy of this chapter that free and open examination of public records is in the public interest, even though such examination may cause inconvenience or embarrassment to public officials or others. RCW 42.56.550(3).

Statutory Provisions: “Public record” includes any writing containing information relating to the conduct of government or the performance of any governmental or proprietary function prepared, owned, used, or retained by any state or local agency regardless of physical form or characteristics. For the office of the secretary of the senate and the office of the chief clerk of the house of representatives, public records means legislative records as defined in RCW 40.14.100 and also means the following: All budget and financial records; personnel leave, travel, and payroll records; records of legislative sessions; reports submitted to the legislature; and any other record designated a public record by any official action of the senate or the house of representatives. RCW 42.17.020(41)..

“You do nothing wrong, violate no ethics laws or other laws in your public role, and you got nothing to fear.” …what an epically naive statement in the mode of “if you've broken no law, then you've nothing to fear”. There are vast arrays of behavior that are neither fish nor fowl but are still likely to used by a political opponent against someone. This issue is not as simple as compliance with state or federal law – because the law is vague and not up to date with technology. Most lawyers and ethnics boards don't know what compliance means anymore. Please don't deal in absolutes, it will always leave you looking like some religious nut.

We are currently funding the radio network to the tune of $6,000,000. This is the system to radio park workers and others. We could buy them all unlimited cell phones for $600 a year with a free phone and supply 5000 workers for $3,000,000 and have $3,000,000 left over for storage.

The radio network cost us $760,000 in 2008.

I'm sure there will be some very good reason why we increased our expenditures by 8 fold in 2 years. Did we reduce a 100 positions by increasing the radio budget?

What is it with you and privacy laws? No one is asking for private information. The PDA covers public documents.

Don't use your private email or cell phone for public business, doing that is what isn't prudent.

It is up-to-date and clear

“Public record” includes any writing containing information relating to the conduct of government or the performance of any governmental or proprietary function prepared, owned, used, or retained by any state or local agency regardless of physical form or characteristics.

I'm not arguing against the FOIA; I'm arguing for reasonable limits on what is and is not disclosed. I continue to ask: “Where's the line for you” and you continue to avoid that question.

I like Open Government. In general, I like records requests. I think intra-departmental emails and official government business should be fair game.

But, if your hope is to record all possible communications between elected officials, I think that goes too far. It's never going to happen, nor do I think it would be prudent.

And, also for the record, I agree that public sector and private sector are two entirely different things; I'm not comparing the two.

You should run for office!

Exactly. I communicate with more than one agency “source” who does this; if they want to get/receive non-public communications while on break at work… However, if they use …@agency.gov, it's public info. And should be archived. And available via PDA or FOIA. Same with texting. Let the sun shine in. Kill the fungus among us.

All archiving systems have costs, and all have retention periods and schedules, and policies for sorting out junk. I have done LOTS of archival work on government actions (been to the Sand Point Archives lately?). Keeping EVERYTHING with the slightest relevance to policy making is very important IMO. EVERYTHING. Print it out if necessary (because actually paper is lots more permanent and cheaper to maintain and easier to access than electronic–so long as it's well indexed). Maybe get rid of it in 500 years. And at that point, the historians will scream if you destroy anything, including McGinn's complaint about a basketball score (or whatever trivia I saw on front of this column).

Timothy is so right.
The law may be that as long as you're using government property you have no expectation of privacy, and even more you should have the expectation of NO privacy, and the public deserves it.
This is also true (no expectation) of most private companies. All your email, surfing, etc. is their business. It's their equipment.

But elected public officials are humans first. We have no right to record their every thought or conversation, even texts, emails or private journals. It's none of our business
Unless it's done on public equipment. So with every push for information I'd expect our electeds to meet more privately, search for wires, and get their own damn phones.

The City of Seattle is required to retain electronic records, including telephone text messages.

On October 13, 2008, the Secretary of State adopted rules for retention of electronic records. Those rules were made effective January 1, 2010. The delayed effective date permitted governments, local and state, time to prepare for the retention of electronic records in all forms.

The rules are codified in Washington Administrative Code (WAC) 434-662.

The rules apply to local governments, including the City of Seattle. The definition of agency in WAC 434-662-020 is: “Agency” means any department, office, commission, board, or division of state government; and any county, city, district, or other political subdivision or municipal corporation or any department, office, commission, court, or board or any other state or local government unit, however designated.

Governments must retain records with archival value. Archival value is define as: “Archival value” means those public records, as determined by state archivist's appraisal, that are worthy of long-term or permanent preservation by the archives due to their historical, legal, fiscal, evidential, or informational value, or are designated such by statute.

While not all text messages are of archival value, the records must be retained and evaluated to determine which must be retained and which may be destroyed. WAC 434-662-030 is clear that electronic records must be retained. It states, “Electronic records are bound by the same provisions as paper documents as set forth in chapter 40.14 RCW. Electronic records must be retained pursuant to the retention schedules adopted by the records committees. Destruction of, or changes to the retention period of, any public record, regardless of format, requires legal approval from the state or local records committee pursuant to chapters 40.14 RCW, 434-635 WAC and other applicable state laws. Public records that are designated “archival” by the state archivist must be maintained pursuant to the provisions of this chapter until such time as they are transferred to the state archives.”

Governments must have a system that saves the records. WAC 434-662-040 states, “Electronic records must be retained in electronic format and remain usable, searchable, retrievable and authentic for the length of the designated retention period. Printing and retaining a hard copy is not a substitute for the electronic version unless approved by the applicable records committee. An agency is responsible for a security backup of active records. A security backup must be compatible with the current system configuration in use by the agency.”

An example of an available service is TextGuard. It advertises, “TextGuard provides a complete mobile electronic communication compliance solution and ensures messaging compliance mandates with all regulatory bodies. The solution provides logging, archiving, monitoring, supervision and alerting of the company’s mobile devices. Presently compatible with Windows®, Blackberry® and Android®, these features are available for text messages, (SMS), Blackberry PIN messages as well as BlackBerry® Messenger.”

That is, since January 1 of this year, it is not permissible for Seattle or any other government to fail to retain text messages because its telecommunications provider does not automatically make a record of the content. There are electronic methods for saving and retaining text messages and Seattle has been responsible for using a retention method since January 1 of this year. The city is in violation of the rule quoted immediately above.

I suggest Poblicola share this with CIty Attorney Holmes and ask him to write a response to you.

Okay, I'll admit that adding text messages to the list isn't a huge deal and will probably become the norm in a few years thanks to the ever-present push by bloggers such as Josh & Erica. The only reason I fight this thinking (that every post-it note is public record) is that like most things, giving a bit encourages more and more. I'm afraid that we'll get to the point that Josh will be complaining that our elected officials personal telephones are on the record, or that even their thoughts are a matter of public interest. As some might propose: “If people want their own thoughts to be private, they should work in the private sector”.

So yes, this issue will likely end up on the side of “open” and text messages will be archived, but I still hold that I'm not going to be any better off and I don't like that as a taxpayer I'm paying for all these frivolous records requests. I see no compelling public interest as electeds can easily meet 1-on-1 or make phone calls.

How could that be done? By mandating that all telephonic conversation between any public entity's officials (or their minions) be recorded, no matter what they're discussing? Come on.

Possible text message from McGinn to O'Brien: Vote against the ordinance or you'll get no support from me again.

Possible reply from O'Brien: If you put it that way, OK.

Could be pretty persuasive with less than 160 characters.

Solid work here, ECB. You should take Mr. Shirley up on his suggestion.

I worked in government (albeit only for about a year) and had to comply with these regulations and it wasn't all that burdensome. You want to keep something off the record? Have a personal conversation.

One point I have yet to see addressed (I could have missed it): were these texts on the Mikes' personal phones? Because if so, personal texts (after hours?) probably wouldn't even be covered under the rules.

ECB?

According to the law as I understand it, if you use a personal account (google, hotmail, personal phone, text…) to conduct public business (lobby a councilmember…) that account is subject to disclosure. Not that I am saying private accounts are used in this way
Discovering that private account on the other hand or that it is happening…

@christi_s: As I understand, it doesn't matter if it's a personal device. If a gov employee is conducting government business on a personal device, the content/ business related to government work on the device (computer, PDA, whatever) is still subject to public disclosure.

Maybe we could do that, but radios work better than cell phones for park workers. They don't crap out in the rain, they broadcast (hey, who left this extra rake over here?), and they aren't subject to accepting calls from girlfriends. If you require people to carry and answer their cell at work, it's really difficult to police using it for private conversations, and with a physical job, those conversations directly reduce productive work getting done.

Hey, you know, fight the power and all that. If there's a cellphone app that saves text messages to your email account, then yeah, sure, let's make them do that. But… meh. I really can't bring myself to get worked up about this. Do you guys have a line on something sinister being said in these text messages?

And maybe I missed it, but I don't think anybody's answered Timothy's question yet: Why is recording text message exchanges crucial to the preservation of democracy in Seattle, but recording telephone conversations not? The letter of the law aside, what is the principled distinction?

You'd be correct.

Josh, the radio network is critical for emergency response in the event that cellular service is interrupted either by high call volumes or the network being somehow incapacitated by a natural disaster, terrorism, etc.

Cool and why did it go up 8 fold? Note I didn't advocate no radio only reducing it to 4 times 2008. The budget info is not complete so let us know why $6M.

Do the parks people really need to be able to lock the bathrooms during an attack? -;)

That said, it could have also come via telephone conversation, which would not be subject to public disclosure.

And I really don't think that O'Brien will need McGinn's support in 2013, rather McGinn will need O'Brien's.

Timothy:
Text messages are written communication. Conversations and phone calls are not. Pure. Simple.

We have strict open government and public record laws to protect citizens from the days of smoke filled rooms. While you may find them slightly over reaching, surely that is better than the alternative: elected officials that can act as they wish without much public scrutiny.

Since my guess is that you are in lather about this because you view ECB's article as an attack! on! Mcginn! (whom you breathlessly defend in multiple comment threads on Publicola), consider this: Tim Burgess could easily spend all day sending texting about his upcoming race against Mcginn on city time and we'd never know….we could see that he had been sharing texts with say, funders, or DSA, or his consultant, but without knowing the content, we wouldn't know if his raising money on city time or just commenting on the weather.

And yes the same could be said of a phone call, or conversation, but those are a lot harder to pull off than text messages and emails.

Agreed! “If you do nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear.” I think Joe McCarthy said something like that. Or the folks at the Salem Witch trials… I'm not trying to use hyperbole, but that comment seems incredibly wrong-headed, almost to the point where I am wondering if the internets has disrupted my irony detector.

Look, politicians need to be able to close their doors and have off the record discussions. I want my elected to be able to raise their voices and make their points forcefully. They need to have private communication means to do so. Text messages can be a part of that.

Although an intimidating sms would be pretty funny: “OMG WTF U WRONG!”

The PDA has been in effect for almost forty years. All written communication has been covered for most of, if not all, of that time. Anyone seeking public office should have been aware of the law, as well as people seeking public employment.

The issue focus here has been on the electeds, but the disclosure of the non-electeds is even more important.

Try to get a question answered by a government agency. My experience is that they ignore questions unless it is in the form of a PDR.

I would suggest that laws should be followed by public agencies. If people don't want to disclose work related communications, they shouldn't work in the public sector.

Law enforcement forensic types can retrieve “deleted” text messages from an iPhone. There's a database, messages are just marked as deleted, not actually removed. I assume all the other devices have similar stories.

I aggressively delete. Oops. No undo. So I investigated.

It's a major pain to do. Eventually, someone will create a simple utility.

At the time FOIA, the PDA, and other open government laws were written there was a bright line between written communications and verbal. Now certain types of verbal communication were also covered by open government laws (open meetings act) but the application was in very limited circumstances.

When email first started to be used by government agencies it was used as a replacement for formal intra and inter office written communications. Thus the records retention policies clearly should apply to email as well and there really wasn't much complaint other than it could be hard to archive in older email systems such as PROFS.

With SMS texting and instant messaging the line is a bit blurrier. People tend to use these forms of communication for informal conversation, “you wanna grab lunch?”, “did you see the game last night?”, etc.

Now I think with the RCW and WAC as it currently stands any official use of SMS messages or instant messaging to conduct government business is subject to the archiving requirements. The question is should an exception be carved out form more informal forms of written communication?

Personally I don't think so as there are ways to have off the record discussions if needed.

You mean policy doesn't change at the rate technology does? Shocking.

Timothy is wrong and so are you. Once you're on the public payroll, all your text are belong to us. If we can retrieve it, we have the right to examine it. That's the law. McGinn and O'Brien are not above it, and neither is anyone else.

Erica, it's fine line for you, ethically on the PDR's. The public values you as a journalist, but we also value the time of our public employees. Make sure it's about the public interest, and not about your own self-aggrandizement.
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There should be a personal litmus test for you – the more difficult your request is for public employees, the higher your personal standard should be for determining its importance, relevance, etc.
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I'll go back to my old saw about Susan Kelleher and the snowstorm. She wasted many hours of taxpayer-funded public employee labor because someone made her look bad and she wanted to take them down. On balance, she was just being a schmuck, not being a good journalist.
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So use your best judgment. It does matter.

But does an SMS = “writing”? I honestly don't know, and doubt there is any case-law on that question. But, as you can see, it specifically says “writing”, and not “communication”. I personally view an SMS as a communication, but not a writing, as as such, would not be subject to public disclosure laws, and can see how a legal argument to that effect, using the statutory provision, could be made and persuade a judge.

The regional radio network is in the middle of a major, multi-year upgrade, hence the sharp increase in budgeted cost over 2008. Since the primary users of the radio network are police/fire/life safety personnel from multiple agencies I don't think gutting the budget would be a prudent move.

If any public employee chooses to violate the public records law and communicate in ways that cannot be recorded/collected for archival purposes then they're going to do it and there's not a thing anyone can do about it unless they get caught in the act. Sorry, but that is the way the world is folks. Technology is a great tool, but it cannot stop people if they want to misbehave.

It's possible to write the laws more broadly, so that any advances in tech are automatically absorbed.

“Any permanent or semi-permanent materials, written or recorded that are created in any part or capacity by municipal agencies, municipal employees on any municipal-owned equipment or services, or on any municipal-owned equipment are subject to FOIA, etc.”

I think it would be advantageous if Seattle and Washington adopted electronic records laws that dictated all material be kept in a format which could be “trivially” disseminated. Yes, I know this may not exist today, but that's the ultimate goal. Then, if I or ECB or you file a request for XYZ, ideally it would be trivial for someone to just fire off XYZ in reply as an email attachment.

Absolutely not. I suppose I'm starting to sound like a broken record or a broken liberal, but the only way to stop that is to make it legally such a disincentive to do what you mentioned that only the insane would be willing to do it.

Which isn't automatically good, but it's the only way being completely pragmatic and realistic.