Citizens Union's Grace Rauh calls for banning auto-delete functions
Grace Rauh, Executive Director of Citizens Union, says auto-delete functions should be explicitly prohibited from official city business, citing her experience suing the de Blasio administration for emails involving outside political advisors, and notes WhatsApp and Slack also add auto-delete functions.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for waiting.
Go ahead, Nick.
Thank you, Chair Brewer and members of the committee.
My name is Grace Rao.
I'm the executive director of Citizens Union, a nonpartisan good government and democracy organization that has been working for honest, accountable, effective government, fair and open elections, and a civically engaged public for nearly 130 years.
I want to start by thanking you for calling this important oversight hearing, and I want to address the two main separate issues before the committee.
today.
First on Signal and the idea of auto-delete apps and messaging.
We believe that this is a clear black and white issue with a simple policy solution.
Automatic delete functions should be explicitly prohibited from any official city business.
I know firsthand from my time as a reporter at New York One, obtaining government records can sometimes require significant effort, but ultimately deserve to be in the public realm.
I successfully sued the de Blasio administration to obtain emails involving outside political advisors and fought City Hall's efforts to keep those records from public scrutiny.
The growing use of instant messaging applications does create challenges because it's not just on one app like Signal.
We're seeing WhatsApp, Slack, other platforms that are creating and adding auto-delete functions that make it more difficult to ensure that government records are retained and available to the public.
Doris does strongly discourage use of instant messaging for substantive conversations, but the existing policies do not go far enough, and it's necessary for the city to establish clear technology-neutral rules in the charter
prohibiting government employees from using auto-delete functions for government communications.
There's a basic principle that should be upheld here.
City employees cannot use or permit the
use of any function that automatically deletes or destroys a government record after a fixed period of time.