Morano asks what additional safeguards DORIS needs to preserve communications

Thank you.

Very briefly.

Commissioner, your testimony describes record management policies, employee training, and technological systems.

We also have a written policy telling employees not to use Signal, which we alluded to earlier, followed by an acknowledged incident involving disappearing messages.

What additional safeguards, if any?

Would Doris need to ensure substantive government communications are preserved, whether it's legislation, whether it's policy guidance?

What else would you need?

Thank you for that question.

We definitely enjoy these points of advocacy.

that come up from city council.

It's very helpful to maintaining our request for agencies to communicate with their employees related to what they should be doing for their records.

So truly it's broadening understanding and ensuring that you two are

preserving your own records and submitting it to its proper channels.

I know that the City Council, for example, has its archives at the LaGuardia Archives, which we were able to visit and get a tour of, and they have a new director.

And we've talked to them about the Memorandum of Understanding related to City Council and Doris's archival records.

And so...

The best way we can support the work of archiving the city is to have a sense of how our own records are being archived and maintained and hopping on board to the records management platform that allows us to do this work.

Would a requirement that agencies document exceptions and verify preservation settings address a gap in the current system, or can you already require that under existing authority?

Thank you for the question.

And just to clarify, a requirement to verify, can you repeat it?

A requirement that agencies document exceptions and verify preservation settings in, say, a WhatsApp group, or I don't know how Signal works, but presumably there's something similar in Signal.

I see.

Thank you for that distinction.

As it relates to, thank you for the question as well, as it relates to the social media platforms, that is not what RecordPoint is capturing.

And so we set the parameters for the records management platform that we are supporting agencies to onboard into.

And that is for government-supported software.

As it relates to the social media, then, the vendor is the one setting up the ability to scrape those platforms.

And so it really is not, it's a very easy and foolproof method.

They just.

Connect their account and they're already being archived if they have a social media archive social account.

Unfortunately, as of now, there really is no way for us to capture what takes place in specific platforms because the technology just doesn't exist.

And so in some future moment, maybe it will exist and we'll continue to advance.

But as of now, the policy is set because of the limitation of technology as well as the likelihood that these messages are transitory and not really worth the government resources to retain in perpetuity the way that other materials eligible.