Saturday, March 13, 2010
Rose Mary Woods demonstating her stretch
The Chief Information Officers Council, tasked with bolstering the federal government’s IT needs, does a lousy job of preserving emails for federal offices, according to the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The government watchdog group has bestowed the CIO Council with its annual Rosemary Award for worst open government performance because it continues to not address the importance of preserving electronic messages for archival purposes.
The Rosemary Award is named in honor of President Richard Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who tried to defend her boss’s erasure of an 18 1/2-minute portion of a key Watergate tape by claiming that she made the erasure by mistake during a backwards-leaning stretch.
The National Security Archive noted that the failure to install a secure backup of all federal emails was especially alarming after it was discovered that former Bush administration officials were able to destroy key emails relating to the authorized use of torture against detainees.
“The CIO Council has a bad case of attention deficit disorder when it comes to the e-mail disaster in the federal government,” said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive. “We hope this year’s Rosemary Award will serve as a wake up call to the government officials who have the power, the money and the responsibility to save the e-mail sent in the course of the public’s business.”
Last year’s Rosemary Award went to the FBI for averaging 374 days to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests and failing to respond at all to two-thirds of such requests.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
2010 Rosemary Award for Worst Open Government Performance Goes to Federal Chief Information Officers' Council (National Security Archive)
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