Tracing the path of government emails

Experts weigh in on lifespan of deleted correspondence as Smith-CBC row heats up

Where does a government email go, after it’s sent?

The lifespan and anatomy of that email lies at the centre of a sizzling controversy enveloping Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and CBC News.

CBC published a story on Jan. 19 alleging that staff in Smith’s office sent questionable emails that criticized Crown prosecutors’ assessments of cases stemming from the border protests last year in Coutts, Alta.

That, if it happened, would be a big no-no and a breach of the independence of the justice system.

CBC said it didn’t have the emails and hadn’t seen them; it relied on unnamed sources.

Smith was adamant this didn’t happen after the non-partisan public service and IT workers in the provincial government did a search through some one million incoming, outgoing and deleted emails.

They found nothing, the government said.

Smith has demanded the CBC retract and apologize for its “defamatory article.” CBC told the Star it stood by its reporting.

The government has told some media outlets that deleted emails were only retained for a period of 30 days, and there have been suggestions that this search would not have captured those deleted, leaving room for speculation that the alleged emails were gone forever.

However, one privacy expert the Star spoke to said she wasn’t so sure about that.

The search still may have turned up deleted emails because even if a sender deleted theirs, the recipient might not have. What’s really at issue is what the parameters of the search were and how deep it went, she said.

The Star sent a detailed list of questions to Smith’s government about the email search and its policy around deleted emails.

The response back from press secretary Ethan Lecavalier-Kidney appeared more detailed than what had been provided to other media outlets and described the lifespan of a deleted email. It’s longer than 30 days, he said. If an email is deleted, it sits in the user’s “deleted items” folder for 30 days. It’s still recoverable by the user while it sits there. After that 30day period, it is deleted permanently for the user, said Lecavalier-Kidney.

However, it is still recoverable by “our investigation team,” he said, for an additional 30 days until it is “deleted permanently.”

That means a total of 60 days in the life of a deleted email. It still also means that the public service’s search may not have turned up an email in a sender’s mailbox since the original CBC story left it vague, saying emails were sent in the fall.

The government email search was conducted from Jan. 20 to 22.

Lecavalier-Kidney noted that “if the person who sent an email deleted the email from their mailbox, the email would still be found in the recipient’s mailbox, unless the recipient also deleted the email,”

That is to say that a Crown prosecutor would have also had to delete an email from someone in the premier’s office appearing to try to politically influence a case, if the allegations are true.

Not to say that couldn’t happen, but according to email deletion guidelines posted online by the province, emails can be deleted only if they fall into certain parameters.

“Many email messages do not merit keeping because they have no business value or are only of temporary value,” the government’s guidelines say.

A flow chart follows. Official emails related to business should be kept, especially if the email is documenting an action or decision, or if it is responsive to an ongoing freedom-of-information request or litigation.

But if it’s about grabbing lunch or otherwise not related to job responsibilities or about supporting business activities, it is probably “transitory” and can be destroyed.

The president of the Privacy & Access Council of Canada, Sharon Polsky, who is based in Calgary, said the government must be more transparent about how the search was conducted.

Asked Polsky: How deep did it go and what were the search terms?

Said the government press secretary: “The search was conducted on approximately 900 mailboxes. This included prosecutors and staff in the (Alberta Crown Prosecution

Service) as well as staff in the premier’s office. The names of those whose mailboxes were included in the investigation are confidential.”

“It is unlikely that another review would be able to find anything without additional information, such as the alleged emails, which CBC has admitted that they have not viewed or even proven that they exist,” Lecavalier-Kidney added.

The government has also previously stated that the “search included all emails in the GOA (government of Alberta) mailboxes including emails sent from or to a non-GOA email address.”

But Polsky said usually an email can live on outside of the recipient’s or sender’s mailbox.

“It’s not a direct connection between my computer and yours,” she said. “It goes from my computer to at least one server.”

That server also probably has a backup server, Polsky said. The Star asked the government about the search and if it looked into servers but didn’t receive an answer.

The questions for Polsky lie in the search terms used by the team tasked with combing emails. She says that the search was probably similar to one done when the government receives a freedom-of-information request, and that structuring search terms is “a bit of an art.”

Then there’s the question of if the government searched various devices, Polsky said. Did it look into desktop computers, laptops, government cellphones and personal cellphones?

“The line gets blurred,” she said. “That’s the problem in any search. How they overcome that is always a challenge.”

The government must also be more transparent about which emails are deleted and why, she said.

“So, 30 days, that might be 30 days in this system for transient documents or for certain categories of documents,” she said.

“If they’re suggesting it’s for all documents, well, then that’s a big problem, because government is supposed to keep a record of what it does so that the public, the taxpayers, their bosses, can ask and find out, ‘What are you doing? How are you spending your tax dollars?’ ”

The political stakes are high for Smith, who must face Albertans in a general election in four months.

The backlash over whether Smith contacted Crown prosecutors started weeks ago when Smith herself stated publicly she was talking to Crown prosecutors about COVID-related charges.

Then, she clarified, saying she didn’t contact prosecutors directly, just Justice Minister Tyler Shandro and the assistant attorney general, and she spoke about charges being in the public interest.

Then, on Wednesday, another CBC News report: allegations based on sources that Shandro’s office has been feeling pressured by the premier for months over COVID-19 charges.

The report said the premier’s office wanted charges to go away. Specifically brought to the justice minister’s attention were charges related to pastor Artur Pawlowski, the report suggested.

There’s been a lot of smoke over the issue. Where the fire is, if there is one, could have implications that are political, legal, democratic and beyond.

‘‘ Many email messages do not merit keeping because they have no business value or are only of temporary value.

ALBERTA GOVERNMENT GUIDELINES