"Instead, ever since April, workers have been told to take screenshots on their own devices in order to abide by the law - a shift in policy that has a high potential for misuse and abuse, and which makes it much more difficult to track messages when requested in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) inquiries. The Federal Records Act requires all agencies within the government to document their employees' communications, with some exceptions ostensibly granted for national security concerns."
"In testimony before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia he gave last week, Michael Weissman, executive director of the Chief Data Officer Directorate within the Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), said that TeleMessage had "cybersecurity failures" that meant DHS had to stop using it. However, it was not replaced with new software - instead, DHS employees were "obligated to manually archive their messages," via screenshots taken by themselves, "in accordance with existing" department policies."
DHS halted use of the TeleMessage archival tool after identifying cybersecurity failures and did not replace it with new software. Since April, DHS employees have been instructed to manually archive electronic communications by taking screenshots on their own devices. The Federal Records Act requires agencies to document employee communications, with limited national-security exceptions. Manual screenshot archiving increases the potential for error, misuse, and deliberate abuse and makes it substantially harder to locate and produce messages in response to FOIA requests. The change emerged during testimony tied to a lawsuit by American Oversight seeking communications from DHS staffers regarding the National Gu.
Read at Truthout
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