Report Bashes Feds Sloppy E-mail Management

A new report from the Government Accountability Office is bashing the e-mail management policies of federal agencies, saying there is “little assurance that [federal] agencies are effectively managing records, including e-mail records, throughout their life cycle.”

In an article on the Yahoo News website, Richard Martin says the GAO report criticizes the digital-records and cyber-security policies at five government agencies including Department of Homeland Security.

The report, titled “Federal Records: National Archives and Selected Agencies Need to Strengthen E-Mail Management,” comes in the wake of the long battle over thousands of missing e-mails from White House officials that the Bush Administration has been unable or unwilling to locate.

“Among the report’s findings is the revelation that employees at the Dept. of Homeland Security have access to Web-based e-mail services, such as Gmail and Hotmail, from government computers,” Martin says. “Such e-mail systems are often the conduit for various forms of malware including viruses, phishing scams, and the like.”

“The entire apocalypse-in-a-box that is the Internet is allowed to tunnel through all of Homeland Security's security,” government cyber-security expert David Gewirtz wrote in an analysis based on the GAO report, “because employees can open the Pandora’s box of trouble that's everyone’s e-mail account on the Net.”