Federal judge sanctions Seattle officials for deleting texts
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
This is a common and fitting, though usually devastating, sanction for spoliation of evidence.
To the obvious one.
"Assume there was evidence so bad they risked criminal charges to get rid of it" makes instilling doubt a lot harder.
Plaintiff because, culpable or not, those texts may be the best explanation for whatever happened. Losing them means they're framing their arguments a bit in the dark. It's easier to persuade if you land pretty close to an actual truth, and that's harder without complete discovery of executive communications.
For defendants, because the explanations are actually pretty plausible for a municipal IT operation, and it's dumb for big liability to ride on some stupid, irrelevant IT gaffe on some peripheral technology.
The court because there isn't a good answer and deciding big cases on questionable legal presumptions and fictions that themselves turn on irrelevant technical arcana-- these are the things people dislike about lawyers.
Nah.
> The former mayor has offered a number of explanations for the missing messages, including that she dropped her phone in water, that she inadvertently changed the phone’s deletion settings and that “someone” set a new phone to delete messages older than 30 days, resulting in a rolling deletion of previous messages.
Individually, sure. Combined? That's an unlikely set of circumstances. This, too:
> The order notes that Best’s phone at some point was also set to delete text messages after a month, despite her obligation to keep them due to pending litigation. Zilly noted that the former chief apparently deleted more than 27,000 of those text messages by hand.
All this while subject to a litigation hold looks very bad. Letting them wiggle out of it would encourage such behavior in the future.
https://www.euronews.com/2022/01/28/von-der-leyen-text-messa...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/29/european-commi...
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/454580-mueller-...
"What? Like with a cloth?"
Is the full quote here's the video.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/hillary-clinton-jokes-...
BleachBit's Response
https://www.bleachbit.org/news/bleachbit-stifles-investigati...
The FBI agent in question was was taking bribes from Oleg Deripaska, not "from Russia". Deripaska paid Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, $10 million dollars and was receiving private briefings and confidential polling data from him. I really don't think it's a point in favor of "the FBI was out to get Trump" when one of the guys investigating the wrong-doing was being paid by one of the campaign's allies.
How does it tie in with what we know about the pressure from the FBI's New York field office to reopen the HRC email investigation right before the 2016 election? Comey was pretty sure that they were going to leak to the press if he didn't speak out himself. That does seem indicative of a rogue agency, but not exactly one that is pro-Democratic or pro-Clinton.
this article is about a month old; the case recently settled [0] (at least, a preliminary notice of settlement was filed, it's not finalized yet, and none of the details are public)
it seems very likely that these sanctions convinced the city to settle instead of going to trial, or at a minimum forced them to settle for less favorable terms than they were hoping for.
0: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/seattl...
I would expect this from a middle schooler, not a mayor.
yes, but it's even worse than that
> Jenny Durkan is a partner and co-founder of the Seattle office of global law firm Quinn Emanuel. Her practice focues on cybersecurity issues, white collar investigations and litigation. [0]
and
> Durkan served for two years on Attorney General Holder’s original Attorney General Advisory Committee, and has chaired his advisory Subcommittee on Cybercrime and Intellectual Property Enforcement since 2009. [1]
of all the federal prosecutors (US Attorneys) in the country, she chaired the cybercrime subcommittee. and her private practice focused on cybersecurity issues and white collar crime.
and she committed a white-collar cybercrime.
0: https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/print-edition/2015/11/20...
1: https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/us-attorney-jenny-durka...
Also, the texts were sent to someone and both parties had to delete them for deleting to work - so... conspiracy too.
How are we supposed to trust our government when this is what they do?
Interesting fact about Bowles that’s relevant to HN: Years ago she did a profile of Jessica Livingston that ticked pg off: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2014/8/21/11630108/ycs-jess...
Fond fantasy: Judges send such idiot officials to prison for ~50 years. And that is repeated so often that we start seeing occasional grown-ups in municipal offices.
But, if you think it's hard to get good people to do thankless work for $40k/yr now, just try doing it when the last couple people in that chair are in prison for a few decades right now.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/washington/hundreds-of-seatt...
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/374-seatt...
“The median gross pay among SPD’s more than 2,000 employees last year was about $153,000, not including benefits, with 374 employees grossing at least $200,000 and 77 making at least $250,000, according to a Times analysis”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newyork-pension/public-wo...
> For example, a police officer with a history of zero overtime worked more than 800 hours of overtime in his last years on the job, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate said in a report.
"The gross pay numbers cloak some details, because they combine regular and overtime pay; SPD uses overtime to staff emphasis patrols, sports events and other special events, such as parades and protests. It spent more than $34 million in overtime pay in 2019.
Last year’s gross numbers are also somewhat skewed, because members of the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) received lump-sum retroactive raises from 2015-2018, when they worked under an expired contract.
The retroactive payments help explain why SPD’s median gross pay rose from about $105,000 in 2017 and $104,000 in 2018 to $153,000 in 2019, and why 20 employees leapfrogged Best in gross pay from 2017 to 2019."
The $153k median is skewed due to - median backpay of around $35k for 3 years, so in reality median base pay is around $115k.
True...though (at least in my part of the US) there seem to be plenty of junior-high-escapee municipal officials making vastly more than that.
Another Fond Fantasy: People who get really nasty with bottom-tier civil servants, over decisions which are obviously made much further up the org chart, face mental competence hearings. If you're screaming anger at a part-time retail postal clerk, over stamp prices that are set by officials in Washington DC...maybe we need to X-ray you head, before it's too late.
It is a felony with a punishment of imprisonment for up to 10 years and/or fines of up to $5,000, but that is a separate issue from the civil suit. RCW 40.16.020
Politicians the same - most of them could dream of making the kind of money they're making as higher govermental officials with their skills, most of them are slimy opportunists that simply want live off taxpayer money.
That’s because the people doing their job properly don’t get noticed, except maybe by the people directly served (and most of them just take it for granted) while the ones like those under discussiom get covered in national news and discussion sites with a global audience.
It seems shocking to me that deleting the messages off the phones makes them inaccessible to prosecution, when presumably there are backups on multiple servers controlled by telecom companies and other government entities.
Actual message content is kept only for a short period of time.
https://www.dhs.gov/fusion-center-locations-and-contact-info...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory#Origin_and_U...
> The earliest known usage was by the American author Charles Astor Bristed, in a letter to the editor published in The New York Times on January 11, 1863.
> The term "conspiracy theory" is itself the subject of a conspiracy theory, which posits that the term was popularized by the CIA in order to discredit conspiratorial believers, particularly critics of the Warren Commission, by making them a target of ridicule.
Who popularized it is subjective.
What isn't subjective: the CIA indeed sent out a memo about this. It marked an increase in the use of the term in popular media publications. You can find it and read it.
> the CIA indeed sent out a memo about this
Wow, the CIA noticed something and sent a memo?
AT&T is almost certainly not storing every text message long-term. The NSA likely is. It wouldn't be surprising if that's via a direct PRISM-style integration, but it still means subpoenaing AT&T for old texts is likely to not be productive. (As it was not productive in this particular case.)
Subpoena the NSA and they'll say "no, for national security reasons".
6 billion text messages are sent per day in the US. That's about the volume of Google web searches, and I know from experience Google doesn't have the capacity to log every search or the logs of evaluation of every search. If Google lacks the capacity, I suspect the NSA lacks the capacity.
6 billion SMS messages, at a max length of 160 characters, is 1 terrabyte of raw text. I think that the NSA has the cash to shell out $100 for a new 1TB hard drive every day... (not even including compression, of which it is highly, highly compressible)
I already operate on the assumption that all text messages (like all emails) are scanned and stored somewhere to my detriment.
Also, if I'm a provider, keeping all those text messages is going to be a more of a liability than a benefit. It's an expense for storage and retrieval. I'm not sure they would really make any money off of maintaining a long history; it would be super rare that this would pay off. Better to just state that "after n days, they are gone, we're done. Archiving is up to you, the customer."
The key thing is to have a policy or practice. If your policy is to purge texts after 7 days, that’s a defensible position. If your behavior is to throw your phone in the river around the time of your communicating about a matter of interest to a litigant, that reflects poorly.
In the US, for example AT&T is only a couple of days; Verizon, 3-10 days for SMS contents. Everything else like subscriber info, call history, tower location, tower dumps, range-to-tower can be years.
In EU similar patchwork.
(source: me half century in field)
The only tool that I know of that can encrypt SMS messages is Silence. The source code is quite stale.
The fifth amendment allows an individual to refuse to disclose a password in criminal trials (they can be compelled to open biometric locks, hwoever). I don't know if these protections would extend to civil proceedings such as occurred here; if not, the judge could hold such witnesses in contempt.
Could the writers of this piece not come up with a more lurid and entertaining headline?
The mayor dropped their phone in water and it stoped working and after they received a new phone it had the 30d retention setting set (and this all being city equipment, the mayor didn't set their own phone up). Also pretty much everybody in the case (defendent + plantif) had deleted some messages ...
[1]: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17292181/166/hunters-ca...
> the former chief apparently deleted more than 27,000 of those text messages by hand.
Surveillance cameras are everywhere on street. But if asked the footage to against themselves, the usual answers are cameras broken, storage broken, or even server is missing.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17292181/hunters-capita...
Cities get a lot of money through taxes so one could say that it's paid for by taxpayers although it wouldn't be completely accurate as they have other revenue sources (fines, Federal money, etc).
Sometimes the government employee does something so agregious that we say "we cannot defend you: you are on your own" but that is really rare.
Then again, the website told me "Your browser is set to private mode. To continue reading, log in or subscribe." so I was unable to read the full article. Whether I'm in private mode or not is none of their damn business.
They explain the sanctions directly in the article.
"For that reason, Zilly said that when the case goes to trial he’ll instruct the jury that it may presume the text messages were detrimental to the city’s legal position and that there’s significant circumstantial evidence they were deleted intentionally."
"He also ordered the city to pay the attorneys fees for those who showed city leaders destroyed significant evidence about their decision-making during CHOP, including their move to abandon the Police Department’s East Precinct."
Instructing the jury to assume the evidence of wrongdoing existed is indeed a crippling sanction; that's an immensely high bar for the lawyers to have to jump over now.
Maybe you missed where is stated: >>Then again, the website told me "Your browser is set to private mode. To continue reading, log in or subscribe." so I was unable to read the full article. Whether I'm in private mode or not is none of their damn business.
Then it is rather odd to complain that the article lacks information.
Honestly your tone this entire thread isn't conducive to any sort of constructive discussion. It seems like you're just having a bad day and lashing out at this article for whatever reason.