Every US government office - at both the state and federal - levels has records keeping requirements. It’s the reason we can submit FOIA requests that return with data from the 30s.

Is every conversation in a rest room recorded and available?

If you don't trust people creating cryptography standards you cannot really leave gaps, can you?

Most officials communicate in ways that circumvent FOIA.

Adding to this FOIA doesn't guarantee useful answers. Having gone through the process whilst in the military I found a few loopholes. They can give a bloated answer with boxes and boxes of useless mostly unrelated information. They did this to me. They can also decline to answer and just say it's classified. They can also just decline to answer through stalling tactics. It served my purpose and that was to stall them from collecting DNA.

Hillary Clinton's email server is a famous example of attempting to avoid FOIA requests.

From what I hear, it's also an example of how ineptly run the State Dept's IT systems were.

Complex tasks like "set up a new computer" had months of lead time.

That wouldn't explain the intentional destruction of the blackberry phones and the deletion of thousands of emails.

I'd say the haphazard destruction of Blackberries and iPads with hammers is pretty explicit evidence of how bad State Dept IT policy and execution was.

Maybe I've worked in large corporations too much, but my first question when I see policy violations is not "How is this person conspiring?" but rather "What made following the official policy difficult? And how can we fix that?"

Also, the State Dept seems like exactly the sort of place policy violations become culturally routine: non-technical experts, doing work that is arguably "more important", with IT seen as a cost rather than profit center.

Perfect storm for policy-in-name-only.

She must've been unaware of her legal requirements under FOIA, that her husband signed into law, when she ordered the people's emails destroyed.

Or, she didn't even think about records retention or device security, in the same way that most politicians/executives don't, assuming it was handled by someone.

And it was in fact not, because there was no functioning policy enforcement at State.

> there was no functioning policy enforcement at State

I agree, the laws were not enforced in this case.

I would have gone with Petraeus' gmail account. The one that got the Chinese to hack Google.

Why not? Have you ever worked in an open kitchen?

If you can't do your work for the public under public scrutiny, you shouldn't.

How is that in any way like working in an open kitchen?

Anyway, interesting take that people working for the public should have no right to privacy in any way. Not sure you will find many people for such work, though.

The people are still human beings. The process is still open to FOIA. It’s not perfect, but it’s the right solution.

Sorry, what is the right solution? Total surveillance? The current approach? Some middling thing?

FOI

Does mandating to record any work related communication really invade privacy of people working there?

As it would be based on distrust, you'd have to record everything everywhere to avoid people not evading it.

Even innocently, if, for example, two employees meet at home for dinner with their respective families and there is talk about work - needs to be recorded in that view. Or people car sharing on the way to work - recorded. Any work related communication is very very broad.

And everything recorded open to the public, too.

How is it any different?

You don't have privacy in what you do at work when it comes to your employer. That's why it's called privacy, it relates to private and personal things. Your work for someone else is, by definition, not private.

You don't get to push stuff into production and play coy about what you're pushing, do you? Why would that change when the employer is the public?

Putting aside finer points on privacy at work (depending on jurisdiction not so black and white), recording and making publicly available all work related communication goes way beyond usual surveillance at work places even in regulated communication settings. I have at least never worked in any place that would insist on recording any work related conversations with a co-worker during the morning commute (and to have that publicly available).

But how do we prove the cooks aren't talking to each other outside the kitchen?

If there's something wrong with the work they do in the kitchen, it doesn't matter how that came to be. If there is nothing wrong with it, it doesn't matter what else (other than something that would make them do something they shouldn't in the kitchen) they talk about outside of the kitchen.

The solution can't possibly be not even knowing the difference between someone putting salt or toe nails into a pan -- but ensuring cooks don't talk to each other, so even though we have no clue what they're doing or should be doing, we magically know nothing bad is going on.

How do we know the cooks aren't holding out on a better recipe for Alfredo sauce that uses more salt? The recipe they're using seems adequate, but there's a better formula they could be using by adding salt, except they've all gotten together outside of work to conspire against us and say there's nothing wrong with the amount of salt they're using. Who knows who's paying them to say this? We need to follow them everywhere, see who they see, read what they write, audit their bank records. We need proof.