There are number of persistent FOI inquirers who want to find out about BBC links with Common Purpose. Recently one asked for any private emails between DG Mark Thompson and the organisation - it was the second time of asking, after the Information Commissioner ruled that private emails about official company business were indeed discoverable, last December.
The BBC says any private emails from the DG would be automatically linked to BBC account, to keep records. And there are none after January 1st 2009.
Then comes the interesting bit - all emails before that date have been archived, and the BBC argues it would take too long in FOI terms (four calendar days, or 12 working days) to "export the KVS system" - a process that would be required before the archive could be searched.
Can that be right - four days to find an email from before 2009 ? Anyone help ?
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I have years of experience in IT support at the corporate level. This sounds like a total fabrication.
ReplyDeleteEmail will be held retained on an email server(s) usually dedicated to the task. Emails from all accounts will ALL be held upon that server and the whole lot periodically archived onto backup devices tapes DVD or some other form of mass storage. As the quantity of emails held on the server increases and storage space is only finite there may be some time limit set for instance 3 years where emails are no longer retained on the server but archived off to backup. However this a) seems a very short retention period and b) The old mails would not take four man days to recover from a backup device.
I have restored from backup entire mail servers with thousands of email accounts and more individual emails than anyone cares to count in a matter of hours.
The claim that to restore a single users email account from a backup media takes four days effort is ridiculous.
Searching all of those emails for a specific string such as "common purpose collaborator" or "Lord Haw Haw" or "Quisling" would only take seconds.
They probably have something to hide.
Mark Thompson the current director general of the BBC. 'In November 2005, Thompson traveled with his Jewish wife to Israel, where he held direct talks with Sharon.
http://aangirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/israeli-controlled-bbc.html