Monday 9 January 2012

None of our business? Private emails, FOI and lawful interception

an article by Jonathan Baines, Information Governance Office in the Legal and Democratic Services Team at Buckinghamshire County Council, examines the issues surrounding FOI and lawful interception published in Freedom of Information Volume 8 Issue 2 (November/December 2011).

And at that point I come to a thundering full stop. There is no abstract to this article. The two introductory paragraphs could be taken to constitute one (see below) although they aren’t really. This journal is not listed on DeepDyve nor does there appear to be any way of accessing a single article without subscribing to the whole journal for a minimum of a year.

This policy is, to my mind in this day and age, short sighted but then I'm not the publisher trying to make money!

Introductory paragraphs

There was much discussion in the media recently about reports that the Information Commissioner was to investigate the education secretary, Michael Gove, and his close advisers at the Department for Education (the Department). The Department has since denied any impropriety, and has stated that private email was being used to conduct party political rather than government business.

These stories provoke some interesting questions. Firstly, to what extent can information contained in “private emails” be caught by the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA)? Secondly, to what extent might a deliberate attempt to evade FOIA in this alleged manner be unlawful? Thirdly, to what extent can an employers, or a government department, scrutinise its employees’, or an elected person’s email accounts (especially if those accounts are webmail accounts)?

Interesting!!

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