EPA Employees Are Using Encryption Technology to Hide Resistance to Trump — But Is It Legal?
By MICHAEL BASTASCH Published on February 2, 2017
https://stream.org/epa-employees-usi...e-trump-legal/
Federal employees are turning to encryption technologies to coordinate their resistance to the Trump administration, looking for ways to protect their conversations from hackers or agency overlords.
A small group of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees are already "communicating incognito using the app Signal shortly after Trump's inauguration," Politico reports. Such apps encrypt communications and make them difficult to monitor or hack
But is this legal? Probably not, according to one expert.
"It appears that some employees at the EPA may be using encrypted apps on their phones to avoid transparency laws in an effort to conceal their communications from internal and external oversight," Henry Kerner, an attorney and senior vice president of the public interest law firm Cause of Action, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Federal law requires agency employees to preserve work-related records on government servers, even if such communications occur over non-government emails, phones or text messages.
Encrypting messages allow employees to create potentially work-related messages only they can control. That creates the possibility employees could use encryption to circumvent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
"Under the Federal Records Act, the EPA has a legal obligation to preserve all records made by employees working on official government business," Kerner said. "This obligation is all the more important if EPA employees are using personal cellular devices or private accounts for such purposes."
...EPA has long had problems with employees not preserving records and using private emails to conduct agency business. The agency's inspector general, for example, found EPA employees only archived 86 text messages out of 3.1 million sent and received in 2015.
Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used an alias email address under the name "Richard Windsor" to conduct agency business, and top agency officials have been caught using private emails to coordinate with environmental activists....
...News outlets frantically reported Trump's team ordered the EPA employees to temporarily freeze grant spending and stop sending out social media posts or talking with reporters.
But veteran agency employees who spoke to the New York Times said the Trump administration acted no differently than the Obama administration did when taking over the reins of government in 2009.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Lista
