News release: “The Rosemary Award for worst open government performance, named after President Nixon’s secretary who erased 18½ minutes of a crucial Watergate tape, this year goes to the Federal Chief Information Officers Council, the senior federal officials (responsible for $71 billion a year of IT purchases) who have never addressed the failure of the government to save its e-mail electronically, according to the citation today by the National Security Archive. Formed by Executive Order in 1996 and codified in law by Congress in the 2002 E-Government Act, the CIO Council describes itself as the “principle interagency forum for improving practices in the design, modernization, use, operation, sharing, and performance of Federal Government information resources.” Yet neither the Council’s founding documents, its 2007-2009 strategic plan, its transition memo for the Obama administration, nor its current Web site even mention the challenge of electronic records management for e-mail. Last month, the Justice Department investigation of former senior officials John Yoo and Jay Bybee over their authorship of the so-called “torture memos” revealed that “most of Yoo’s email records had been deleted and were not recoverable.” The Yoo deletions represent only the latest red flag about government e-mail preservation – dating back to the January 1989 attempt by the Reagan administration to destroy its e-mail backup tapes, thwarted by the National Security Archive’s lawsuit.”