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Cuomo admin mum on FOIL searches

Feb 08, 2019 12:21 am
Chris Bragg reports at Capitol Confidential that the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo repeatedly is refusing to answer whether it has the technological capacity to search through all their employees’ emails — at once — for a particular search term. The Cuomo administration routinely rejects Freedom of Information Law requests that use broad terms saying that the administration’s “record-keeping” system may not be able to handle them, and staffs cannot be forced to perform “unreasonable” or “herculean” tasks. "Organizations like Reinvent Albany, have told the Times Union that these types of searches are easily possible for state agencies," Bragg writes. The story notes that the state's Department of Health, for instance, uses Microsoft Office 365, and a Microsoft-issued tutorial seems to show that broad searches of emails – for a particular search term – are possible, without the searcher needing to pre-identify who wrote emails. Read the full story at Capitol Confidential, a Times Union blog.