web1_TTl091615barberbdy.jpg

Skylar Rae Barber

web1_weather.jpg

Day starts with foggy areas, warm trend continues

An open government advocate said Tuesday that a missing password that has rendered inaccessible part of a compact disc containing documents of a former state agency chief &#8220;looks indicative&#8221; of a wider records retention problem in Pennsylvania.The comments came as the state Department of Education for a second day was unable to explain why it does not have the correct password connected to a compact disc that holds work-related documents of the department&#8217;s former acting secretary, Carolyn Dumaresq.The agency has said it consulted Ms. Dumaresq to gain access. But Ms. Dumaresq said she told the department that if there is a password, the agency must know it since its own information technology staff created the disc to preserve items from her computer hard drive when she left office in January.She said it is standard department practice to pull material from computer hard drives of departing employees for safekeeping &#8212; &#8220;I gave them all my [computer] passwords.&#8221;Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania News Media Association, said the matter is troubling from a public access standpoint. The agency discovered the disc&#8217;s existence and the password feature while searching for documents potentially responsive to an August Right-to-Know Law request from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.&#8220;The agency has a responsibility as the steward of these records to see that they are stored in compliance with the law,&#8221; she said. &#8220;It&#8217;s not [Ms. Dumaresq&#8217;s] responsibility. It&#8217;s the agency&#8217;s responsibility.&#8221;She said it &#8220;looks indicative of a wider record-retention issue&#8221; confronting the state.The matter took another twist Tuesday when the education department offered a description of the problem&#8217;s scope that differed significantly from one it gave a day earlier in a response to the newspaper prepared with help from the agency&#8217;s legal staff and signed by Angela Riegel, the department&#8217;s open records officer.The Monday response said the department had discovered that the CD was password-protected and &#8220;attempted to access any information on the disc&#8221; but did not succeed.The department &#8220;has sought the assistance of the Commonwealth Office of Administration to determine whether any information on the disc can be accessed by utilizing that agency&#8217;s information technology resources and expertise,&#8221; the response further stated.But on Tuesday, education department spokeswoman Nicole Reigelman offered a sharply different take in a statement issued at the close of business. The statement said that files copied to the disc in fact &#8220;were readily accessible&#8221; to the department but that staff discovered &#8220;one file on the disc was password-protected&#8221; &#8212; something the statement said sometimes is done to secure items going over the commonwealth server.The statement said none of the computer passwords Ms. Dumaresq provided unlocked the file. It did not address why the agency as steward of records would not have the password.The Post-Gazette&#8217;s Right-to-Know request sought communications between Ms. Dumaresq and former higher education special adviser Ron Tomalis evidencing work performed by Mr. Tomalis.The emails, released after a 30-day legal review, did not appear to shed significant new light on the subject.The department is seeking an additional 14-day extension to attempt to access the password-protected material and said it cannot say anything further about what, if anything, is in the file.<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta>by Bill Schackner</bylineMeta></div>

Missing password may signal bigger issue at State Department