Kineavy E-mail Scandal Leads to Print-and-Scan Boondoggle

So, StoneTurn, the Boston-based computer forensics, has had a pass at Michael Kineavy's second computer, and the results, which were posted on the city of Boston's website were less than revealing. Approximately 740 new e-mails were made public, but most of them were essentially blank, retaining only the e-mail header. The newest release of e-mails reportedly did not contain e-mails submitted to federal investigators in connection with the Dianne Wilkerson corruption investigation.

That's not the only frustrating thing about the release of the new documents. Puzzlingly, the city decided to print out all of Kineavy's e-mails, nearly 7,000 of them, which it then scanned. That means that the versions of Kineavy's purely electronic communications that you can download from the city's website were once paper documents that a human being had to make into an electronic image.

We can only assume that the job of rescanning all of Kineavy's e-mail fell to the city hall flunky who "found" Kineavy's second computer. As punishment.

This latest twist in the e-mail fiasco unintentionally underscores an aspect of the Menino administration that Michael Flaherty and Sam Yoon have covered at length—its technological backwardness. Sure, city hall probably didn't provide the e-mails in an easy-to-search electronic format because it didn't want to make the job of the papers and the mayor's political enemies easy for them. But the little Adobe Acrobat icons on the city's website speak volumes. They look like links to public records that were released in the mid 90s. [UHub; Herald; Globe]